Report on Scottish Islamophobia Conference 2025
22 December 2025 - SACC
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This year's Scottish SACC/IHRC/DIN Islamophobia Conference was held in Glasgow on Sunday 15 December. It was a lively event covering matters of vital importance to the struggles against Islamophobia and racism in Scotland as well as against colonialism and genocide in Palestine.
The event coincided with a protest at Hampden Stadium against the stadium's partnership with Barclay's Bank, which has links to the Israeli military. Attendance at the conference suffered a little as a result.
The conference was held at the Ark in Glasgow's Southside. Speakers were Aamer Anwar (lawyer), Linsay Taylor (CEO of MEND), Omar Afzal (Director of Public Affairs at the Scottish Association of Mosques), Raisah Ahmed (Screenwriter and Director), Professor Saeed Khan (Wayne State University, USA), Richard Haley (SACC), Moazzam Begg (Senior Director at Cage International), Sofiah MacLeod (SPSC) and Yvonne Ridley (journalist). Sofiah MacLeod was speaking in place of scheduled speaker Sarah McCaffer (SPSC), who was unable to attend due to illness. Lawyer Fahad Ansari had been scheduled to participate online, but was unable to do so because of family issues.
The conference began with an emergency session covering the crisis facing the public inquiry into death of Sheku Bayoh at police hands 2015. Retired judge Lord Bracadale stepped down as inquiry chair in October following complaints by the Scottish Police Federation about meetings he had held at the start of the inquiry with the family of Sheku Bayoh .
Aamer Anwar, who represents the family, told the conference that there had been nothing secret about the meetings and that meetings with victims' families were a commn practics at public inquiries. He said:
"People think it was the Scottish Police Federation. It wasn't just the Federation, it was an unholy trinity of the Police Federation, the Crown Office and Police Scotland that came togeter to sabotage this public inquiry."
He added:
"There's much more to this. This is about attacking the system of the public inquiry. They have spent the last several weeks saying, 'all these millions of pounds spent.' I said, you wouldn't need to spend milliions of pounds in public inquiries if you actually did your job, if you arrested police officers that broke the law."
He concluded:
"The family need justice and they need a movement. Because if we just leave it to lawyers, if we just leave it to judges, then nothing's going to change. What terrifies them is a response from outside. What terrified them was the vigils, the public campaigns, the demonstrations and it needs to be galvanised."
Islamophobia in Scotland
The first panel following the emergency session discussed Islamophobia in Scotland and the wider context around it. The speakers were Omar Afzal, and Raisah Ahmed.
Omar Afzal said:
"The struggle against Islamophobia can't be separated from the struggle that we see across the world, particularly the structural violence directed against peoples like the Palestinian people or the Kashmiri people or indee the Rohingya people."
He warned:
"Very often in Scotland we think that we're an exception to that and we fall into the trap of Scottish exceptionalism, when in fact if you look at the detail you find that Scotland is just as bad, if not worse than, other parts of the UK or indeed Europe."
Linsay Taylor said:
"It's the fact that in work places you're three times less likely to be called for a job interview simply from having a Muslim-sounding name. It's the fact that as a Muslim woman you have the three-prongs penalty if you're ethnic minority as well. So you have bacause you're a woman, because you're Muslim, because you're an ethnic minority woman, you're more likely to face discrimination in the interview process."
She added:
"The first time I understood what it was to be hated was the day I wore hijab full time and went out onto the streets of Glasgow and I thought: whoa! wait a minute, this is different."
Raisah Ahmed said:
"We have a thriving film and TV industry in Scotland now thankfully but we have a huge lack of representation when it comes to, to be honest, most marginalised communities within the Scottish industry. If I was to ask someone what Scotland looked like, who wasn't from Scotland, they would not believe that a single person of colour lives in Scotland let alone that we have a diversity of faiths, different ways of living, so that in itself is one of the huge problems."
She pointed out that conversations on Gaza have changed because of social media, saying:
"I've been going to protests around Gaza since I was probably about 13 or 14 and it isn't until the events that happened on October 7 and the fact that Palestinians were able to pick up theire phones and say: I'm a person, here's what is happening to me, that people realised, these are people with lives, these are people that have the same emotions that we have. People that would maybe normally not have thought about Gaza have suddenly opened up and realised, hold on, these are human beings that are impacted by this."
She also spoke about the difficulties of working in the film and TV industry:
"I think one of the challenges of the representation of Muslim communities in the industry is that Muslim communities need to be in the industry, right. One, yes, it can feel like a bit of an alien place to be in, because often we are in situations where we are othered and we are made to feel like we might have to compromise on certain things. But what I find is once you're in there you can start making change and you can start having an inpact."
"Cancelling and Reclaiming Resistance - Decolonising the struggle in Gaza and the West."
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The next panel was themed around "Cancelling and Reclaiming Resistance - Decolonising the struggle in Gaza and the West." Speakers were Professor Saeed Khan, Richard Haley and Moazzam Begg.
Saeed Khan said:
"It seems as though those who are invested in, or feel obliged to, as an imperative, resist, are doing so primarily from the standpoint of it being a struggle for agency and a struggle for inclusion to shape the moral development of society instead of ceding it to just a few elite members of that society. But agency also carries with it the equally important notion of accountability because of course when we find the elite, they tend to either define accountability or just simply ignore it when it becomes inconvenient for them. And I see activists and I see people of conscience and also protestors, for Gaza or for other issues, are not just agents of resistance, bute they're also whistleblowers."
He concluded by noting:
"Today, we now hve out of the top 100 economies in the world, 70 of them are corporations and only 30 are sovereign states. So we have to then wonder who is the tail wagging the proverbial dog. When it comes to protests that are being crimnalised its not just Gaza, we saw efforts when in came to Black Lives Matter, the Me Too movement and Occupy wall Street, and in many ways these have served as a canary in the coal mine. Coming next are going to be anyone who dares to protest against inflation, food insecurity, as Richard mentioned earlier climate change, health and wellbeing, jobs and even truth. But I want to say that resistance does work. One who challenged the status quo, tried to reform from within, when he was rejected had to move 250 miles away and then began a resistance movement that today we know as Islam, and this of course is the prophet Mohammed, peace and blessings be upon him. And then the person who ended the first corporation and its monopoly on the world, a man who had 95 complaints about this particular corporation, particularly when it came to its corrupt practices and its hold on power, and this person then decided that he couldn't reform it from within and became an agent of resistance from without. And of course this person was Martin Luther and the corporation was the Catholic church."
Moazzam Begg said:
"Palestine is one of the things, I think, despite the vast differences we may all have as people, that brings us together and nothing has brought us more together, as communities that support resistance, than the issue of Palestine."
He went on to draw attention to Abu Zubaydah Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn, a man originally from Gaza and now one of 15 prisoners remaining in Guantanamo. He said:
"The intelligence that came to the United States, the Americans, was that this man is a serious al Qaeda member. He was not. And after he was captured he was taken to a series of detention sites in Thailand, in Poland, in Romania, in Lithuania and in those sites he was tortured repeatedly using medieval techniques including one that's called water-boarding."
Discussing Osama bin Laden's "Letter to America", published in the Guardian in 2002 and removed from the Guardias's website after it began featuring in Tiktok posts that went virial in late 2023, Moazzam Begg said:
Agree with him, disagree with him, condemn him, praise him, he mentions it. And the girls on TikTok, you know what they started to say? Now, I understand. Now I understand why 9/11 happened. And, as if by magic, the Guardian removed - that voice of freedom and opinion removed - something that had been on their website for close to or over two decades. They don’t want anyone to think, to make those connections.”
An article published in the Telegraph shortly after the conference falsely claimed that Begg had described Osama bin Laden as "that voice of freedom." He had not. He was referring the the Guardian.
Richard Haley said:
"We often forget that in Britain anti-racism is always dissent. We forget because decades of campaigning have forced governments to adopt some policies against racism, which we then have to defend from attacks from the right. But racism is still embedded in British institutions and the British state. If you doubt that, just look at how determined both Labour and Tories have been to help Israel carry out its genocide in Gaza. Or if you want to see it up close and personal, look at what the way the public inquiry into the death of Sheku Bayoh is being derailed. In forgetting that anti-racism is dissent, we open the door for racist agitators to persuade people doing badly in our society that attacking immigrants and minorities is a way of attacking government."
He went on to say:
"As far as the Palestinian territories internationally recognised as occupied are concerned, we need to continue to uphold the right, as recognised in international law, of the Palestinian people to engage in resistance, including armed resistance. And of course alongside that right there’s an obligation on all sides to respect international humanitarian law.";
Conscience and Dissent
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Speakers on the "Conscience and Dissent" panel were Sofiah MacLeod and Yvonne Ridley.
Sofiah MacLeod said:
"We've seen for the last two years arrests and charges for participating in demonstrations, really brutal brutal treatment of campaigners as well. For SPSC, and I think in Scotland, the first charges for pro-Palestine advocacy and for boycott, divestment and sanctions campaigning came in 2008 and I was one of five charged initially with breach of the peace, which we expected, that turned into hate crime for disrupting an Israeli state-sponsored quartet, musical quartet. The charge changed shortly after Gordon Brown, who was Prime Minister at the time, attended a conference in London that promoted, as part of its final statement, the first version of the IHRA definition of anti-semitism. Very quickly after that conference our charges changed to hate crime - which we won, by the way."
"SPSC have got T-shirts printed saying Genocide in Palestine, Time to Take Action. It was deliberately worded in order to demonstrate the overreach because part of the argument against the proscription [of Palestine Action] was, look, this is going to lead to police overreach. And we've seen that happen."
"So now we have over 20 people who've been charged -arrested, chased down the street, and charged under Section 13 of the Terrorism Act for wearing the T-shirt. We have one member who has two charges under Section 12. That's the only person that's an SPSC member that we know of. I know that there's one Defend Our Juries protestor who's had a Section 12."
Yvonne Ridley spoke about her experiences after the boat she was on in October as part of a humanitarian flotilla to Gaza was intercepted in international waters by Israeli forces. All on board were taken into captivity in Israel. She described the moment her captors discovered a T-shirt in her luggage.
"She pulled out a grey T-shirt of mine and my heart sank. She rolled it out and realised it was inside out. And she pulled it back and looked at what I was hiding. She held it up at me defiantly and raised her eyebrows. It was an image of Leila Khaled, the famous Palestinian hijacker, standing looking all mean and moody with her Kalashnikov, and underneath it, it had: a woma's place is in the resistance. So she's holding this up at me and she raised her eyebrows and I just raised my eyebrows back and then I was pushed sideways and this Israeli soldier pulled out this knife and he started slashing the T-shirt and he was going crazy. There were beads of sweat comind down his face, he was so agitated. It was like the scene from Psycho but without the shower. In the end this iconic image was in shreds, really fine shreds. When he finally finished he put his knife back in his sheath and then looked at me. And I said to him: all these years and you're still scared of her. I know Leila, she's been ill of late, but I can't wait to pick up the phone and tell her about this, because this will cheer her up immensly."
All photos © James McSporran, all rights reserved
