Experience For Islamophobia.

The number of recorded hate crimes against Muslims in London has risen 70% in the last year according to new police figures,with women thought to be make up the majority of victims.

Overall, there was a 26.9% increase in racist and religious hate crime across the city. The total number of recorded crimes was up 3.5% to 720,000 for the year to July. The figures don’t reflect the number of convictions, but do show an increase in the number of incidents dealt with by the police where there was enough evidence to prosecute.

Here, three victims of hate crime from across the UK share their stories.

Khadija Gulamhusein, 26, a chartered accountant from Harrow in northwest London, was approached by a man on the London underground who made throat-slitting gestures to her.

“A couple of months ago, I was on my way to work, it was around 10.30am and I was on the Jubilee line near Westminster,” she said. “I was just sitting there staring into space and there was a guy about a metre away maybe – I could see him in the periphery but I didn’t think anything of him.

“He was on the train for two or three minutes and then he really slowly walked over to me – I thought he was going to sit down next to me because there were some empty seats.

“But then he started making strange gestures, these slashing gestures at his throat. At first I wasn’t sure if he was crazy, then he kept on doing it, as if he was going to slit my throat. It lasted about 30 seconds. Then he made a cross gesture across his face, and then the train stopped and he got off.

“It was really bizarre and scary. I wasn’t expecting it and he was looking at me in a really threatening way. No one on my train did anything, they just sat there, though I’m pretty sure they all saw it happening. He didn’t even say anything, he just kept staring at me, then walked off like nothing had happened.

“I felt intimidated and was really wary for a couple of days. What if he had a weapon? What would he have done? I’d not done anything to aggravate him. I was wearing a headscarf, but apart from that I was in quite brightly coloured clothes.

“I called the police, who were really friendly and said, ‘If you want to talk to somebody we can put you in touch.’ They took the details, but I don’t think anything came of it.”

Mohamedali Gokal, 24, from Harrow, was told “please don’t behead me” while stood outside a railway station.

“I was on my way to a friend’s event,” he said. “It was 3pm on a bright summer’s day about a month ago. I was outside the station and my friend was on the phone to his father and said ‘Salaamun Alaikum’, which is the Muslim greeting meaning ‘peace be on you’.


“I assume this man who walked past heard this – he was an Asian man – and he said something along the lines of, ‘Look at you and your terrorist friend, please don’t behead me,’ and he threw his ticket at us and walked off.

“I just said, ‘Excuse me?’ and sort of laughed it off. It was nothing violent but it was worrisome. We were just dressed in shirts and jeans. And this happened in Harrow, one of the most multicultural parts of the country.

“It wasn’t particularly threatening, but it does make me worry for my siblings, and, in particular, Muslim girls. It’s very sad, and something has to be done about it.”

Sahar al-Faifi, a molecular geneticist from Cardiff, who wears a niqab, regularly receives racist and Islamophobic abuse – most recently while being interviewed by the BBC.

“I was doing an interview with BBC Wales,” she said, “talking about the new extremism laws proposed by Theresa May, and someone looked at the camera fearlessly and swore at me and said, ‘You’re an an f-word bomber.’ Just because she saw I was clearly a Muslim.

“It was just another example of how these incidents are happening everywhere and that people are fearless because there is no legal persecution – it’s common and socially accepted to be racist and Islamophobic at the same time.“I work in a local hospital and there’s a patient who always waits for me in the corridor to swear at me. The last time I passed by him he said, ‘Oh, don’t cut off my head you ISIS.’ I took me a few seconds to understand what he said, because it was a total shock. I was just taking a few samples across the hospital and he said it front of other patients, disrespecting the whole place. That’s just one example, but there are more.

“The problem is that Islamophobia isn’t recognised as a term, and that means you’re not even allowing an educated debate to take place – you can’t tackle it or challenge it.

“I don’t know life without racism and Islamophobia, it’s part of my daily life and I can cope with it and challenge it, but in the long term it has a really negative impact on community cohesion. Unless we all work together to tackle it it won’t be solved.

“It shouldn’t be seen as a Muslim issue – this is about the betterment of society as a whole.”

Faifi said she has complained to the police on several occasions but that she’d had to explain what Islamophobia is to officers. “Because of the high number of incidents I face, I don’t report all of them,” she said. “If I did I’d spend all my life in a police station.”