The Director of Faith Matters and TELL MAMA, Fiyaz Mughal, spoke at the Big Iftar event, organised by Innovate Walsall, and raised the issue of social justice being closely entwined with Islam. The Director stated that this being the case, it was imperative that Muslims play their part in countering hate, intolerance and injustice against any community, if they are targeted because of a part of their identity.
The work undertaken by TELL MAMA over the last 3 years was also raised. This has involved assisting over 3,700 people who have reported into TELL MAMA and with over 300 arrests which have been made directly through the work.
Fiyaz Mughal also talked about the need to report in anti-Muslim hatred and particularly for Muslim women to report in the harassment that they may receive at a street level. He also raised the fact that data from TELL MAMA shows that visible Muslim women are the ones most targeted because of their visibility and that women who wore the Niqab (or religious face veil), were sadly more likely to be targeted through more aggressive incidents.
The final message was that Muslims are looking for equality, nothing more and nothing less and that reporting in anti-Muslim hate would strengthen that objective by drawing a line with perpetrators. “This country,” he said, “has the systems in place to redress grievances such as hate incidents and hate crimes. Sometimes, it may not be the outcome that you are looking for, but you stopped being a victim the moment when you reported it in.“