At first, he began with, “What the fuck are you staring at?” The man was shouting at my friend and me as we travelled through east London on the underground. Then he stood up and stepped towards me screaming, “F***ing Muslim whore”, beginning a tirade of disgusting Islamophobic abuse. Though it lasted about five minutes, it felt like hours. Finally, another male passenger confronted him and managed to make him sit down. But as he left at the next stop, he came up close to my face and said, “If you get off here, I’ll be waiting for you.”
With depressing regularity, hijab-wearing women like myself are being subjected to appalling abuse and discrimination. Last year, a shocking video shared on social media showed a group of white men and youths in Sheffield launching a vicious attack on a veiled Muslim woman and her daughter. A 2019 paper from Nottingham Trent University reported that attacks against hijab-wearing women in the UK were on the increase, suggesting that this was because veiled Muslim women were “represented as ‘agents’ of terrorism”. And Tell Mama UK, the watchdog that monitors Muslim hate crime, reported in 2018 that 58% of recorded Islamophobic incidents were related to Muslim women because of their “overt religious identity”.
