CITIZENSHIP: FROM RIGHT TO PRIVILEGE > TellMAMA in their annual reports from 2013 on, and many other commentators have noted the rise of anti-Muslim hate crime on the streets; > By 2013, between 40 and 60 percent of all mosques, Islamic centres and Muslim organisations had experienced at least one ‘hate’ attack; 58 > Two-thirds of 1,800 Muslim respondents to a 2014 survey had experienced anti-Muslim verbal abuse, and nearly one-fifth physical assault; > In 2015, researchers noted how ‘Muslim identity has been subject to a process of racialisation whereby this identity is defined on the basis of the individual’s race rather than exclusively on the basis of their religion. Indeed … anti-Muslim hate crime and racism were inextricably intertwined’;59 > Mainstream and far-right parties played on anti-Muslim sentiment during the Brexit referendum, which saw a large spike in attacks following the vote; > A survey in 2018 found that 70 percent of Muslim respondents had suffered religionbased prejudice in the previous year; 60 > Racial and religious hate crimes rose to nearly 100,000 in the year 2020-21;61 > Far-right groups such as the English Defence League have fed off and fed into antiMuslim racism and have been responsible for a large proportion of online and streetbased anti-Muslim racist attacks. 5. Shamima Begum: the construction of a hate figure When in February 2015, CCTV footage was released of 15-year-old Shamima Begum leaving the UK for Syria with two schoolmates, the response focussed on safeguarding issues: how had the girls been able to leave, amid huge concern after another school friend had left the previous December? A Met police commander described the girls as ‘extremely vulnerable’. But only four years later, when Begum reappeared, still only a teenager, interviewed in a prison camp as she was about to give birth to a third child after losing two, and pleading to come home, she had become a hate figure. 62 58 Copsey et al, Anti-Muslim hate crime and the far Right, Teesside U/ TellMAMA, July 2013; Tell MAMA annual reports. 59 Awan and Zempl, We fear for our lives, Birmingham City U, Nottingham Trent U, TellMAMA, October 2015. 60 Abrams et al, Developing a national barometer of prejudice and discrimination in Britain, EHRC Research Paper 119, October 2018. 61 Home Office, Hate crime, England and Wales, 2020 to 2021, October 2021. 62 ‘Shamima Begum: bring me home, says Bethnal Green girl who left to join ISIS’, Times, 13 February 2019. Sky News interviewed her four days later, after her son’s birth: see Sky News, 17 February 2019, transcript 20 February 2019. 17