Johann Hari

In 2001, as the world began to come to terms with the great gash in the New York skyline, a small tinder-dry Muslim woman wandered onto the London stand-up circuit. “My name is Shazia Mirza,” she announced. “At least, that’s what it says on my pilot’s license.” Wearing a hijab, she lived in a pincer movement of prejudice – feared from the outside for being a Muslim, and oppressed within the community for being a woman. She was determined not to be bullied into silence either by racists or by men who try to impose the values of a nineteenth-century Pakistani village in twenty-first century London. Instead she joked about everything from the Queen to Primark to how good Allah would be as a judge on Pop Idol, and asked the audience, “Does my bomb look big in this?”

Then, in March this year, the death-threats began. “I will throw acid in your face so you can never go on stage again,” said one fundamentalist, declaring she was “a prostitute to the West.” Another made it clear he had been stalking her, listing her car registration number and describing exactly what she had been wearing in random public places. Most comedians – whose biggest danger is a nasty write-up in the Standard – would have slunked away and found a different career. Not Shazia. She went on stage at the Battersea comedy club Jongleurs that night – with Scotland Yard detectives in the audience – and read from these death threats on stage. In response to the maniac who says “I will rape you then burn you,” Shazia asks, “Well, what girl likes to be burned before rape?” To the acid-tosser, she quips, “At least that will stop my moustache growing back once and for all.”

Shazia is part of a wave of heroic rebellion by Muslim women that can be witnessed – slowly, tentatively – across London. Shazia used to be a teacher in Tower Hamlets, where I live, and she would see Muslim girls rebelling against the chafing medieval codes of their fathers every day. “They would arrive at school peel off the hijab, put on make-up, and head down the pub to get pissed,” she explains. “They would snog their white boyfriends behind the staff room. But I would look at them and feel so sad, because they are forced to live a double-life. Come 3.30 they put the hijab back on and they’re carted off to the mosque to rote-learn the Koran for three hours. They would come in the next day exhausted, having not done their homework, and they would say, ‘My parents say the Koran comes before homework.’”

Shazia understands this better than most: her parents are, she says, “fanatics.” She was forbidden to leave the house throughout her teenage years except to go to school. “I’m a woman, and I couldn’t stand the repression. I wanted to go swimming, do ballet, ride horses, tell jokes. I was allowed to do all those things until I went through puberty and then it was all taken away from me, and I couldn’t stand it. I looked at the beautiful, intelligent women like my mother and my aunties who were basically turned into prisoners in their own homes, and I thought – I can’t live that life.” Her mother had been a university lecturer until, at the age of 22, she was married off and turned into a housebound baby-machine.

Shazia has seen her best friend defeated by these reactionary ideologies. They sat together at school from the age of ten, and her friend went on to become a fantastically successful PhD. She fell in love at University but was pressured by her family to give him up and accept an arranged marriage. She first met her husband at their wedding, where Shazia automatically sensed something was wrong. “He was so cold. He didn’t look at her or hold her hand or kiss her.” When she moved in with her husband and her parents, they forced her to hand over her credit cards and close her bank accounts. She had to ask her father-in-law when she wanted money. Soon she was pregnant and covered in bruises. “She says, ‘You have to put up with things’, but I can see she’s so depressed.”

Tens of thousands of Muslim women are kicking back against Islamic fundamentalism. They have immigrated from countries where there has never been a feminist revolution, so they are having their feminist revolution here, on our streets. Shazia comments, “I always wanted to be like my white friends, who had abortions, herpes and chlamidya. And my mother would say, ‘Wait until you are married, your husband will give you all of that.’” These brave, brilliant women are the key to breaking the back of Islamic fundamentalism, since without them the fanatics literally cannot reproduce. But these men are not going to give up their patriarchal privileges any faster than Western men did. At parents’ evenings, Shazia would be barracked by fathers who demanded, “Why aren’t you married? Why are you working? Why are you wearing Western clothes?”

Instead of helping these women fight back against fanatical men who threaten to burn and stab them, too often the police are shrugging. After Shazia reported her death-threats, the police acted as if she must have done something wrong. They went through her comedy routine and judgementally asked, “Do you think that is offensive?” (I get my fair share of death-threats – there is even a charming website called ‘Shoot Johann Hari’ – and I can testify this response is pretty typical). The default position of the police should be that you have a right to say whatever you like, and we are here to protect you from any madman who tries to stop you. But instead, they often encourage people to hush up in the interests of a bogus “public order”. They eventually fitted a panic button in Shazia’s house – a month after the death threats began.

Shazia Mirza is not going to run away, and she is not going to settle for a life as chattel to some oaf-husband. She is going to stand and fight with the weapon that dissolves the absurdities of religious fanaticism better than any other: ridicule. So when are we going to start standing up for her, and the tens of thousands of Muslim women in our city who aren’t going to take it any more?