Institutionalised Systematic Islamophobic Speech,

your name is too long for my mouth to read aloud,

so instead I’ll call you all ISIS, that okay?

No? Sorry, it’s just easier, no

need to think that this is a personal attack

like the bombs you dropped

into every word you stacked

against me, telling my brothers, my sisters,

my aunts, uncles, mothers and fathers,

that you think are radicalised and unable to think

for themselves, without being misguided.

Romance novels can be so sad sometimes. 

Have you ever read one?

Girl meets boy, boy wants to go on a date,

she leaves in the night to meet him, honest mistake,

comes back pregnant and bearing children with needs

but because she’s Muslim fled to Syria, we leave her to bleed.

She isn’t Syrian but there is no way she’s British,

we can’t say that this is

in any way, shape or form, to do with us.

We can’t be afflicted

with this illness that is 

clearly what this young teenage girl had,

she was brainwashed, desensitised,

her adolescent hormones couldn’t stop her

so why care if she dies?

Your ISIS says no, revoke her ID,

provoke the public so no empathy

can dare to shield this heinous crime,

this deceiving criminal who’s outwardly 

just a poor woman, in a foreign country, with kids to feed.

But forget this,

let’s talk to you about education instead,

when children want to cover their head

because they were taught to be modest

and this was a way to stay honest.

How many teachers saw this

and stood, terrified, of a child

who wasn’t even half their height,

yet still donning this symbol of antagonised

piety. Yes, that’s right, that’s all

it was ever meant to be.

Bishops can join the House of Lords

based on that shared trait,

and schools are encouraged to

make trips to the church to do the same,

but no prayer rooms, no changing rooms,

nothing’s ever put in place for us.

Because your ISIS says we’re too wrong to exist.

There’s no age of consent for injustice

but apparently with age comes ignorance,

and let me ask you, this one question,

in a world of masks, we have had no use for faces.

You ignored the deaf people, asking for lip readers,

defending that masks can’t ever be clear but

still no move, to ever teach a language of hands,

underhandedly limiting them in every way.

But okay, we’re allowed masks, they’re great!

I agree, they protect others and we’ve learnt

that we can easily work if we make this compromise.

So why?

Why would my niqab be any different? 

My veil, my mask, part of my existence?

Why is your ISIS so insistent that wearing a veil

would create great confusion, great calamity,

oh! What terror! No more can you see my teeth!

I’d understand if you phrased it in any other way,

because yes it could be hard to lipread,

yes it could be hard to check ID,

yes it could be used to hide skin that bleeds.

But those aren’t your reasons. Because you don’t care do you?

You just follow what your ISIS tells you.

No schools, no universities, no workplace

allows us to express ourselves freely

because you need to be able to check on our face

that we aren’t concealing any schemes, any hate

that could brew into a storm, right underneath your nose,

because somehow, you fear us and our powers,

whilst stamping us into the dirt under your toes.

And teachers who dare to cover up,

this is their way of life and entirely their choice,

these educated people with big brains and hearts

are forced to choose between living wage

or throwing protection away from their face.

Because you, ISIS, you think of the children!

You’ve finally thought about them again

and how obviously they’ll never learn empathy

or hear the teacher properly if they can’t see

their face, no! It would only traumatise them!

Platefuls of my childhood were full of classes

taught by women with cloth behind glasses,

their veils would only ever show their eyes

but as those are the windows to the soul,

none of us ever needed more 

to hear their lessons and see them smile.

But obviously, this isn’t proof, we must be lying,

because what other reaction would children have

than fear, afraid of dying

at the hands of this teacher, obscured by blackness,

so similar to the images in horror movies they know

and live off the fear of - the monsters in the dark.

They’re never exposed to a human, whose safety

is to be wrapped up and covered in shadow,

so how can these children grow up to believe

that these veils lead to people and not monsters

that will feed off of their sorrow?

Dear ISIS,

I just came to ask you to stop lying to yourself.

We know you hate us anyway.

[Author Note: I did this in around 30 minutes so it is partly fuelled by rage, though the second to last stanza was made in 10 minutes and added on an hour later. This was written to be submitted into a poetry challenge, the prompt was to write a letter to something I thought needed to change or was oppressing others, that was ending at the very day and hour I started writing this so it isn’t very refined and I didn’t even submit it with the penultimate stanza. I had “Dear White America” and “Dear Hearing World” in my head as I wrote this, meaning it’s a piece that was half consciously written to be performed! It details a lot of islamophobia that I’ve heard about from the point of view I’ve learnt to see it from, but mixed in with my own experiences.]