My name is Aisha. I am an English literature undergrad at Queen Mary
University. My cultural background is mixed - so my father is Jamaican and my
mother is English. Everything that I'm saying is coming from personal
experience and it's rooted in a very particular context. So my relationship
with Islam growing up when I was younger - it was there but it wasn't like
completely present. In the sense that I always identified as a Muslim - I always
knew that I was a Muslim and Islam was practiced in my household - but when I
would go out into the wider community, I guess my perception of what Islam was
and my understanding of what an Ummah should be was very different from how I
saw it being practiced. I don't necessarily appear to many people as a
black person. A lot of people kind of think I'm North African or even
sometimes Asian. So I've always been very good at distinguishing, you know, where
Islam stands on certain things and where there's human fault, right. So I never
really took it as "oh that's an Islamic thing". I kind of just took that as the
ignorance of, like, people who claim to be part of this religion. But I would say in
terms of my perception of the Muslim community, it definitely did taint it.
Because it just made me think - I don't belong here,
I'm not welcomed here. If I do want to belong here and be part of this
community, I'm going to be met with, you know, racism and discrimination and I'm
gonna have to sit and listen to like nonsense from other people which I'm not
going to take. I think when you're young it really plays on your mind a lot. I
kind of went through a period in my life where I almost wanted to distance myself
from the Muslim community because these type of encounters were happening quite
a lot and quite frequently. I've even seen Muslims - black Muslims - leave Islam
completely because they've experienced, you know, discrimination and racism. I've seen
that happen as well. You know, I was seeing a lot of things. I
was hearing a lot of things that were being said about black people,
that were being said about other black Muslims, you know. Just seeing how black
Muslims were treated in certain spaces. It's very apparent, you know. If you're
aware, it's very, very apparent. So yeah, I went through a period in my life where I was
just frustrated, like as you said, by seeing these things that I
wanted to move away from the Muslim community that I was a part of -
which was a predominantly Asian community - and try and find a community of people who
came from, I guess, a Caribbean background or an African background. But also just
the background of people who I saw to be more open-minded. A background of people
who were more creatively minded, because I come from a creative
background myself. Which I did and I guess just along the way by chance you
meet certain people and then you learn certain things and then you move into
certain spaces and then you see a different side of the Muslim
community. You see a different side of Islam. It's human nature - when you're
being treated in a certain way, you will want to repel away from that thing as
much as possible. I am black and I am Caribbean and I'm proud to be and I've
grown up with a very strong sense of understanding and connection to
my culture and my cultural background. I grew up in between the UK and Jamaica,
so, you know what I mean, so it's very much part of me. So for me to
imagine myself as just trying to be like a Muslim without where I'm from, to me it
just doesn't mentally sit right with me.