Growing up in a deeply religious household in Pakistan, my sisters and I were used to the daily inequalities that marked domestic life under conservative Islam.
Our brother, the only boy among four siblings, wore better clothes, received more generous portions at dinner and was afforded freedoms we could only dream of.
Not for him the endless instructions – and punishments – meted out by our strict father to us sisters. From the moment we could speak, we knew we must act with decorum, dress modestly and never raise our voices. Transgressions met with severe consequences.
It was made clear to us that we were not equal to our brother, or indeed to any man. The role of a good Muslim woman was in the home, raising children and serving her husband. We were chattels.
None of us questioned this, because we knew what happened to women who did. At best, they were disowned by their community, at worst they disappeared, tortured and murdered by men from their own family to protect its ‘honour’.
I knew of many such cases and it shames me to reflect that so profoundly had I internalised this culturally engrained misogyny that I did not remotely ponder whether it was anything but justified.
As for Western women – we were told they were the Devil’s work: immoral and promiscuous.
If my father had had his way, his daughters would not even have been educated, lest they start to think for themselves and become corrupted.
Growing up in a deeply religious household in Pakistan, my sisters and I were used to the daily inequalities that marked domestic life under conservative Islam, writes Khadija Khan
Fortunately, my mother insisted her daughters attend school and were taught a more gentle version of Islam.
This pushed me to broaden my horizons, and I left Pakistan aged 29 to live in Germany and then Britain ten years later.
I quickly learned all my deeply held ideas about Western women were far from true. We may have been separated by our religious and cultural beliefs, but in all other aspects we were the same.
In time, I also came to recognise that the patriarchal religion in which I had been raised was wholly incompatible with women’s rights.
In Islam, even thinking this is heresy, writing it still more so – and I have no doubt that were I still living in Pakistan I would be lynched. To many of my family, I am now a pariah.
Yet these attitudes have long since escaped my native country. This medieval outlook now exists across the UK in conservative Muslim – and particularly Pakistani – households whose value systems are oceans apart from the democratic, largely secular ethos in the country at large.
This is the same vile and misogynistic mindset, we now know, that enabled the shocking sexual abuse by child rape gangs – made up primarily of Pakistani men – who considered young, white working class girls in the UK so worthless that they repeatedly drugged, groomed and trafficked them to be abused.
The same attitudes underpin the cruelties within sections of the conservative Pakistani community itself, where many vulnerable young girls and women suffer under ‘traditional values’.
For too long, police and social workers have turned a blind eye, preferring to allow communities soaked in misogyny to run themselves rather than offend religious and cultural ‘sensitivities’.
Indeed, it took the actions of a few courageous individuals, among them this newspaper’s peerless Sue Reid and police whistleblower Maggie Oliver, to bring the grooming scandal to national attention over a decade ago.
There was, quite rightly, an outcry. Yet with ever more heinous details of the extent of the abuse now unfolding, too many in the liberal elite remain keen to deny reality – and stand up for all women without fear or favour.
Starmer’s government completely lacks the moral courage to confront the issue of misogyny and sexual exploitation in certain sections of British Muslim communities, says Khadija
How else to interpret the refusal of safeguarding minister Jess Phillips to agree to an independent inquiry into Pakistani child sexual exploitation in Oldham which sparked calls for a national inquiry into grooming gangs.
This was a surprise to some observers who recall that in 2018, as an opposition MP, she spoke in favour of Telford MP Lucy Allan’s call for an independent investigation in her town.
Seven years on and now she is in office, it seems political expediency has changed Phillips’s view.
Make no mistake, I have no truck with Elon Musk’s vile, sexist and inflammatory recent comments about Phillips on X, where he denounced her as a ‘witch’ and a ‘rape genocide apologist’. But I was sickened by Keir Starmer’s comments on Monday, in which he appeared to reserve his greatest anger not for the paedophile rape gangs but for anyone who dared to criticise his record.
Starmer even had the shameless temerity to suggest those who have highlighted this crime against humanity were somehow jumping on a ‘far-Right bandwagon’.
Defending his time as Director of Public Prosecutions during the unfolding scandal, the Prime Minister insisted he had ‘changed the whole prosecution approach’ to grooming victims and ‘challenged the myths and stereotypes that were stopping those victims being heard’.
The truth is that for all Starmer’s self-serving protestations, his government completely lacks the moral courage to confront the issue of misogyny and sexual exploitation in certain sections of British Muslim communities.
It is all the more shaming when you consider that such moral courage has been displayed in abundance by other brave individuals who have spoken out despite the risks to their own reputation and livelihoods.
Among them are Nazir Afzal, an Asian lawyer and former chief executive of the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners, who campaigned to bring the Rochdale grooming gang to justice, and who went on to write a passionate article in The Mail on Sunday in 2017 in which he urged the authorities to ‘challenge a misogynistic culture that’s getting out of control and … talk about the predators in our community’.
This brave and sensible intervention led to the Society of Asian Lawyers disinviting Afzal from giving an address at its annual gala. Why? Because, as a member of the committee explained in an email, in the wake of such sentiments, concerns had been expressed about whether his keynote speech may ’cause offence’.
Nor can we forget the fate of former Labour shadow equalities minister and Rotherham MP Sarah Champion. She was forced to resign in 2017 after criticism over another newspaper article in which she wrote about grooming gangs and stated that ‘Britain has a problem with British Pakistani men raping and exploiting white girls’.
Then-Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn declared that his party would not ‘demonise any particular group’. Champion was forced to apologise for her ‘extremely poor choice of words’ and stepped down – exposing how courageous people calling out deep-rooted misogyny are often slandered, branded as ‘Islamophobes’ and accused of fuelling tensions.
Notably, one of Champion’s few supporters, Manchester Labour councillor Amina Lone, was prevented from running for office after saying she believed Champion was made a scapegoat.
Lone took to X last week to express her belief that there would never be an independent public inquiry on grooming gangs under this government. ‘Too many vested interests & no leaders with integrity,’ she wrote.
She is right. It is a tragedy that for too long those in authority have resisted a full and frank debate on the sexual exploitation of women and girls, and any racial element to these crimes.
Such resistance denies real justice. It is high time we, as a society, confronted male violence without fear of offending anyone – for the sake and safety of all our girls and young women.
Khadija Khan is Politics and Culture Editor at A Further Inquiry magazine.
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