After a long day at a children’s play centre in Leeds, I got on the bus home with my 23-month-old son.
This was last October, and we sat in the space reserved for pushchairs. Suddenly, a white man in his late twenties sat down beside me – a hijab-wearing Muslim woman.
Without rhyme or reason, he suddenly proceeded to cough and splutter directly on my son – who is brown and of mixed South Asian, Arab and English descent.
This man coughed not once, but three times. I was almost certain that it was deliberate and he wouldn’t have done this to a white baby.
‘Excuse me, can you cover your mouth when you cough, please,’ I told him politely, but assertively. He then started shouting at me that I was harassing him and threatened to tell the bus driver.
‘Tell the bus driver,’ I replied calmly. ‘All I’ve asked is for you not to cough on my baby.’ This seemed to aggravate him further and so he shouted: ‘f***ing foreign c**t’ and then he addressed the entire bus, ‘you’re all f***ing foreign c***s, just you wait and see.’
No one replied or intervened. Maybe they were afraid of aggravating him further.
I looked across to an East African woman and her baby in a pram who were sitting facing me. She looked at me in horror.
Without us exchanging a word, we both rang the bell and got off at the next stop. We caught the next bus with our babies and chatted, sharing how threatened the man had made us feel, and how we got off the bus fearing for the safety of our children.
Unfortunately, abuse like this is something I have experienced multiple times before.
But I have noticed something very troubling. Since the war in Gaza began on 7 October, it’s happened almost every time I get on public transport. In my four years of using this same bus route, I have not experienced nor witnessed such racial abuse.
As a millennial Londoner, I can vividly remember the Islamophobic attacks that were leveraged against visibly Muslim women in the aftermath of 9/11.
My mother (also a hijab-wearer) was once locked in the back of a black cab with my brother – who was only a toddler at the time – by a white driver who screamed Islamophobic slurs at her the entire way, refusing to stop and let her out.
I started wearing a headscarf at the age of 12, and vividly remember numerous occasions during the early ‘00s in which I would be out with my father and having ‘f***ing Arab’ and ‘f***ing Muslim’ yelled at us.
I was barely a teenager and such vitriol made me feel scared and unwelcome in Britain, the country I was born and raised in.
By 2003, my father felt things had deteriorated so much for Muslims in Britain, that he moved the entire family to the Gulf where we lived for over a decade.
Now, I find myself in my father’s shoes, trying to shield my son from this racist and Islamophobic abuse.
But since the most recent escalation of war in Gaza, this abuse feels even more venomous.
On some journeys, the hostility in the air is so thick you could cut it with a knife.
In a similar incident a few months later, I was on the bus to Leeds on New Year’s Day, when a white man in his thirties boarded and told everybody: ‘Happy New Year’.
The bus was quiet except for a few hijab-wearing South Asian women, myself, and a group of West African nurses who I’d been chatting to.
The nurses had just finished a long hospital night shift in what was one of the busiest nights of the year in A&E. When no one replied – probably because they were tired – the man screamed at us: ‘Do none of you speak English? You f***ing foreigners are what’s wrong with my country.’
I looked across to an East African woman and her baby in a pram who were sitting facing me. She looked at me in horror
I decided to talk back this time.
‘Actually, we’re not what’s wrong with your country, the Tory government is. You can’t talk to us this way or blame us for your problems,’ I told him. When he heard me speaking in perfect English, he quickly backed down and apologised.
I found this incident astounding – the gall of this man to think he could swear and belittle us when he assumed that we didn’t speak or understand English.
Tell Mama, Britain’s leading Muslim agency for monitoring Islamophobic hate crimes, told the BBC in February that, since the war in Gaza started, it had recorded over 2,000 hate crimes in four months alone. This is the largest number over four months since the charity began almost 15 years ago.
In two out of three incidents, the victim was a Muslim woman. I’m not surprised.
Footage emerged at the end of May of man claiming to be an ex-IDF soldier being arrested for ‘racially-aggravated assault’ after reportedly pulling off a Muslim woman’s hijab at a London train station and saying: ‘dirty f***ing Muslims’.
The way that I have been treated on public transport by other passengers has brought back all the feelings of fear and vulnerability that I experienced in the early 2000s.
So much so that I no longer wear a full hijab when I take the bus to Leeds – I wear a turban. I feel incredibly sad that wearing my hijab in the conventional style no longer feels like an option.
Admittedly, being mixed race and having quite an artsy taste in clothing, my racial profile is quite ambiguous. But I should not have to amend my dress style for fear of my and my toddler’s safety once people recognise that I am a Muslim.
In terms of what needs to be done to support Muslim people on public transport, I believe that bus drivers have a responsibility towards the safety of their passengers.
If they see or overhear incidents unfolding, they must be able to step in when a passenger is racist, Islamophobic, aggressive or threatening.
Of course, there are some bus drivers that are brilliant and don’t stand for any threatening behaviour. Unfortunately, in my experience, I haven’t seen that happen yet.
The next time I am faced by a racist and Islamophobic outburst on the bus, for the safety of myself and other passengers, it’s time for me to pick up my phone and dial the Transport Police’s number – after all, that’s what they’re here for.
I want to send such perpetrators a message that we will no longer tolerate being made to feel threatened and scared on public transport, purely for the faith we follow and the colour of our skin.
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