In honour of our late sister, Maz Saleem, we are compiling some of her speeches and articles.  This page is dedicated to the acceptance speech she gave at the 2017 IHRC Islamophobia Awards.  Watch it below or read the transcript underneath.

Read her obituary here.

From  00:47

Salam alaikum  brothers and sisters. Thank you so much  for this award. I’m truly honoured and I feel absolutely blessed.  I have to credit the work of the IHRC, Islamic Human Rights Commission, for all the great work that it does  on raising awareness on anti-Muslim rhetoric and human rights violations against Muslims home and abroad.  I’ve been blessed to speak with Sister Arzu actually this time last year on a platform at the NUS  conference and she’s a big inspiration of mine.  So for those that do not know me, my name is Maz Saleem, short for Masarat Saleem.

I’m the very proud daughter of Pakistani immigrants.  I’m an anti-racism and anti-war campaigner  and one of the key organizers of the Stand Up to Trump  UK movement. But most importantly, I’m the daughter of the late Hajji Mohammed Saleem, who was brutally murdered by neo-Nazi terrorists, a mosque bomber, Pavlo Lapshyn.

Now, Pakistan was born out of the embers of the British Empire that produced colonialism and ethnic cleansing. And because of the UK policy of divide and rule, and because of the British Empire, my father came to Britain in 1957. World War II ended in 1945, and my father came to the UK to rebuild the country and settled in Birmingham, as you can probably tell with my very posh, Brummy accent.  So war, imperialism, fascism, and racism are the breeding grounds for discrimination and hatred, which the UK government is complicit in.

You know, I will never forget the day I received that phone call from my sisters on the 29th of April, 2013,  sitting in my flat, those horrifying words etched in my brain forever, “Dad’s been stabbed,” my first sister called Fauzia.  And then secondly my older sister called within seconds and said, “Dad’s dead.”

The shock and horror  I felt at that time is still pretty hard to fathom today. My personal experience of Islamophobia will live with me and my family for the rest of our lives. It reminds us what happens  when hatred in society goes unchallenged and people who hate are not stopped.

So on the 29th of April, 2013, my beautiful father, Mohammed Saleem, was 82 years old at the time, was singled out and murdered on the road he’d lived on for over 30 years. And the motive for his death was because he was brown and dressed like a Muslim. He was followed from the masjid at 10.10 p.m. Green Lane Masjid is at the end of our street. We live on Little Green Lane.  We went to this masjid when we were kids.

Dad prayed there five times a day, the street is very safe, it’s a quiet, cul de sac.  But he was followed home from the mosque after evening prayers at 10.10 p.m. by a Ukrainian neo-Nazi terrorist ah who’d only been in the country for less than a week. He followed my father home and brutally stabbed him from behind three times. My father was educated and very political, especially when it came to Pakistani politics.

He eventually worked as a baker.  Prior to that, he was working at Aston Steel Works, and he was also a trade unionist. There’s millions like my father, Irish, Russian, Jewish, Eastern European, that have all come here to work and seek a better life for their families. My father worked extremely hard. He did double and triple shifts at the bakery to feed his family. Racism has always played the role of dividing people, and we should oppose it. This country has been nourished and built by immigrants and we should never ever forget that.

Now Pavlo Lapshyn was known for his racist neo-Nazi agenda in Ukraine. He was given a work placement from the British Embassy in Ukraine, too Small Heath an area  densely populated by Muslim for many years. We’ve lived in this area most of our lives and as soon as he entered the country he embarked on a campaign  of terror and murder.

So the British Embassy in Ukraine supported his application to come to the UK, and he had his hands on a hunting knife  within five days of entering Britain and stabbed my father to death. He then went on a three-month bombing campaign and planted bombs outside three masjids (mosques) in Wolverhampton,  Tipton, um Tipton, Wolverhampton, and, oh  gosh, I completely forgot the other one.

There was three, where he put three nail bombs and they went  off, but because of Ramadan,  there was no one at the masjid, so  it could have been really a lot of casualties had it been an hour earlier. So why, knowing his history as a fascist, did the British Embassy in Ukraine support his application  to come to the UK as an intern in a densely populated Muslim area?  Surely these facts should have merited a closer look from the government, in exactly the same way as they spent energy  and resources in investigating the murder of Lee Rigby.

Theresa May seems to be screening Muslims coming in and out of the country with the counter-terrorism  bill, but I would like to know how Nazis are let through and sponsored by the state. Now, Lapshyn is now serving 40 years for my  father’s murder and for the three mass bombings in the West Midlands. I’d just like to point out now that they made that he’s a lone wolf, but we as a family know Lapshyn was a lone wolf on that night  These are all acts of terrorism He was charged under terrorism laws yet to this day  the media the police the government have not treated Pavlo Lapshyn as they would if the terrorists was a Muslim.

When Lee Rigby was murdered three weeks after my father his murder received global news coverage and cries of  protest, but my father’s brutal terrorist murder on the streets of the UK received comparatively little attention. Instead of hashtags and discussions about the dangers of neo-Nazi beliefs, there was a deafening silence. A Muslim alleged terrorist on the other hand, would certainly have led to conversations about the dangers of radical Islamism.

And the police were very reluctant to call this a hate crime too. They came to our house, they investigated every other motive,  but not the most  obvious possible motive was not initially investigated. They came to our house and said, this is not a racist attack and we actually told them, yes it is and we challenged them every step of the way. When we confronted West Midlands Police about our concerns with the investigation, we were shocked to discover they were not even considering hate crime as a possible motive.

Now Dad was a practicing Muslim and he enjoyed the serenity he found in his faith. It encompassed how he lived his life. Dad was keen to advocate education, he would often say there’s no point being a Muslim  if one did not educate oneself because without good prospects a person could not fully support their family.

The way we were treated by West Midlands police demonstrated that shows that not enough has been done since the Stephen Lawrence inquiry. The suspicion of the police, the surveillance we had placed on us and the coroner’s failings in the judicial process left us with a very bitter taste.

Much more needs to be done to address these failings. We found the police complaints  process disorganized and confusing.  Our complaints were ignored by the IPC and time limits to responses were not met. I actually met Theresa May at secret meeting. She came, like she was doing the Cobra meetings and the getting mosques to condemn Lee Rigby’s’s attack and then she came to see us months later and  we had a secret meeting at the Tipton Mosque with the Imams from the mosque where the bombs went off and the negligence was appalling. she wanted to know what happened. And I just said, “Listen, you know what happened. I want to know how you let Nazis into the country and how they are state sponsored.”

And in real life, she’s a witch.  And  she actually looks like one and sounds like one.  So basically, she couldn’t really answer my question. [laughter and applause]

I  said to her, they need to do something about the burial laws, because Islamically, dad wasn’t buried for months. And this was the most heartbreaking part. We  were in  shock.  We challenged the police. And I think because we challenged them, they kept dad’s body in the mortuary for months. I wrote to the ummah, I wrote to organizations to help me release my father’s body. And no one helped me.  We had to basically  had seven inquests with the coroner, who played the role of God.

He went on a holiday in that period, came back with a bright pink tan,  and literally was just literally laughing at us.  But Alhamdulillah, when they finally released dad’s body, about 8,000 people turned up to dad’s funeral. They wouldn’t give us the body on Jumma because they knew it would be even busier, but we got it, Alhamdulillah, on Saturday.

So we are still struggling to cope with the tragic loss of our father in our family. We are Muslims and the victims of terrorism, and quite rightly, we do not equate all white people with Pavlo Lapshyn, but we are tired of being treated like potential terrorists by so many white British people.

We need to address the pressing issue of Islamophobia and its increase over the last four years since Dad’s terrorist murder and the three mosque bombings, much of which has been instigated by the right-wing politicians and media on both sides of the Atlantic. Muslims should be embraced and respected like every other community in our inclusive society. We are human beings just like everyone else.  The media has to stop this hateful reporting and our judiciary needs to review its processes around dealing with cases of hate crime, particularly when there is sustained targeting of people because of their identity.  My dad loved and respected this country. The brutal terrorist murder of my father and that of Mohsin Ahmed in Rotherham in 2015 and of so many other Muslims around the world need to be recognized and addressed as Islamophobic hate crimes as and when they occur.

Now four and a half years since Dad’s terrorist murder, Islamophobia is burning through the world right now and since my father’s passing I’ve become an active campaigner against racism and Islamophobia and standing up to many a high platform on a daily basis but obviously there’s no higher profile platform as those offered to our Prime Minister Theresa May, who was actually awarded the Islamophobe of the Year by the Islamic Human Rights Commission in 2015.

Her rise to position of Prime Minister is hardly a cause for celebration if you’re a British Muslim. She has used Islamophobia and the anti-refugee stance to get where she is today. Anti-Muslim rhetoric and bigotry have been the main factor for the so-called war on terror for over 16 years, and the demonization of Muslims and Islam has been used to its full extent by the US and the UK mainstream media to justify  the bombings in Muslim countries.

Now Islamophobia needs to stop and we need to challenge politicians across the globe with their blatant racist rhetoric towards Muslim migrants and refugees. Muslims are obviously enduring intense  discrimination in everyday life at the hands of the media and through government policy and it’s our duty as Muslims, not only to understand the  religious issues in terms of theology, but to also understand and speak out against Islamophobia  and to get actively involved  and continue to campaign to ensure  a better, humane and peaceful world for the future generation.

And inshallah, I’ll be launching an educational website in memory of my father called Education for Peace in Remembrance of Mohammed Saleem. So, EFP.MuhammadSaleem.com and you’ll be  raising awareness. It’s an educational site for Islamophobic bullying, the stories behind the headlines. So please support me. I have my business card so you can come and take it from me later on and  I’d just like to end there.

Thank you very much. [applause]