The first stone landed near me, like a raindrop heralding an approaching downpour. “Did I just imagine that?”, I wanted to ask. But I was sitting all alone on a park bench that 23rd April (St George’s Day) two whole decades ago. The second stone to come flying in my direction hit my bench and was accompanied by a shout that rang like thunder in my ears – “Muslims should get out of our country!”.
Disbelief mingled with panic in my mind as I tried to focus on a plan for action. I looked over to the source of the stones and saw a small group of white teenage boys on the other side of that small square gardens in central London. Another series of stones came pelting in my direction, yet my legs were reluctant to run. “This is MY country and MY publicly-funded park and bench!”, I silently declared inside my own stubborn mind, wanting to stand my ground. But the self-protective part of me reasoned that small stones might progress to greater violence and I better act quick.
I dug in my pocket for my mobile phone and dialled 999. “Police please”, I said as loudly as I could, as soon as the emergency services operator picked up. Immediately the group of boys ran off.
When the met police showed up they drove me around the block in a fruitless search for the perpetrators and then proceeded to log the crime using their official form. “Your ethnic group?”, they asked me, and when I replied, “white British” the copper paused with his pen poised. He had already recorded the incident as “racial hatred” (at that time there was no tick box for anti-Muslim crime). The policeman looked deeply puzzled by the possibility of recording a race hate crime by white boys against a headscarf-wearing white British woman, until with a relieved look he declared that he would tick the “Asian” box for me on the basis that I had mentioned that my husband was Bengali!
I was born in late-70s London into a White Anglo-Saxon(ish) lapsed-Protestant family. The possibility that I would ever personally experience prejudice or hate or be violently targeted never occurred to me. I remember my infant school teacher talking to our class after a Bengali boy had been called “Paki” within earshot of the teacher, but when growing up I never stopped to seriously imagine what it must be like to face name-calling and much worse, simply for being who you are.
Then at the age of 20, while doing a teacher training degree, I found myself on a profound and rather unexpected spiritual journey, and I was on the cusp of converting to Islam. One afternoon during that time of excitement mixed with trepidation, I was sitting in a lecture about equal opportunities in education, when it suddenly occurred to me that if I became a Muslim I would be part of a minority – a possibility that I was none too keen on after the privilege I was used to.
Once I did convert to Islam I started to see distorted reflections of myself as a Muslim in the views and reactions of others around me and it was a shock to my system. Every time I came across Muslims being demonised and dehumanised in the media it subtly corroded my own sense of self. When 9/11 happened and Islamophobia started to sky-rocket I felt increasingly besieged by hate within my own country.
Unlike many converts to Islam I didn’t face rejection by non-Muslim family and friends. However the fact that a lot of people were profoundly and permanently puzzled by my newfound religious beliefs made me feel increasingly misunderstood and isolated. Ignorant assumptions about Islam exhausted me as I constantly felt the need to defend my beliefs and correct opinions that were based on misinformation. And the ways in which I stood out with my headscarf, my five daily prayers, my fasting for Ramadan and my avoidance of alcohol all made me feel different, and unconsciously undermined my sense of belonging in my family, my community and my country.
Meantime I struggled to feel like I fitted in within the British Muslim community. Too often my Muslim brothers and sisters would assume that converting to Islam meant that I had also converted to being Pakistani or Arab etc and I found there was often a huge cultural gulf between me and other Muslims. Many times when I introduced myself as “Catherine” I was immediately and mistakenly told that as a Muslim convert I had to change my name to an Arabic name.
Also I often had a rather different perspective on religious questions to the teachings that were emphasised in many mosques and Islamic talks. As a Muslim who still identified strongly with much of my English culture I felt deeply alienated by the fact that some preachers who were influenced by Saudi interpretations of Islam spoke about “not imitating the non-believers” and encouraged believers to reject the cultural practices of non-Muslims, even when these didn’t directly contradict Islam.
I was now living almost my entire life as a minority of one – either as the only Muslim in non-Muslim environments or the only white person in Muslim environments. Everywhere I went people only felt an automatic affinity with one part of me – either the white English parts of my identity and culture or the distinctly Muslim parts of me. The other “half” of who I am was mostly ignored, often misunderstood and sometimes rejected, by both non-Muslims and Muslims. And the strongly class-based cultural traditions and distinct dialects of English society meant I also felt that I was far from familiar territory living mostly outside the upper middle class bubble I had grown up in.
Thankfully I found pockets of belonging where I felt I fitted in within the wider Muslim community, like my university Islamic society sisters’ section and my new husband’s Muslim family. And it meant the world to me when some non-Muslim friends occasionally went out of their way to acknowledge and value my different beliefs in little gestures like text messages wishing me “Eid Mubarak” for Islamic festivals or a thoughtful gift of a new headscarf for my birthday. And despite the topics of money, religion and politics being taboo in polite society I loved it when non-Muslims were actively interested in asking about our differences and understanding my experiences and perspectives as a British Muslim.
But a real turning point for me was joining a group of young British Muslim activists who were pro-actively campaigning against Islamophobia and for an ethical foreign policy (focusing on freedom for Palestine and opposing the death and destruction brought about in the name of the ‘War on Terror’). Feeling a sense of solidarity and empowerment as part of this campaign group was a huge boost to my mental wellbeing for the decade or more that my very workaholic activism was at the centre of my life. During those years on the campaign trail in my twenties I did have periods of burnout and quite debilitating depression, especially when in my personal life I ended up going through marital troubles followed by divorce. But having a vehicle through which to tackle hate head on and wonderful brothers and sisters to fight alongside made me feel blessed and hopeful, despite the ever-increasing Islamophobia that was facing me on top of personal problems.
As part of my activism I went on the media as a Muslim spokesperson and one radio interview I gave ended up going viral on far-right internet forums. My Facebook Direct Messages were suddenly flooded with hate mail and graphic death threats, describing in gory detail what these men would like to do to one of “our white women” who became a “traitor” like me. When I reported these messages to the police they eventually told me that although they wanted to prosecute they were unable to obtain the relevant IP address from the internet company in order to identify the culprits. I knew in the back of my mind that, as someone who regularly did public speaking events, it would not be that hard for someone to find me if they really did want to make an example of me.
But I completely shut the trauma of those violent threats out of my mind and continued to throw myself into my activism, buoyed by the bonds of brotherhood and sisterhood I felt with my comrades in my activist group. That sense of belonging was suddenly shattered however when I entered into a foolish infatuation and so-called engagement with a relatively new member of our Muslim campaign group. He was a British Pakistani man a few years younger than myself and his mother immediately launched her very own Bollywood drama of emotional blackmail and hysterics over the fact that her son wanted to marry an older white woman. Me being a fellow Muslim was seemingly completely invisible and irrelevant to her – there was no way my fiance’s mother could countenance a white English woman as a daughter-in-law, conversion or no conversion.
As my “fiancé” repeatedly called the engagement off and then on again my mental health started to unravel. The repeated rejections, alternating with declarations of love and commitment, sent me into a manic spin – thinking faster and faster about how I would ever find love, and form a happy family, in this divided and hateful world. The fact that my so-called fiancé also repeatedly tried to pressure me to break the bodily boundaries that I wanted for myself as a Muslim woman (I wanted no sexual relationship before marriage) was the final straw. I started to lose my mind completely. The fresh emotional wounds from this disastrous romantic relationship reopened deep emotional wounds and traumas from childhood and from my first marriage in my twenties. I ended up in psychosis, locked up and drugged on a psychiatric ward.
I was discharged from psychiatric hospital after 3 very long and traumatic weeks and soon sank into a deep depression. But after about 6 months of struggling through life with each breath feeling unbearably painful and no hope on the horizon, spring finally came with the launch of the 2010 election campaign. As an experienced activist I felt I had something to offer and I hit the streets with leaflets alongside my fellow campaigners. Within weeks I felt back to my ‘normal’ self and I had the self-esteem that I needed to finally get out of that toxic “engagement”.
I soon found a new relationship with another British Muslim man, got married and over the next 5 years we had 3 beautiful children together. As a busy mum I no longer had time for any significant activism though. Nonetheless, on tv and social media I was witnessing genocide and horrific human rights abuses against Rohingya Muslims and Uigur Muslims, Iraqis and Afghans, prisoners in Guantanamo and Israel’s jails and an increasingly hostile political climate towards Muslims in the UK. After the 7/7 terror attack hit my home city I had been repeatedly targeted with verbal abuse in the street, as was every other hijab wearing woman I knew – and now each new report I heard of Islamophobic attacks against people I knew and strangers on the news alike felt deeply personal.
My powerlessness felt like an ever-heavier oppressive pressure on my mind. I felt increasingly disconnected from many friends and family who were actively disinterested in hearing about or acting against the mass murder, ethnic cleansing and human rights abuses committed or supported by our own government.
I read about the genocide against Muslims in Bosnia in the mid 1990s and I wondered… if Islamophobia ever spills over into ethnic cleansing and even genocide in the UK, who might be brave enough to hide me or my children, or my future grandchildren, in their attic? Were the Brits really intrinsically morally superior to Germans or Serbs or were we living on a knife-edge between an existential threat and hope for the birth of a truly vibrant and deeply-rooted multi-cultural society?
When a hate-filled murderous maniac then drove his van into a crowd of local Muslims standing outside Ramadan prayers at our own mosque in Finsbury Park, causing the death of an elderly Bengali “uncle”, my sense of our personal safety was once more shattered. I took the long way around when going out with my children for weeks so that I could avoid having to explain to my 5 year-old daughter that the piles of floral tributes outside our mosque were there because some people want to kill us just for being Muslim.
A whole series of stressful personal life events subsequently piled on top of each other, and then being locked down during the pandemic in a deeply dysfunctional second marriage finally broke me completely. My mind started to spiral out of control once more. When it then cracked in two, my psychosis felt like a living dream, playing out all my fears and emotions around being an English Muslim political activist living on the fault-line of a “Clash of Civilisations”.
The fear of hostile security services monitoring and potentially disrupting political activities through infiltration is actually a rational and evidence-based concern for radical political activists who oppose the interests of powerful political forces. But I ended up living in an ever-changing and increasingly outlandish spy story in my head, while my body was once again locked in a psych ward and forcibly injected with mind-altering drugs. My psychotic fantasy was that all these nightmares would eventually end with being airlifted out to a safe house in rural New Zealand – the land where they had filmed Lord of the Rings. I would live happily ever after in a village of fellow Hobbits with those few friends and family that I still felt a sense of safety and belonging with.
Meantime back in the reality of the psychiatric system I was locked in a “seclusion room” in a “Place of Safety” in Devon, having been reported to the police by a member of the public for shouting Arabic Islamic phrases in the street, in my deeply distressed and sleep-deprived state, in a sleepy little country village. I was soon under a police section and in handcuffs in the back of an ambulance. The multiple observation windows looking onto the bare “seclusion room” that they then placed me in, especially the windows looking onto the shower and the toilet, sent my paranoia into overdrive. The blinking lights on the alarms on the ceiling were definitely communicating messages to me. I took a fully clothed shower, then ended up getting out of my wet clothes and pacing the room naked, ranting at the security services whom I knew to be watching and listening. I exploded verbally with righteous anger at the abuses of innocent Muslims and fired off a non-stop top-volume tirade at the speed of a rapper against the way we British Muslims were treated as the “enemy within”.
A big group of mental health workers came into my “seclusion room” to forcibly inject me with tranquiliser, then unceremoniously shove some clothes onto me and load me into a police van like a dangerous animal, to be transported to my local mental health trust up in London. Staff on the London psych ward, that the police van delivered me to, initially assumed that this white woman named Catherine Heseltine who was repeatedly requesting a headscarf to wear and halal meals to eat was suffering from a psychotic delusion that I was a Muslim. But when saying my prayers on the ward, wearing a blanket as a hijab, I heard two Muslim members of staff comment to each other as they observed me, “She’s just prayed 4 units of prayer correctly for the midday prayer – she IS a Muslim!”.
The only person in the psychiatric system who ever considered Islamophobia and identity issues as a possible cause of my mental health problems was the elderly Moroccan caretaker who worked on one of the wards I was placed in. Unlike the medical staff who treated me as a walking diagnosis, this caretaker showed a grandfatherly concern for me, always taking time to exchange a little conversation as he went about his work. On one occasion he approached me with a video he wanted to show me on his phone of a short interview with a Muslim convert, in which she talked about how she had been rejected by family and friends for embracing Islam. “Can you relate to that at all?” he asked me gently.
When looking for inspiration in tackling my mental health problems I certainly related to the story that I read by black British actor David Harewood of being driven to psychosis by living in a polarised and hate-filled society*. Harewood had felt he was not accepted either within the very white world of Shakesperean acting or within the black community, where he felt he stood out like a sore thumb culturally and was seen as a traitor for taking on stereotypical black roles (the only work then available for an actor of colour).
As the mother of 3 beautiful mixed-heritage children I wonder and worry about the disproportionate number of people of mixed “race” that I met as fellow inpatients in the mental health system. One amazing lady in her late 60s whom I met on a ward, whose father had been black Caribbean and mother white British, talked to me of her memories of growing up in the only mixed-race family she had ever heard of. She told me that in school the teachers used to make them all sing an outdated racist song about “little black children over the sea”. She and her younger brother, who grew up not “over the sea” but in a racist white-majority community, both ended up spending their adult lives in and out of psychiatric hospital. Another mixed-race woman on another ward I was on paced the corridors repeatedly muttering, “I don’t tell no-one my ethnicity”.
After a total of 4 traumatic experiences of my identity issues and experiences of hate contributing to being sectioned with psychosis now, I pray I am beginning to regain some mental stability – to heal, to grow and to reconnect with people around me. But living in a world of violent prejudice and hate feels a bit like being Buffy the Vampire Slayer in the cult tv series, living on the hellmouth – where demons, vampires and all kinds of evil can erupt at any time into my everyday life. The recent racist riots sent me into a manic mental spin, thinking at lightning speed about solutions and bombarding everyone I knew with social media posts and messages regarding the issues.
In the aftermath of the riots (in which my friend’s neighbour was assaulted by far-right goons in the street and left so traumatised she couldn’t leave the house for days), I ended up searching for a spiritual perspective on our situation. I finally found some mental and emotional balance again when I focused on accepting that all we can do is try to find connection with the good people out there in the world, of whatever race and religion, and to act in the most effective ways we can find to tackle hate, speak truth to power and build more love and solidarity in this world. The rest is in the hands of God…
Meanwhile having a public rant on my Facebook against the far-right was certainly good medicine for my often too turbulent mind:
“Go Back to Where You Came From!”
“Well, I actually do still live in Islington, but if you mean originally… then my family has a genealogy going back to someone who invaded with William the Conqueror.
Invading countries is certainly not a nice thing to do so it’s fair enough I guess that I should go back to Normandy and all the resources Britain brought from its Empire should go back home too…
So please research your own family tree and when you go back to wherever you came from kindly take all your racist mates with you.”
*’Maybe I don’t belong here; a memoir of race, identity, breakdown and recovery’ by David Harewood.