In 2024, the journalist Mobeen Azhar made a documentary called Small Town, Big Riot that ought to have been highly influential, but, in our atomised modern media landscape, wasn’t. He deconstructed how anti-immigrant racists, radicalised by online propaganda, lies and hearsay, end up on the streets perpetrating shocking violence and rioting against a largely imaginary foe. Azhar’s new film tackles a wider, thornier problem and is less satisfying as a result.
But in his willingness to debate hard topics – even if it means hearing difficult arguments, some of which are aimed at him personally – he is still provoking thoughts and airing views that better-known journalists would never go near. We even captained the England cricket team. And then this happened.” Cut to footage of the World Trade Center’s twin towers exploding on 11 September 2001.
The world has not been the same since – and life for British Muslims certainly hasn’t. In the film, Azhar charts a quarter of a century of rising Islamophobia, his concern being how Muslims – and Muslim film-makers like him – have reacted. To do this, he teams up with an older documentarist, Masood Khan, who is the programme’s co-director and is often seen jammed into Azhar’s passenger seat wielding a handheld camera, to get those obligatory “musing while driving” shots.
As the film develops, he becomes one of Azhar’s most important interlocutors, but he sticks to his main job as Azhar makes his first visit, to the Birmingham house of Salma Yaqoob. Yaqoob’s career in politics began when she was spat at in the street soon after 9/11, having previously been just “Salma, a mum at the school gate”. In 2003, she helped to organise the biggest political demonstration in British history, against the forthcoming invasion of Iraq.
And yeah, there was that hope.” Azhar comments that her weary countenance suggests the hope has now gone. While the consequence for Muslims in Iraq was that they were killed in large numbers, the less serious repercussions here were still deeply troubling. Azhar explains how radical Islamist agitators took advantage when their warnings about protests going unheeded were proved to be correct; they began preaching loudly against integration and in support of violent resistance.
At the time, Azhar and Khan made films about the phenomenon; now, to their great credit, they are willing to listen to people who think that was a treacherous mistake. Alyas Karmani in Bradford and Farasat Latif in Luton are community leaders who have worked to deradicalise local Muslim men. Karmani is combative and Latif gentle, but both accuse Azhar of fanning the flames of Islamophobia by helping to boost an unrepresentative fringe.
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