Zaiba Malik talks about her childhood and growing up with isolation

To Zaiba and her siblings ‘TOTP’ was secret code for Top Of The Pops – forbidden viewing in their house. The children had secretly taped it over one of their father’s favourite Islamic films, its title crossed out in felt-tip.

A black cross had been typed through ‘TOTP and Queen’, replaced with ‘Mehfil-E-Qawwali’. This too was crossed out, and ‘Superman’ scrawled in faint ink. Over that, in black marker pen, was ‘The Hajj 1991’.

“Those words remained,” says Zaiba. “Nobody dared face the wrath of Dad or Allah for taping over the holy pilgrimage.”

To Zaiba, the discovery of that old video tape symbolised her life as a British Muslim.

We Are A Muslim, Please is her compelling account of a childhood caught between two worlds. Alienated at school, confused at home, she struggles to find her identity against prejudice and social change. Today, Zaiba is an investigative journalist, named one of the UK’s 20 most influential Asian women.

But as a child, torn between two opposites, her anxiety led to a self-imposed year of silence, retreating inside her head “where I had control, friends and one life.”

Zaiba’s father came to Bradford in the 1960s to work in mills. Born in Leeds, she grew up in Great Horton, attending Brackenhill Primary and Great Horton Middle schools before landing a scholarship for Bradford Girls’ Grammar, where she was the only Muslim in her year.

While Zaiba’s funny, moving memoir focuses on her experiences growing up in the 1970s and 80s, it’s also a narrative of Bradford’s social history. she recalls the Ray Honeyford affair, the Satanic Verses book-burning, the setting up of race relations units, early mosques in terraced houses – and, as migrants became settlers, hostility from National Front rallies and the Yorkshire Campaign Against Immigration, warning white parents their children would catch smallpox from Asian pupils.

“For the 30,000 of us in the city, it was ‘settlement by tiptoe’; we took on aspects of British life, but preserved Pakistani life through language, religion and culture,” says Zaiba.

“Bradford has been pivotal in terms of race relations, but communities can be very closeted. It came as no surprise to me when reports into the 2001 riots pointed to long-standing problems of racial self-segregation and cultural lives that don’t seem to touch.

“I have no doubt there are many Pakistani families in Bradford who don’t live near, work with, or even speak to white people, and I’m sure the reverse is also true. Bradford could benefit from more dialogue and everyday contact.”

While she pulls no punches in her assessment of Bradford, Zaiba remains fond of the city. “I’m very grateful I’m from there,” she says.

For Zaiba, who barely ventured “beyond the landing in our terraced house”, things other girls took for granted – boyfriends, make-up, nights out – were far removed from her sheltered life.

The jarring contrasts between home and school are highlighted in her achingly-moving account of an evening at Bradford nightclub The Time, The Place. Telling her parents she’d been invited to a birthday party – “after weeks of negotiation, they said yes” – she sneaked off with two schoolpals.

While they wore short skirts and white stilettos, Zaiba despaired of her wardrobe: “I had sparkly shalwar kameezes I wore to weddings, I could cut the top to English shirt length and get rid of extra material on the bottom. But there was so much cloth on the billowing shalwar, it looked like a pair of clown trousers. I looked ridiculous.”

With her friends disappearing into the darkness of the club, Zaiba sat alone, surrounded by long-legged girls and handsome boys lighting cigarettes and flirting. Painfully self-conscious, she studied their body language.

“When I thought my crash-course in socialising was complete, I tried to launch myself off my stool. No joy. My body frozen by the dry ice I was immersed in, I tried singing to Human League’s Mirror Man. I tried to look cool, but I was the most immobile object in the disco,” she writes.

“I was surrounded by people from school, but what would I say to them? ‘Do you like my top, the one I wear to school all the time?’ or ‘Does your mother really let you out of the house dressed like that?’”

More than 20 years on, Zaiba regards her experience as “character-building”. “In hindsight, it was a privilege having that insight into people’s lives,” she says. “It helped me, as a journalist, to go into different communities.”

It also helped her endure a terrifying experience at the hands of interrogators in Bangladesh, where she was held for filming a documentary about the growing influence of Islam which the authorities claimed was anti-state.

“It was almost an out-of-body experience,” says Zaiba. “I was held for three weeks, but it seemed much longer. They took our mobiles so we had no idea if anyone was trying to release us. After I returned, I had a very negative view of humanity. Now, whenever anything bad happens, I think ‘it could be worse – I could be in a Bangladesh prison’. It made me appreciate the British legal system.”

Locked up in a tiny cell with the threat of a death sentence or life imprisonment hanging over her, Zaiba thought of her family; of watching TV with her dad, chuckling at Mind Your Language and It Ain’t Half Hot Mum.

She writes with affection for her parents; her devoutly-religious father who woke at dawn to recite his Fajr (prayers) after a ten-hour shift at the mill, and taught himself to read and write English under the light of an oil lamp.

And her mother, who wrote to the Queen asking if she could be her cleaner, and would say: “We are a Muslim,” to doctors’ receptionists, people at the bus stop and to her own family, particularly when she disapproved of Western intrusion in their home, from Songs Of Praise and bacon adverts to Vogue magazine.

Zaiba also pays tribute to the countless ‘Aunties’ in her community. She recalls them crammed into her parents’ living-room at her uncle’s wake, grieving for themselves.

“I could hear them sobbing, feeling they had nothing, how they were on medication to get out of bed in the morning,” she says. “Most of the time they were treading water, kept buoyant by medication, resignation or faith.

“I used to think they were gossips – now I see what they gave up for us. I want people to know what it’s like for these women who left everything behind to live here.

“We see them around Bradford all the time; people are rude to them and their children take them for granted. Many are lonely and depressed. These days, their children are part of another culture, and there’s a huge drugs problem.

“Of course, there were benefits coming here, but there was also isolation, insecurity, loss of self. Various measures have been put in place to encourage immigrant communities to integrate, but it’s not that easy. You can’t just forget everything you know and feel.

“Maybe Umejee (her mother) and the Aunties should have made more of an effort; become fluent in English, lived among white people, but I’m not sure that would’ve made Bradford any more like home.”

Throughout the book, Zaiba addresses an unnamed Muslim. His identity is revealed in the powerful final chapter – a letter to Bradford-born Shehzad Tanweer, one of the suicide bombers responsible for the July 7 London bombings.

While writing her book, Zaiba made the chilling discovery that the bomb factory used by Tanweer and his accomplices stood on the Leeds street where she was born. It was the address the men left at 3.30am on July 7, 2005, with their rucksacks, to travel to London and kill 52 people.

“It wasn’t my intention to go into that, but so much has been written in the five years since 7/7, I couldn’t ignore it,” says Zaiba.

“As a British Muslim, I’m horrified that this is where my faith is, that people have this terrible perception of Islam. That wasn’t what I learned from my dad.”

We Are A Muslim, Please is published by William Heinemann, priced £12.99. Zaiba Malik will be signing copies of her book at Waterstones, Bradford, on Thursday, August 5 at 6.30pm.