Thread: Tonight is the official launch of one of the most important books for Muslim communities in the UK.

The book edited by @AsimCP flips on its head the prevailing culture of expecting Muslims to condemn , explain & apologise for actions which have nothing to do with them.

The anthology consists of the personal experiences of a wide array of individuals who have encountered this attitude in their personal lives, be they professionals, activists, students, academics or artists. The writers portray how they resist the suffocating pressure.

The feedback thus far has been positive with many expressing a feeling of relief that they were not alone and also of empowerment that there is another way to respond. When a community has been so browbeaten for such a lengthy period, this book is a breath of fresh air.

Of course, @AsimCP was the subject of mass opprobrium in 2015 when he was asked to condemn ISIS, something never posed to non-Muslim guests. His refusal to do so & to instead explore the Islamophobic nature of the question led to a campaign of harassment against him & his family.

Those events may have been the catalyst that triggered the formulation of this anthology, as all of us who are made to feel the unfair expectation to condemn shared Asim’s pain (if not then, once the dust had settled).

Ironically, in July 2020, the Quilliam Foundation started pressuring @ManchesterUP to not publish the book. It claimed it gave @UK_CAGE “a veneer of academic respectability”. This seems to ignore that the book was subject to intense peer review; it is academically respectable!

Since then, @ToubeDavid has valiantly sought to keep the pressure up on @ManchesterUP. Toube has got history however and seems to have made it his life mission to master cancel culture.

Here is @ToubeDavid storming the launch of a @UK_CAGE report on control orders at Freshfields. His angry tirade only came to an end when he was escorted from the premises. See who else you can spot on the panel & in the crowd. @ManchesterUP - he won’t be able to do this on Zoom.

Of greater concern was that they were joined by Sara Khan of the @CommissionCE who claimed this was all a “cover to legitimise their divisive activism”.

Let’s get this straight - a government regulator sought to pressure a university press not to publish a peer-reviewed book.

It’s worth repeating this: Sara Khan of the @CommissionCE , the government regulator, was so worked up by her paranoid conspiracies that she tried to ban a book by a series of writers, published by a university, subjected to peer review, a book she had never even read.

So please join us tonight for the official launch where you can hear from myself, @AsimCP @thebrownhijabi @Lowkey0nline @aamer_rahman @hodakatebi and @RemiJS90 about why this book is so critical today. Tune in to learn about the book they tried to ban.