I first met Naz Shah at the Bradford Literary Festival in 2017. In the 2015 election, she had beaten the objectionable George Galloway, and won Bradford West for Labour, a seat the MP still holds today. She claimed her space in the public square, with a resonant voice and eyes that seemed to be lit up with flames. That is not the Naz we see on the front cover of her new memoir. In her school uniform, she looks fragile, sad and wary.
Born in 1973, she suffered, in Hamlet’s words, “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” and twice tried to end it all. And now this, the brutal story told to the world – arguably her bravest act.
Women from backgrounds like hers and mine are taught to leave painful events alone, and in the past. But Muslims are also commanded to pursue the truth. Shah has done that and more in this book.
The title, Honoured, reclaims a term that has been utilised to justify appalling violations of the human rights of South Asian and Arab people. Forced marriages, violence against gay members of the family, even murders of young people who want to be free are defended in the name of “izzat”, a word meaning honour, dignity, pride. The victims must remain unseen and unheard. Naz and her mother broke that expectation in the most dramatic way.
Naz Shah, left, at 24 with her sister Fozia demonstrating following the rejection of an appeal by their mother against her murder conviction (Photo: Ben Curtis/PA)When our paths first crossed, I didn’t know Naz was the daughter of Zoora Shah, who, in 1993, gained notoriety after poisoning Mohamed Azam, a local gangster, drug dealer and pimp in Bradford. I had covered her story back then.
Zoora, an illiterate and malleable teenager, had been given in marriage to a kinsman, Abid Shah, a British Pakistani from Mirpur in Kashmir. Abid was violent and abusive. Naz witnessed him beating her mother many times.
But Abid adored his firstborn daughter. He twirled her around while singing “Brown Girl in the Ring”, gave sweets to her mates. He was handsome, owned a successful bed and sofa factory, and was a popular local figure.
Naz’s descriptions of her upbringing are so evocative, you feel you were her imaginary friend, sharing her confusing emotions.
When she was six years old, her brother still a baby, and Zoora pregnant, her dad left them for the 16-year-old daughter of their neighbours. The community blamed Zoora. “It was believed that Mum drove Dad away by not being ‘enough’ for him,” Shah writes. “It was my mum’s responsibility not only to bear the shame of his abandonment, but to manage the carnage he had left in his wake.” Zoora and her kids had to move 14 times in the ensuing two years, while being excoriated for Abid’s wickedness and betrayals.
Naz Shah at her home in Bradford (Photo: Matthew Lloyd/Getty Images)Zoora sold her wedding jewellery to pay for a deposit on a house. But she didn’t know how the system worked. A man they knew as “Uncle” Azam came along, promised he would sort out a house for them. But he pocketed the cash, and raped and pimped Zoora to his criminal associates. When she threatened to expose him, he replied: “Just remember the grass is always greener with that daughter of yours.” Zoora feared he was going to make Naz his next sex slave.
That is why in 1985, Zoora took a 12-year-old Naz out of school and sent her off to her family village in Mirpur. There Naz was turned into a village girl, and, at the age of 15, married to a cousin. Her beloved mum was too embedded in those customs and could only repeat the pattern. It was, in part, an immigration scam. Naz eventually divorced the guy and saved herself.
Then came the darkest moment. In 1993, Zoora put a fatal dose of arsenic into Azam’s food. She was jailed for 20 years. During her trial, she had felt too mortified to mention the multiple rapes. Many violated women feel the same way.
Naz was 18, her sister Foz 13, and brother Imy 11. She became the family earner, worked in a laundry, a factory, worked for the Samaritans and the NHS and the mental health sector. And she campaigned with Southall Black Sisters and Justice for Women to get Zoora released, which she was, in 2006.
The first part of the book is often unbearably sad – at times, truly appalling. How can people behave like the men who abused Zoora did? In Honoured, Shah doesn’t condemn men like this – and there are many of them – forcefully enough. Perhaps she has to think about votes. She writes with feeling about Islam – which, at times, sounds like proselytism. I think faith is deeply personal; it loses profundity when shared.
The second part is uplifting, though somewhat therapised. It begins with Shah’s father. “With the aid of some really fine people, I turned my anger towards him into some of the energy that fuels my politics today,” she writes. “I am now in my fifties and while I can assure you that nothing in me has mellowed, the anger is now more fuel than flame. I use it constructively.”
She’s become a phenomenal woman. And her eyes still burn.
That passion makes this a memorable, intensely feminist book. I was dazzled by it. You will be too.
‘Honoured’ by Naz Shah is published by Orion on 5 March, £22
In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie.
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