In 2014, I was approached by a respectable source with close ties to the government, with what seemed a sensational story. He claimed a member of the cabinet was an undercover fundamentalist, secretly co-opted by Muslim extremists to penetrate the heart of government. Her name was Baroness Sayeeda Warsi. It didn’t take much investigating to establish that the claim had no basis in fact, and would have been laughable if it wasn’t so serious. But the episode left me fascinated; not by anything Warsi had said or done, but by how she managed to come by such determined enemies.
Warsi’s new book, The Enemy Within, provides an answer of sorts. Here, the former Foreign Office minister – the first ever Muslim woman to hold a cabinet position in the UK – reveals her unique perspective: as a British Muslim of Pakistani heritage, intimately connected to her faith and her community, and part of a government whose domestic and foreign policies were accused of alienating Muslims.
Warsi’s early life, in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, symbolises the blend of cultures in her background. She and her four sisters were raised in a neighbourhood where Pakistani immigrants were in the minority – a family proud of their heritage, who spent their summers eating candyfloss in Blackpool, or fruit-picking in their shalwar kameez.
The account reveals tantalising details of an identity struggle in which she felt “acutely aware of difference” and “wanted to fit in”. In her 20s she had something of an early midlife crisis, closing her legal practice – she was by then a successful lawyer – and taking a “very late gap year”, travelling around Pakistan. In a rather extraordinary rebuttal of the various conspiracy theories about her, she cautions those suspicious about her past to “stop watching Fox News!”.
Warsi is at her best delivering a withering polemic on the flaws in government rhetoric and policy on extremism and multiculturalism. In a chapter entitled “Islamophobia”, she dismisses the approach of David Cameron and other former colleagues as “nonsense”. Applied across the board, the government’s current definition of “extremism” would, she says, include Russell Brand.
She goes further, accusing the machinery of government of amounting to a “paranoid state”. This claim includes the revelation that when she was minister for faith and communities in 2012, her adviser was pulled aside by someone in government and told to spy on her. My source was not, apparently, alone in his desire to incriminate Warsi.
Disappointingly, Warsi’s personal relationship with identity, however, is skimmed over in the book. After describing a liberal childhood, she reveals – briefly – an arranged marriage with a first cousin from Pakistan, in a ceremony she says made her deeply uncomfortable. Her views on homophobia, which were exposed in a 2005 campaign demanding “an end to… the promotion of homosexuality”, she now describes as “toe-curlingly embarrassing” and “deeply offensive”. But her analysis of these issues, which go to the heart of the multiple cultures many British people are navigating, is mostly downplayed.
Warsi ultimately resigned from her role as Foreign Office minister in 2014, over government policy concerning the war in Gaza. The resignation was not, she says, because of Israel’s actions, but her own government’s inaction in committing to Gaza’s post-conflict rebuilding. She has since elaborated her stance, placing her – I think it’s fair to say – alongside advocates of feminist foreign policy, who believe the “British values” so often preached at Britain’s Muslims should apply to our dealings with foreign states, too.
No doubt some will accuse Warsi of an over-eagerness to become a “Good Immigrant”, appealing to Muslims to open up their mosques and abandon the niqab, for example. Others will criticise her denial that violent extremism has anything to do with Muslim ideology. But underlying The Enemy Within is the belief that “we must let a thousand flowers bloom. There will never be a single voice for a super-diverse community of three million.” And so to find fault with her version would be to fall into the very trap she cautions against.
• The Enemy Within by Sayeeda Warsi is published by Penguin (£20). To order a copy for £15 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
