Baroness Sayeeda Warsi with Archbishop Vincent Nicols Photo by English: Foreign and Commonwealth Office/Wikimedia Commons
The life of Baroness Sayeeda Warsi has been full of drama. As if becoming a member of the House of Lords, the first Muslim female cabinet member and co-chair of the Conservative Party was not enough, she created high drama when she resigned from government in protest at the situation in Gaza in 2014. Her decision to so publicly rebuke her own government earned her its wrath but the respect and affection of the British Muslim community.
I saw the respect and affection the community has for her last year when she and her husband Iftikhar Azam invited us for breakfast at Zoya, the smart new Pakistani restaurant in Bradford. Customers, waiters and owners were genuinely pleased to see her and several asked to be photographed with her. She is clearly a local hero.
What impressed my wife, Zeenat, my granddaughter, Mina and myself, however, was her personal warmth and courtesy. She has a reputation for being standoffish but that is more to do with a shy nature than any put on airs. The high positions she had held and her fame have not touched her. She ordered the classic Pakistani breakfast insisting that we must try it. This was the full works –halwa–puri, siri-paye, and nihari with paratha and to top it all sweetmeats that had come particularly recommended. Brimming with Pakistani hospitality, she also ordered a full-scale English breakfast in case we preferred a less spectacular meal. She need not have worried. We tackled the halwa-puri with relish.
The restaurant reflected the new Bradford with its squeaky clean and spotless appearance. It even had the confidence of hiring an Englishman to play the piano without a hint of postmodern irony. It was surreal, eating halwa-puri and listening to “As Time Goes By”.
What makes her position remarkable is the fact that her eminence is not owed to a father or uncle who is a Pakistani minister, general or feudal lord. Rather, Sayeeda Warsi rose to prominence through hard work and the support of her role models: her middle-class parents. Sayeeda believes that she got her sense of determination and confidence from her father who arrived in the UK with £2.50 to work in a mill and as a bus driver. He is now the owner of two multi-million pound businesses.
Being raised a Pakistani Muslim in Britain meant that Sayeeda always knew that she was different from her peers, whether that meant being called names, such as “Paki”, “Asian”, “black”, or “colored”; being forbidden from watching TV shows that her peers enjoyed; or wearing pants beneath her school uniform’s skirt. When she learned about the Crusades in school, she discovered that the school’s narrative bore little resemblance to the Islamic history she had been taught as a child that emphasized compassion, generosity, and friendship. She reflected, “It was another example of how British Muslim kids can have two experiences in parallel, how they can be living two presents based on two pasts, where the two aren’t brought into a shared narrative to create a single figure.”
Baroness Warsi shot to fame when she was appointed to the House of Lords during the summer of 2007 and became a star of Britain’s Pakistani community. With a twinkle in her eye she recounted during our meeting that at age 36, she had found herself a member of an organization whose average age was 69.
Her recently published book, The Enemy Within: A Tale of Muslim Britain, is creating waves in Britain. She has been scathing about the government’s counter-terrorism policy called Prevent, calling it “toxic” and “broken”. The Prevent strategy, which she originally supported as part of a battle between violence and democracy, became problematic for her when she observed it begin to alienate British Muslim communities. Instead of working alongside Muslims to address community concerns and causes of violence, attention was paid to the idea that “ideology” was driving terrorists to violence. Sayeeda noted, “To discuss root causes was seen as an expression of disloyalty.”
Naturally enough, Warsi’s outspoken criticism, delivered with such confidence, has incurred the wrath of many in the media who have poured their scorn into scathing reviews of her book. “Much of the resulting text reads like poor cut-and-pastes from Wikipedia,” sniffed The Times.
While her faith was of little concern to others in her youth, a light has been cast on her Muslim identity in the decade since the terrorist attack on 7/7. All around her, Muslims have been cast as a monolithic group whose Islamic values are inherently contradictory to British values, but, Sayeeda observes, Muslims are a far cry from a monolith, and British values have evolved drastically in the past two centuries and will continue to evolve. Sayeeda remains optimistic that if the mistakes made in dealing with Muslims in the past decade are corrected, it is possible to create a shared and inclusive British identity.
Sayeeda urges Muslims to critically engage with the holy texts and history to determine the best way to live their lives in Britain. Politicians need to stop basing policy on personal agendas and instead develop policy rooted in fact, with emphasis on problem solving and not fear mongering. Both need to reach out to each other to get to know the “other”.
Sayeeda is an authentic bridge between the communities. She needs to be heeded by both sides.
