Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan – författare

''Lyrical and uncompromising - Suhaiymah writes to disrupt'' - gal-dem

Islamophobia is everywhere. It is a narrative and history woven so deeply into our everyday lives that we don’t even notice it – in our education, how we travel, our healthcare, legal system and at work. Behind the scenes it affects the most vulnerable, at the border and in prisons. Despite this, the conversation about Islamophobia is relegated to microaggressions and slurs.

Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan reveals how Islamophobia not only lives under the skin of those who it marks, but is an international political project designed to divide people in the name of security, in order to materially benefit global stakeholders. It can only be truly uprooted when we focus not on what it is but what it does.

Tangled in Terror shows that until the most marginalised Muslims are safe, nobody is safe.

‘Toni Morrison once said, “If there’s a book you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”

In 2016 four friends wrote the book they wish they’d had as 18 year-old women of colour going to study in the elite academic institution of Cambridge University. And what a book! Wonderful, fiery, radical and brave – it uses multiple voices and forms such as memoir, polemic, poetry, critical approaches – to document their experiences as women of colour in an institution that they had each discovered failed to validate or even acknowledge their heritage, their gender, their right to see themselves in their place of study. As a narrative and a testament, this patchwork book has been sewn together with extreme skill and moves through time as it moves through the different threads of its subject, addressing the curriculum, ways of teaching, visiting authors, student society and activism, with anger and energy and incredible readability. This book, its pace, its outrage, tells its truth in a way that is pretty much unputdownable. The experiences in this book rarely get to be heard and as a result they are rarely accepted as real. The book articulates both the feeling and the struggle to articulate the feeling of being in spaces built for others. As such, it is the book that many many more than it’s four authors will want to read, a book that needed to be written and also needed to be published.