Gina Khan lives in Birmingham's Ward End. She is a British Muslim and has spoken out in the past about the problems she and her community face from extreme Islamists. Described as "a very brave woman" in an article for the London Times, Gina - in a four part exclusive interview given to the Westminster Journal - here, in part two, continues to relate her experience as a British Muslim and calls out, especially to the British Government, for help in solving the Islamist problem the West is now experiencing from within. 

Q: So Islamism - that of Tablighi Jamaat and other Islamist cults - is a distortion?

Everybody's religion is 'true' to them but why go force it on others? The Islamists think by forcing us, embedding their violent ideology and creating fear they are forcing the hand of God on us in communities. They use bloodcurdling language but when you see through their ideology you realise they are actually pretty feeble little men behind the ranting, really.

More and more British born Muslim girls were being and still are being subjugated and downtrodden 35 years on. No one cared then about our plight and no-one cares now. Those of us who got out, even mentally - we have had to fight from within to break the chains of even the cerebral part of the slavery the Islamist ideology forces upon you.

Q: How did the Islamists get a foothold in communities like yours?

Mullahs were forever knocking on the doors asking for charity towards mosques. What I do remember is most Pakistanis didn't trust the local mullahs, they were driving their Mercedes Benz in the 80s, where as most people like my brothers, were working hard to build the family business year after year. The community was funding these backward thinking mullahs.

Dad had been laying down the foundation for his holy project - a madrassa - in his village in Pakistan. He had just made it back to Mum's deathbed. Dad returned to Pakistan to continue his project but would come over now and again to collect funding.

I had visited him when he was ill and had observed young male orphans at the madrassa who were fed, clothed and sheltered but could only study the Quran and Islam under the authority of a mullah and never integrated with the villagers.

I really questioned my Dad's belief for the first time then. Why build a madrassa for boys only and not a girls' school or hospital that would have benefited the whole community?

He answered ''that even if just one of these children from my bloodline memorises the Quran, 7 generations of my family will go straight to heaven''. His belief was resilient - he had been brainwashed well. Every penny he had or whatever properties Mum had in Karachi were donated to the madrassa.

Dad had gone colder and oblivious to anything else around him. He had promised himself to complete the madrassa before he died and he did. He requested to be buried in the compounds of his madrassa. My Dad was an honest, hardworking man who became indoctrinated into an Islamist ideology. I see his last years as a great pity, as he had been changed - this was not My Dad but a brainwashed Tablighi Jamaat drone in his place.

Q: After your Father's death you saw radical changes in your community as the years passed by?

Back home in Britain, this was not the Britain I knew. This was not Ward End as I knew it. Every empty house and shop was being turned into a mini mosque and unemployed Muslim women could earn extra money by teaching 20/30 children a day at home. Islamic revival was here to stay without anyone questioning the motives or the ideology.

Even I was stunned at some of the translations the Islamists were using that clearly discriminated against me as a woman, a wife, a mother and as an equal human being. Did Allah really ordain what they were saying for Muslim women? I refuse to believe He could.

Q: Was your husband taken in by any Islamist teachings?

I had been a victim of domestic abuse and polygamy myself. The first time my husband slapped me after I questioned him he said ''don't question my authority - in our religion you are not allowed. I'm your husband.''

After divorce I made a promise to him that I would raise the issue of polygamy in the community and expose the consequences  Muslim women silently endure, a woman would rather see her husband burn on a pyre than take on another wife. I stated that it wasn't him I was after. I was after the true kafirs - the extreme Islamists who advocate the practices that taught him that he could slap a woman across the face and take on another wife in the name of Islam. Backward practices must be erased. What happened in the 7th century or 18th century can't be continued in the 21st century. Women have a right to their full humanity as full human beings.

He wasn't a bad person; he had been forced into an arranged marriage with a cousin. Our children were ostracised from his family as a consequence of it not working out.

Polygamy destroys the soul of a woman. I knew polygamy wasn't beyond him. In any case our love story had ended. Polygamy and forced marriages destroy the lives of both men and women. Children often pay the price for broken homes and witness escalating domestic violence and oppression. The British Government hesitates in stamping it out - not wanting to instigate racial tensions; they should show some backbone because right now we are suffering.

Q: Surely local religious leaders step in and help women out, as would say a vicar or parish priest?

Not one mullah or leader of any mosque locally has ever done anything progressive for the emancipation of Muslim women, let alone help them out when they are divorced and lone mums. No one is addressing these issues seriously.

My children have been hit several times around the head in the local mosque and I was treated like an outcast - as if my stigma of being a lone mother was deserved. They wanted me to think that it was my entire fault - that I was mad not to have conformed to their ideologies. This hurt my kids - it felt like we were being punished.

Q: But you still rose up above all this negative pressure?

It wasn't until after divorce and after 9/11 that I decided I wasn't mad. I wasn't an apostle or a kafir or Islamophobe. Islamistophobic perhaps! I pulled my children out from the Islamists' bubble of influence for good. I decided to get to know my enemy - get to see what was behind the Islamist ideologies that had hurt me and were hurting so many others so much.

I realised that to understand Jihadists I had to understand the roots of Jihadist history myself - not depend on the books or translations I was being subjected to. I started to read the Quran, study my religion and Islamic history. My reading helped promote my respect for democracy, as well as the values and principles of this great country, Britain, which is my home and my motherland too.

As a lone mother I learnt a lot about myself and who I am. The Sharia law was designed with the 'family' framework in mind. The lone mother isn't in the Islamic conscience; Islamists claim 'there are no lone mothers in Muslim communities'.  Of course there are. The more reason why lone mothers need to protect their children from being indoctrinated or recruited into Jihadism.

So far I had been de-humanised as a Muslim woman. I thought about converting to another faith or renouncing the religion I was born into, but no, I realised I was a Muslim. To convert - that would be pointless. Just because I think Osama Bin Laden is wrong doesn't mean that I should change my religion - the Islamists are wrong too.

Q: Now you are at peace even if the Islamists are not?

My identity isn't in conflict with itself anymore. I'm a British Asian and we are a proud breed apart - but very much part of Britain.

To be a Muslim you have to adhere to the 5 pillars of Islam - that in itself is a struggle and it's a spiritual, personal struggle. Jihad - an unofficial pillar devised by early Muslims - is not a compulsory pillar as the Islamists would have you believe. The meaning of Jihad is complex in the Arabic language but for the Arabs Jihad means Holy War, not a yoga experience as many apologists in Islam claim.

Modern Jihadists have twisted verses using the Quran's historical edicts. I'm still on a journey to discover the truth. I am a secular Muslim. I live in a secular country where we had freedom to practice our faith, and freedom to have no faith, where I have learnt to respect people from all religions and races, regardless of their gender or sexuality. As the humanist I now know myself to be, I have faith in myself, faith in the Almighty and faith that modern secular Muslims - the silent majority - will emerge and stand up to counter doomsday Jihadism. We just have to.

The Gina Khan Interview - Part ONE

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