What we don’t know about Europe’s Muslim kids and why we should care | Deeyah Khan | TEDxExeter

When I was a child,
I knew I had superpowers.

That’s right.

I thought I was absolutely amazing because
I could understand and relate to

the feelings of brown people like
my grandfather, a conservative Muslim guy,

and also I could understand
my Afghan mother and Pakistani father,

not so religious but
laid back, fairly liberal.

And of course I could understand and
relate to the feelings of white people,

the white Norwegians of my country.

You know white, brown,
whatever, I loved them all.

I understood them all even if they
didn’t always understand each other

They were all my people.

My father though was
always really worried.

He kept saying that,
even with the best education

I was not going to get a fair shake,
I would face discrimination,

according to him, and the only way
to be accepted by white people

would be to become famous.

Now mind you, he had this conversation
with me when I was seven years old.

So, while I’m seven years old he said

'Look, so its either got to be sports
or its got to be music.'

He didn’t know anything about sports,
bless him, so it was music.

So when I was seven years old
he gathered al my toys, all my dolls,

and he threw them all away.

In exchange he gave me a crappy little
Casio keyboard, and singing lessons,

and forced me to practice for hours
and hours every single day.

Very quickly he also had me performing
for larger and larger audiences,

bizarrely I became almost a poster child
for Norwegian multiculturalism.

I felt very proud of course because
even the newspapers at this point

were starting to write
nice things about brown people,

so I could feel that
my superpower was growing.

So when I was 12 years old walking home
from school I took a little detour

because I wanted to buy
my favourite sweets called 'salty feet'.

I know they sound kind of awful,
but I absolutely loved them.

They are basically these little
salty licorice bits, in the shape of feet.

And now that I say it out loud I realise
how terrible that sounds,

but be that as it may,
I absolutely loved them.

On my way into the store, there was this
grown white guy in the doorway

blocking my way, so I tried to walk around
him, and as I did that he stopped me,

and he was staring at me,
and he spit in my face and he said

‘Get out of my way you little black bitch,
you little Paki bitch, get out of my -

go back home where you came from.’
I was absolutely horrified.

I was staring at him, I was too afraid
to wipe the spit off my face,

even as it was mixing with my tears.
I remember looking around,

hoping any minute now a grownup
is going to come and make this guy stop.

But instead people kept hurrying past me
and pretending not to see me.

I was very confused because I was thinking

‘Well, my white people come on,
where are they? What’s going on?

How come they’re not
coming and rescuing me?’

So needless to say I didn’t buy the sweets
I just ran home as fast as I could.

Things were still ok though, I thought.

As time went on, the more
successful I became,

I eventually started attracting
harassment from brown people.

Some men in my parents community felt that
it was unacceptable and dishonorable

for a woman to be involved in music,
and to be so present in the media.

So very quickly I was starting to
become attacked at my own concerts.

I remember one of the concerts, I was
on stage, I lean in to the audience,

and the last thing I see is
a young brown face,

and the next thing I know is some sort
of chemical is thrown in my eyes.

And I remember I couldn’t really see,
and my eyes were watering,

but I kept singing anyway.

I was spit in the face in the streets
of Oslo, this time by brown men.

They even tried to kidnap me at one point.
The death threats were endless.

I remember one older bearded guy
stopped me in the street one time and said

‘The reason I hate you so much is that
you make our daughters think

they can do whatever they want.’

A younger guy warned me
to watch my back, he said

‘Music is un-Islamic
and the job of whores,

and if you keep this up you are going to
be raped and your stomach will be cut out,

so that another whore
like you will not be born.’

Again I was so confused.
I couldn’t understand what was going on,

my brown people now
starting to treat me like this.

How come?
Instead of bridging the two worlds,

I felt like I was falling
between the two worlds.

I suppose for me,
spit was kryptonite.

So by the time I was 17 years old
the death threats were endless,

and the harassment was constant.

It got so bad at one point
my mother sat me down and said

‘Look, we can no longer protect you,
we can no longer keep you safe,

so you’re going to have to go.’

So I bought a one-way ticket to London.
I packed my suitcase, and I left.

My biggest heartbreak at that point
was that nobody said anything.

I had a very public exit from Norway.

My brown people, my white people,
nobody said anything.

Nobody said ‘Hold on, this is wrong.

Support this girl, protect this girl
because she is one of us.’

Nobody said that. Instead I felt like,

you know at the airport,
on the baggage carousel,

you have these different suitcases
going round and round,

and there’s always
that one suitcase left at the end.

The one that nobody wants.
That nobody comes to claim.

I felt like that. I’d never felt so alone.
I’d never felt so lost.

So, after coming to London,
I did eventually resume my music career.

Different place, but unfortunately
the same old story.

I remember a message sent to me saying
that I was going to be killed,

and that rivers of blood
were going to flow,

and that I was going to be raped
many times before I died.

By this time I has to say I was actually
getting used to messages like this.

But what became different was that now
they started threatening my family.

So once again, I packed my suitcase,
I left music, and I moved to the US.

I’d had enough. I didn’t want to have
anything to do with this anymore.

And I wasn’t going to be killed for
something that wasn’t even my dream,

it was my father’s choice.

So I kind of got lost,
I kind of fell apart,

but I decided that what I wanted to do is

to spend the next however many years
of my life supporting young people,

and to try to be there in some small way,
whatever way that I could.

So I started volunteering for various
organisations that were working

with young Muslims inside of Europe.

And, to my surprise what I found,
was so many of these young people

were suffering and struggling.

They were facing so many problems
with their families and their communities,

who seemed to care more about
their honour and their reputation

than the happiness and
the lives of their own kids.

I started feeling like maybe I wasn’t
so alone, maybe I wasn’t so weird.

Maybe there are more
of my people out there.

The thing is what most people
don’t understand,

is that there are so many
of us growing up in Europe

who are not free to be ourselves.
We are not allowed to be who we are.

We are not free to marry, or to be
in relationships with, people we choose,

we can’t even pick our own career.

This is the norm in
the Muslim heartlands of Europe.

Even in the freest societies
in the world, we are not free.

Our lives, our dreams, our future,
does not belong to us,

it belongs to our parents,
and their community.

I found endless stories of young people,
who are lost to all of us,

Who are invisible to all of us,

but they are suffering and
they are suffering alone.

Kids that we are losing to forced marriages,
to honour based violence and abuse.

So eventually I realised, after several
years of working with these young people,

that I will not be able to keep running,

I can’t spend the rest of my life
being scared and hiding,

and that I’m actually going
to have to do something.

And I also realised that
my silence, our silence,

allows abuse like this to continue.

So I decided that I wanted to put
my childhood superpower to some use,

by trying to make people on
the different sides of these issues

understand what it's like to be
a young person stuck

between your family and your country.

So I started making films,
and I started telling these stories.

And I also wanted people to understand

the deadly consequences of us
not taking these problems seriously.

So the first film I made was about Banaz.

She was a 17 year old
Kurdish girl in London.

She was obedient, she did
whatever her parents wanted.

She tried to do everything right.

She married some guy
that her parent’s chose for her,

even though he beat
and raped her constantly.

And when she tried to go
to her family for help they said

‘Well, you’ve got to go back
and be a better wife.’

Because they didn’t want
a divorced daughter on their hands,

because of course, that would bring
dishonor on the family.

She was beaten so badly
her ears would bleed.

And when she finally left, and she found
a young man that she chose,

and she fell in love with, the community
and the family found out,

and she disappeared.
She was found three months later.

She’d been stuffed into a suitcase,
and buried underneath a house.

She had been strangled,
she had been beaten to death,

by three men, three cousins,
on the orders of her father and uncle.

The added tragedy of Banaz’s story,

story is that she had gone to the police
in England five times asking for help.

Telling them that she was going
to be killed by her family.

The police didn’t believe her,
so they didn’t do anything.

And the problem with this,

is that not only are so many of
our kids facing these problems,

within their families and
within their families communities,

but they are also meeting
misunderstanding and apathy

in the countries they grow up in.

When their own families betray them,
they look to the rest of us.

And when we don’t understand,
we lose them.

So while I was making this film,
several people said to me

'Well, Deeyah, you know
this is just their culture,

this is just what those people do to
their kids and we can’t really interfere.’

I can assure you,
being murdered is not my culture.

And surely people who look like me,
young women who come

from backgrounds like mine,
should be subject to the same rights,

the same protections,
as anybody else in our country.

Why not?

So, for my next film, I wanted
to try and understand why

some of our young Muslim kids in Europe
are drawn to extremism and violence.

But with that topic,
also recognised

that I was going to have
to face my worst fear.

The brown men with beards.

The same men, or similar men, to the ones
that have hounded me for most of my life.

Men that I’ve been afraid of
most of my life.

Men that I’ve also deeply disliked
for many many years.

So I spent the next two years
interviewing convicted terrorists,

jihadis and former extremists.

What I already knew,
what was very obviously already,

was that religion, politics,
Europe’s colonial baggage,

also Western foreign policy failures
of recent years,

were all a part of the picture.

But what I was more interested
in finding out, was what are the human,

what are the personal reasons
why some of our young people

are susceptible to groups like this.

And what really surprised me,
was that I found wounded human beings.

Instead of the monsters that I was
looking for, that I was looking to find,

quite frankly because it would have been
very satisfying, I found broken people.

Just like Banaz, I found that
these young men were torn apart

from trying to bridge
the gaps between their families,

and the countries that they were born in.

And what I also learnt is that
extremist groups, terrorist groups,

are taking advantage of
these feelings of our young people,

and channeling that cynically,
channeling that towards violence.

‘Come to us!’, they say.

‘Reject both sides, your family and
your country, because they reject you.

For your family, their honour
is more important than you,

and for your country, a real Norwegian,
Brit or a French person

will always be white and never you.’

They are also promising our young people
the things that they crave,

significance, heroism, a sense of
belonging and purpose.

A community that loves and accepts them.
They make the powerless feel powerful.

The invisible and the silent
are finally seen and heard.

This is what they are doing
for our young people.

Why are these groups doing this
for our young people and not us?

The thing is, I’m not trying to
justify or excuse any of the violence.

What I am trying to say,
is that we have to understand

why some of our young people
are attracted to this.

I would like to also show you,

these are childhood photos
of some of the guys in the film.

What really struck me is that so many
of them - I never would have thought this,

but so many of them have
absent of abusive fathers.

And several of these young guys ended up

finding caring and compassionate father
figures within these extremist groups.

I also found men brutalized
by racist violence,

but who found a way to stop feeling like
victims by becoming violent themselves.

In fact, I found something
to my horror that I recognised.

I found the same feelings that I felt
as a 17 year old, as I fled from Norway.

The same confusion, the same sorrow,
the same feeling of being betrayed.

And not belonging to anyone.

The same feeling of being lost
and torn between two cultures.

Having said that,
I did not choose destruction,

I chose to pick up a camera,
instead of a gun.

And the reason I did that,
is because of my superpower,

I could see that understanding
is the answer, instead of violence.

Seeing human beings, with
all their virtues, and all their flaws,

instead of continuing the caricatures
of us and them, the villains and victims.

I had also finally come to terms
with the fact that my two cultures

didn’t have to be on a collision course,

but instead became a space
where I found my own voice.

I stopped feeling
like I had to pick a side.

But this took me many, many years.

There are so many
of our young people today

who are struggling with these same issues,
and they are struggling with this alone.

And this leaves them open like wounds.

And for some, the world view
of radical Islam

becomes the infection that festers
in these open wounds.

There’s an African proverb that says

‘If the young are not
initiated into the village,

they will burn it down
just to feel its warmth.’

I would like to ask to Muslim parents
and Muslim communities,

will you love and care for your children,

without forcing them
to meet your expectations?

Can you choose them,
Instead of your honour?

Can you understand why
they’re so angry and alienated,

when you put your honour
before their happiness?

Can you try to be a friend to your child
so that they can trust you,

and want to share with you
their experiences,

rather than having to seek it
somewhere else?

And to our young people,
tempted by extremism,

can you acknowledge that
your rage is fuelled by pain?

Will you find the strength to resist
those cynical old men,

who want to use your blood
for their own profits?

Can you find a way to live?

Can you see that the sweetest revenge
is for you to live a happy,

full and free life, a life defined
by you and nobody else?

Why do you want to become
just another dead Muslim kid?

And for the rest of us, when will we
start listening to our young people?

How can we support them
in redirecting their pain

into something more constructive?

They think we don’t like them, they think
we don’t care what happens to them.

They think we don’t accept them.

Can we find a way to
make them feel differently?

What will it take for us
to see them, and notice them,

before they become either the victims
or the perpetrators of violence?

Can we make ourselves care about them,
and consider them to be our own,

and not just be outraged when the victims
of violence look like ourselves?

Can we find a way to reject hatred,
and heal the divisions between us?

The thing, is we cannot afford
to give up on each other, or on our kids,

even if they’ve given up on us.
We are all in this together.

And in the long term, revenge and violence
will not work against extremists.

Terrorists want us to huddle
in our houses and fear,

closing our doors and our hearts.

They want us to tear open
more wounds in our societies,

so that they can use them
to spread their infection more widely.

They want us to become like them,
intolerant, hateful and cruel.

The day after the Paris attacks, a friend
of mine sent this photo of her daughter.

This is a white girl and an Arab girl.
They’re best friends.

This image is the kryptonite
for extremists.

These two little girls,
with their superpowers,

are showing the way forward towards
a society that we need to build together.

A society that includes, and supports,
rather than rejects our kids.

Thank you for listening.