Previous speakers
Afzal Khan MP
Baroness Sayeeda Warsi
Professor Tariq Modood
Afzal Khan was elected as the Labour MP for Manchester Rusholme in 2024. He previously served as the MP for Manchester Gorton from 2017 until 2024. Afzal served as Shadow Minister for Immigration (2017-2019) and Shadow Foreign Office Minister (2019-2020). When Sir Keir Starmer became Leader of the Labour Party, he appointed Afzal as Shadow Deputy Leader of the House of Commons and then Shadow Minister for Legal Aid. Afzal served as Shadow Minister for Exports in Labour’s Business and Trade Team from September 2023 until November 2023. He is also a Vice Chair of several All-Party Parliamentary Groups, including on British Muslims, Climate Change, Pakistan, Hajj and Umrah, Food Banks, and Poverty.
Baroness Sayeeda Warsi is a lawyer, author, business woman, philanthropist and member of the House of Lords. She was Britain’s first Muslim Cabinet Minister; Chairman of the Conservative party and a Senior Minister at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Daughter of an immigrant mill worker, Sayeeda Warsi rose to become an Advisor to the Leader of the Conservative Party, Michael Howard, in 2004, the youngest peer in the House of Lords, aged 36, in 2007 and Britain’s first Muslim Cabinet Minister in 2010. A campaigner on equalities and religious freedom in 2007 she travelled to Sudan and famously helped to secure the release of the British teacher Gillian Gibbons who was on trial for blasphemy. The iconic images of her in 2010 on the steps of No 10 Downing Street in a shalwar kameez (a traditional ethnic outfit) were beamed around the world as she was appointed as Chairman of the Conservative Party – the first Asian to chair a major British political party. Warsi has been a major driver of four start-up businesses; two in the service sector and two in manufacturing, all of which developed into vibrant and successful SMEs. In Government she led the campaign to ensure that Britain became the first western country to issue a Sukuk (Islamic bond), which was issued in 2014. She also Chaired the Global Islamic Finance & Investment Group. Sayeeda Warsi is the Pro Vice Chancellor at the University of Bolton , a Visiting Professor at St Marys, an advisor at Georgetown University Washington D.C, and a member of the International Advisory Board on FORB, University of Notre Dame. She is the author of The Enemy Within, a provocative and brutally honest account of the relationship between Islam and Britain. She was co Presenter of the political reality show Make Me Prime Minister as well as being a regular TV presenter, commentator and documentary maker. On 26 September 2024, Warsi announced that she would no longer take the Conservative Party whip in the House of Lords.
Professor Tariq Modood [Professor of Sociology, Politics and Public Policy, School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies, Centre for the Study of Ethnicity and Citizenship University of Bristol] - Professor Tariq over the last 35 years has worked on: Theory and politics of racism, racial equality, multiculturalism and secularism, with especial reference to British Asian Muslims; ethnic identities, national identities and the 'second generation'; ethnic disadvantage and progress in employment and education; comparisons within and between Western Europe and North America; the politics of being Muslim in the West. He is most focused on are the political theory and sociology of multiculturalism, interculturalism and secularism; and on Islamophobia. He was the Bristol Director of the Leverhulme Programme on Migration and Citizenship, with UCL, which consisted of 8 projects running between 2003-09. With Anna Triandafyllidou led EMILIE: A European Approach to Multicultural Citizenship (with 8 EU partners), an EU 6th Framework project (2006-09) and followed this with a 15 countries project, Accept Pluralism: Tolerance, Pluralism and Social Cohesion (2010-2013). He worked on a project with Dr Therese O’Toole, Muslim Participation in Contemporary Governance, funded by the AHRC (2010-13). During 2010-11 he had a Fellowship from the AHRC to work on a book on Secularism and the Accommodation of Muslims in Western Europe, which he developed further on during his Robert Schuman Fellowship at the European University Institute, 2013-2015. He has held over 40 grants and consultancies, have over 35 (co-)authored and (co-)edited books and reports and over 350 articles and chapters. He was awarded a MBE for services to social sciences and ethnic relations in 2001, made a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences (UK) in 2004 and elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2017. In 2022 he was ranked in the top 20 UK cited scholars in Politics, Law, Sociology and Social Policy combined. A regular contributor to media and policy debates being frequently cited by policy-makers and practioners and on several occasions has influenced policy. He has been an Adviser to the Muslim Council of Britain and have served on the DfES Race, Education and Employment Forum; the Commission on the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain (1997-2000); the IPPR Commission on National Security (2007-09); the National Equality Panel (2007-10); and the Commission on Religion and Belief in British Public Life (2013-16). His impact case study, ‘Influencing law, policy and public discourse on the accommodation of Muslims in Britain’ was one of three which collectively were ranked as 3rd in the UK by the Sociology 2014 REF. His work is part of syllabi for AS and A Level Sociology (OCR and possibly other Boards) and for A Level Politics. Recent books include Essays on Secularism and Multiculturalism (2019), Multiculturalism: A Civic Idea (2nd ed; 2013); and as Special Issues co-editor, with T. Sealy, Beyond Euro-American centric Forms of Racism and Anti-racism (Political Quarterly, 2022) and Global comparative analysis of the governance of religious diversity (Religion, State and Society, 2022).
Previous speakers
Yahya Birt
Dr Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed
Dr Kawter Najib
Yahya Birt is a research director at the Ayaan Institute in London, where he works on Muslim minorities. In 2022, his report, Ummah at the Margins: The Past, Present and Future of Muslim Minorities was published. He is also a community historian who has taught at the University of Leeds. He has an M.Phil. in Social and Cultural Anthropology from the University of Oxford. He has published over a dozen peer-reviewed articles on Islam in Britain and his co-authored books include British Secularism and Religion (2016), Islam in Victorian Liverpool (2021), The Collected Poems of Abdullah Quilliam (2021) and Our Fatima of Liverpool (2023). In 2022, he published his first poetry collection, Pandemic Pilgrimage. He is a founding co-editor of the Oxford British Muslim Studies series at the Oxford University Press. Currently, he is working with Dr. Fozia Bora on the history of Bradford's Somali Village, an ethnographic show of 100 Somali men, women, and children at the city's Lister Park in 1904. And, with a great set of dedicated colleagues, he is launching the Muslim Historical Society of Britain in 2024, God willing. He lives in West Yorkshire with his family and cat. He likes walking and being grumpy about the state of the world.
Dr Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed is an award-winning 20+year systems theorist, transdisciplinary academic, investigative journalist and strategy consultant, leveraging his skills to understand and drive systems transformation in response to humanity’s biggest global challenges. A bestselling author of seven books (including six non-fiction and a science fiction novel), he has founded and led a range of innovative organisations seeking to generate social change. He is founding Director of the System Shift Lab, a systems transformation consultancy. Since 2023, he has been Director of The Futures Lab, where he leads on systems transformation advisory services to governments, businesses and charities. Previously he was Director of Global Research Communications and Research Editor at RethinkX, a technology forecasting think-tank based in San Francisco and London, where he led on a range of projects creating roadmaps for net zero through both technology disruptions and key societal choices. He was Systems Change Advisor to the Global Citizens Assembly which represented the global population at the United Nations COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, and was a senior delegate to the United Nations COP28 climate summit in Dubai where he worked closely with a range of governments in the Global South. He chaired the Future of Sustainable Innovation heads of state plenary panel at COP28, where he delivered a keynote on the ‘planetary phase shift’. From 2019 to 2023, Nafeez was the Special Investigations & Global Trends Reporter at the monthly British newspaper Byline Times. Before that, he was 'System Shift' columnist at VICE's science magazine Motherboard where he reported on the great post-carbon transition, and a former weekly columnist at Middle East Eye where he covered regional geopolitics. Nafeez previously wrote The Guardian's 'Earth insight' blog from 2013 to 2014, where he reported on the geopolitics of interconnected energy, environmental and economic crises. He is an Earth4All Transformational Economics Commissioner at the Club of Rome, where is also a Full Member. He is a Distinguished Fellow at the Schumacher Institute for Sustainable Systems and a Fellow at the Royal Society of Arts. Nafeez' book, Failing States, Collapsing Systems: BioPhysical Triggers of Political Violence, is a scientific monograph published by Springer Energy Briefs (Springer Nature, 2017) that develops a new systems framework to study the intersection between Earth System Disruption and Human System Destabilisation. This systems framework continues to inform the priorities and directions of his investigative reporting, research and consultancy. Nafeez's passion is to undertake deep, interdisciplinary research into the systems and structures that impact our lives, along with the potential to change them for the better; and to innovate powerful ways to communicate the learning from such research to mass audiences to facilitate coordinated action. Over the years, he has won a number of awards for both his journalistic and academic work. In 2015, Nafeez won the Project Censored Award for Outstanding Investigative Journalism for his Guardian story on the energy politics of the Ukraine crisis. The previous year he won another Project Censored Award for his first ever Guardian article covering the heightened risk of civil unrest due to climate-induced food crises. In 2010, Nafeez won the Routledge-GCPS Essay Prize for his academic paper on the 'Crisis of Civilisation' published in the journal Global Change, Peace and Security. He won the Premio Napoli (Naples Prize) in 2003, Italy's most prestigious literary award created by decree of the President of the Republic, for his first book, The War on Freedom, which critically investigated the Bush administration's narrative of the 9/11 attacks. Nafeez has twice been featured in the Evening Standard's 'Top 1,000' list of most influential people in London, in 2014 and 2015.
Dr Kawter Najib is a Lecturer in Human Geography in the Department of Geography and Planning at the University of Liverpool. Her teaching and research interests centre on social and urban geographies of inequality and discrimination using mixed methods. Her area of expertise focuses on Islamophobia and its spatialization, and I explore more broadly issues of social and spatial justice: urban exclusion, austerity, racism and sexism. She has been a Marie Curie Fellow at Newcastle University where she was the principal researcher of the SAMA (Spaces of Anti-Muslim Acts) project in Paris and London, funded by the European Commission. Her research mainly concerns Europe and especially the UK and France and she is author of Spatialized Islamophobia (Routledge, 2021).
Previous speakers
Dr Shamim Miah
Dr Shamim Miah is a senior lecturer at Huddersfield University and the author of four books: Ibn Khaldun: Education, History and Society; Race, Space and Multiculturalism in Northern England (co author-2020); Muslims and the Question of Security: Trojan Horse, Prevent and Racial Politics (2017) and Muslims Schooling and the Question of Self-Segregation which received the ‘highly commended’ book award by the Society for Educational Studies’ (2016). Shamim is the co-editor for the Muslim’s in Britain series (Oxford University Press). He is also a senior fellow at the Centre for Postnormal Policy and Futures Studies and an associate editor for the journal Critical Muslim (Hurst)
Previous speakers
Professor Hatem Bazian
Faisal Bodi
Jahangir Mohammed
Professor Hatem Bazian is a scholar of religion, politics, and globalization whose field specialties include Islamic Law, Awqaf and Fatawa Texts, Classical Arabic, Palestine, Islamophobia, Diaspora and Comparative Immigration, American Law and Society, Arab and Arab American Studies, Race Theory and History, Colonialism, Post-Colonial and De-colonial Studies, Ethnic Studies, Multi-Cultural and Cross-Cultural Studies, International Relations and Globalization, Social and Political Movement, Comparative Liberation Theologies, Languages, and Media. Dr. Bazian is also a professor in the Departments of Near Eastern and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and an adviser to the Religion, Politics, and Globalization Center there. Prior to his post at Zaytuna College, he taught at UC Berkeley School of Law; UC Davis; San Francisco State University; Graduate Theological Union; Saint Mary’s College; and Diablo Valley College. Dr. Bazian earned his PhD at UC Berkeley in Near Eastern Studies in 2000. His PhD thesis, titled “Al-Quds in Islamic Consciousness: A Textual Survey of Muslim Claims and Rights to the Sacred City,” contributes to better understanding of Muslim attachment and informed political attitudes toward the sacred city of Jerusalem and Palestine in general. Dr. Hatem founded the Islamophobia Studies Center, Editor-in-Chief of the Islamophobia Studies Journal, co-founder and current President of the International Islamophobia Studies Research Association (IISRA); advised on the 2021, UN Special Rapporteur on freedom of religion or belief report on Countering Islamophobia/Anti-Muslim Hatred to Eliminate Discrimination and Intolerance Based on Religion or Belief, and contributed to the Carter Center 2018 report, Countering the Islamophobia Industry Toward More Effective Strategies and has authored five books, the latest being Erasing the Human: Collapse of the Postcolonial World and the Refugee-Immigration Crisis, edited 8 volumes of the Islamophobia Studies Journal and hundreds of published articles. He is also the Chairmman of Muslim Legal Fund (MLFA).
Faisal Bodi is a commentator and former journalist. He has written extensively for the Guardian and Independent as a specialist on Muslim affairs and has also worked for Aljazeera. Faisal has covered many riots over the years including the 2001 unrest in our northern cities and the riots that gripped French cities in 2005. He currently works for the Islamic Human Rights Commission, the longest standing Muslim rights advocacy group in the UK.
Jahangir Mohammed [The Ayaan Institute] is a prolific writer, thinker, and commentator on Muslim Global Affairs with a 28-year experience of studying and analysing Islamic and Jihad movements. During this period, he has written numerous articles, opinion pieces, and been a regular commentator in Muslim and mainstream media. He has acted as a geopolitical analyst and expert for lawyers on international terrorism and extremism trials in a dozen cases. He has been the Director of Centre for Muslim Affairs since 1997. Prior to this he was the Deputy Leader of the Muslim Parliament of Great Britain (1992-1997) and was responsible for much of its research and project development/management. The Parliament’s last project before it ended in 1997 was a global conference, “Islamophobia the oldest hatred”. In his professional capacity, he has been a lecturer in social policy and public administration at De Montfort University Leicester (at the young age of 23). He has worked as a senior manager in and around local and national government for 25 years, in the field of community regeneration, where he has been responsible for hundreds of community based and business development projects. He has extensive experience of understanding diverse and multicultural communities. He now runs his own consultancy business where he is a specialist in organisational and charity management, and has advised hundreds of charities, organisations, as well as lawyers. He is the author of Race Relations and Muslims in Britain (1993), The Home Office Strategy for Islam and Muslims in Britain (1996) , The Final Crusade against Islam: 911 and the Implications for Muslims (2002). Preventing Extremism or reforming Islam (2007), The Prevent Strategy; A Cradle to Grave Police State (2013).
©Copyright - . All rights reserved.
We need your consent to load the translations
We use a third-party service to translate the website content that may collect data about your activity. Please review the details in the privacy policy and accept the service to view the translations.