You know, for a long time I thought that I was really blessed. I thought that I was blessed as a visibly Muslim woman that I have not been subjected to Islamophobic or racist attacks that I know others have been subjected to.

It was only when I was walking home from work one day that memories starting flooding back to me. Almost like flashbacks in a film did I start to recall Islamophobic memories in my life, starting from when I was in Year 2.

And I remember sitting cross-legged on the carpet in the classroom and the teacher was teaching us about different religions. A classmate, known to be a trouble maker, started to throw a tantrum and suddenly he says: “I don’t want to learn about stupid Muslims!” And I felt my stomach drop. As the memory fades, I distantly hear my teacher say to the boy “that’s not nice, Najaah’s* Muslim and…”

This memory was replaced by the memory of Ramadan 2010. My family were walking home with a friend’s family from the Taraweeh** prayers at the Mosque at 11pm when we hear an intelligible shout from a passing car and a shout of shock from our mothers behind us. It turns out the passengers of the car threw eggs at us – only they ran out by the time they reached my friend and I but managed to hit our mums. We turned back to the Mosque and called the police – all while my teenage self-decided to laugh hysterically at my mum’s inconvenience. I remember watching the police enter our Mosque and being convinced that they won’t take us seriously – and slightly annoyed due to the waste of eggs – and being pleasantly surprised when they caught the egg wasters a couple of days later.

My final memory is quite recent and took place last year during work. I attended an event at a college where I thought one of the teachers was treating me differently to my colleague. It was very subtle, but it was the tone of voice she would respond to me, her body language and her curtness which gave it away. I thought it was all in my head until we were on the way back to the office and my colleague brought it up as she definitely noticed it. Strangely, I started making excuses for the teacher – maybe it was something I said, maybe my body language was off. Throughout the whole weekend that followed, I kept repeating the situation in my head and I couldn’t shake off that feeling of being different and being treated as so.

And so, when my –then line manager – asked me the simple of question “Hey Naj, you alright?” in the most casual way, the floodgates opened and found myself offloading everything that I felt for the past 3 days and felt relief that I was being heard. I remember confiding in my (now) manager actually wishing that I had been subjected to such treatment more often, so I won’t feel a way when it happens again. Yet again, I was blaming myself for someone else’s actions, for their behaviour and for their prejudices.

Islamophobia doesn’t need to be stop-searches, Mosque attacks, arson attacks etc. for it to be Islamophobia. Islamophobia is learnt, like racism, from a young age by the media and ignorance that has been unchallenged. And I know that I’m not the only one who has been subject to instances of Islamophobia so “minute”, and even perhaps expected at a young age, that they’ve been pushed to the back of minds. It is something that nearly every religious and ethnic minority individual has endured.

But it’s these acts of racism and Islamophobia which need to be combated first as they are the ones which allow more prominent and life-endangering acts to be committed. Things need to change at the grass-root level before tackling major institutions like the police. After all, if children are brought up understanding and internalising equality and respect for all, there wouldn’t be any room for Islamophobia and racism to fester institutionally.

To read further blogs from Najaah visit her blog, Understanding My Voice

* The teacher, like all my teachers and friends throughout my school life, pronounced my name horribly wrong.
** Taraweeh prayers are optional prayers offered every night during Ramadan where in there 29 or 30 days, the recitation of the Qur’an is completed.