Hello, and welcome to The Sacred, a podcast from the think tank Theos, shared in partnership with Comment magazine. What does it mean to be British right now? What might it mean to be Muslim, to be a Muslim living in Britain in these times? And how does it feel to be the youngest, first female, only brown Economics Editor of The Times of London, when you really didn’t find economics that interesting at Oxford University?
I have rarely had a conversation that so upended my preconceptions and burst my tribal categories as the one you’re about to hear with Mehreen Khan.
“I was like, so if Islam is like punk music and I’m like a punk now, and I’m 12 or 13 — I’m also, I have to explain, if you’ve got football fans, I’m also a Chelsea fan. So the idea of being hated for my affiliation is probably a unifying theme in my life.”
“I’m driven by a moral righteousness. But what I learned was that what I was also, if I really looked into myself, doing — was doing because it made me feel good, and it made me feel powerful, and it made me feel important.”
I’m really honest with you that even though I know how important economics is, I struggle sometimes to get excited by it—anyone else? And what that means is, when we booked this interview with the Economics Editor of The Times, it wasn’t one of the ones I was most looking forward to. And I came away so stimulated and encouraged and entertained—frankly, I’ve rarely laughed so hard in an interview—and trying to figure out, not to sound like a super stalker, how to make this woman my friend.
There are some reflections from me at the end, as usual, and I really hope you enjoy listening.
Elizabeth Oldfield: I want to go digging in your values to understand what it is that drives you. And I’m going to frame it around the sacred, which is a complicated word for some people, and not for others—you can take it in whatever direction you like. Tell me, what is sacred for you?
Mehreen Khan: Can I just credit you with having the toughest opening question of any interviewer? As a journalist, I’m giving you my props, because it’s actually so difficult.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Good. And I knew it was coming.
Mehreen Khan: So I have been thinking about it. When I talk to people about the sacred, I have this kind of throwaway line—that for me, there’s something I put in the category of sacred, and everything else is up for question. This is how I explain religiosity to a lot of my non-religious friends. I say to them, the reason I’m a journalist, the reason I do what I do, is because everything’s up for grabs apart from the sacred. And for me, that usually just means this category of God. But I’m going to be more specific, because that’s a kind of throwaway thing I do to explain to people my worldview, or how I analytically approach things.
So I was like, okay, well, what do I mean when I say there’s this whole category of stuff I call the sacred, and just saying “God” isn’t enough? I think — I know — is sacred, but nobody can really explain it. So I’m going to say consciousness. I’m bringing the big C-word into the conversation.
Elizabeth Oldfield: First time anyone’s said this — ding, ding! I love that.
Mehreen Khan: I’m going with consciousness, just because I’ve been reading a lot about it — a lot of secular work about it. And everyone who’s thought about the question would say, there’s this incredible thing called consciousness. As humans, we have spent hundreds of years trying to understand it, and we still don’t really know what it is. But, by gosh, it’s quite amazing.
Consciousness, from an Islamic perspective, is quite easy to understand, because as human beings, God has given us this innate disposition — this light in our head — this fitrah, as it’s known in Arabic. And I always kind of come back to it as the specialness about humans. That’s not to say things that don’t have consciousness are not sacred, but because of the mystery and unknowability of it — even in big 2026, as the kids say — we cannot tell people what consciousness really is. I think that’s why I can put it in a really, really, really special category of things where material laws don’t apply, and our metaphysical understandings of it are diverse. But we all sort of know what it is.
For me, consciousness is — I will never know what it feels like to be Elizabeth. I can know lots about you, I can live with you, we can become best friends, I can understand your taste in clothes and music and your mores and your habits. But I will never know what it’s like to think like you, and to feel that spark in your head that is you. So, yeah, I’m going with that.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Say more about fitrah.
Mehreen Khan: The fitrah, yeah. It’s the Arabic word Muslims use to describe what God says is our innate disposition. And you can describe innate disposition in many ways — I feel like we have an innate disposition to believe in something bigger than us, to believe in a creator, to believe in a power. There are so many beautiful idioms in Islam about how God creates humans and what he does with them.
One of my favourites is that before our souls are breathed into our bodies, all human souls are sort of in this massive holding pen —
Elizabeth Oldfield: Wow.
Mehreen Khan: It’s quite literally a holding pen. Like a sea of souls.
Elizabeth Oldfield: It is a sea of souls.
Mehreen Khan: And this is the moment in which we say bala, shahidna — we bear witness to our Creator. And I like the idea because it explains the concept of soulmates quite well. So when you feel like you’ve met someone, and you just feel like you’ve seen them before — there’s just something about them, and you’re like, how? We have something. And that’s because when you were in the holding pen, you were probably quite close to one another.
That’s how I explain the feeling when people say “you’re my soulmate” — you quite literally were mates in a gang together before your soul was breathed into your body. And the opposite is also true — I’ve had that very visceral reaction of meeting someone and they’re just not for me, and it’s irrational, and I’m like, why is this person just rubbing me up the wrong way? It’s probably because you were quite far from one another in the holding pen of souls, and there was a lot of distance between you.
So I think when you understand souls as the part of us that will still exist when our corporeal shells are gone, that gets to the essence of humanity to me. And animals also have this — I guess we say animals are sentient. I just met your cat — your cat has a sentience, a lived — it will feel pain and can experience some things. Do we describe that as consciousness? I don’t know, but it’s that spark, that life thing.
Elizabeth Oldfield: It’s so interesting you’re saying this, because a few weeks ago we had Michael Pollan in that seat, whose book on consciousness — I was actually just referencing it and his name escaped me.
Mehreen Khan: Oh my goodness. It was such an interesting thing to immerse myself in for several weeks. And he says that the search for consciousness has become the secular equivalent of the search for the soul. And I hadn’t quite realised how difficult it is to untangle those two concepts, and how much the grasping after being able to tame this concept — to materialise it, to naturalise it, to make it into something we can plot on a graph, or even recreate in a machine — that’s the question of our time, in lots of ways.
And it was fascinating talking to him, because he doesn’t have religious commitments — he called himself a secular person — but as the book goes on, his humanism, his sense that there’s something special about humans, was really at odds with the scientific frame he was trying to use. He goes on this whole exploration where he takes various drugs to get close to the feeling — he starts the book in the lab and ends it in a Buddhist monastery. It’s this real sense of, the place that thinks it has all the answers, I don’t think has all the answers.
Elizabeth Oldfield: So it’s interesting, because as soon as I mentioned the word “consciousness,” as somebody without religious belief, he went straight to talking about soul. So he’s right in that sense — there’s a coterminous nature to the two of those things. But I guess talking about souls might be more difficult from a secular understanding.
Mehreen Khan: But it’s very natural for someone — we need some language, right? There’s something about the human experience within us.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Okay, we’re going to come back to all of that. But first, I want to understand a bit about your story and your childhood. Could you paint me a picture of you growing up — maybe primary school years? What was in the air — ideas, identities, what was going on?
Mehreen Khan: So I grew up in the ’90s — I’m probably an old millennial now. I think I was an insufferable kid, because the thing that’s a constant in my life is a political awareness. My mum said she picked me up from nursery one day and the school teacher said they’d caught Mehreen in the corner on the phone — the toy phone — talking to John Major.
Elizabeth Oldfield: The Prime Minister.
Mehreen Khan: Big up John Major — never met him, he’s a huge cricket fan.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Yeah, he clearly found him approachable.
Mehreen Khan: But clearly, at that point, I seemed to know who the Prime Minister was, and thought I had the temerity to — I don’t know what I was asking him for. And so she tells me that story, I don’t remember it, and I was like, oh God, I was a nerd, right — “let me tell you what’s wrong with the country.” And this was not even that we were a Tory-supporting family, like most desis in Britain.
So that’s something that sticks in my head, because it makes a lot of sense to explain my life — politics was just around. And I was thinking about why, and I’m like — if you’ve got listeners from South Asian backgrounds, if you’ve got desi listeners — desi dads love the news. We just watch the news all the time. So in my house, the only thing that was really on was the 24-hour news cycle. So mostly what I was exposed to was the world through TV news.
And the world in the ’90s was actually quite tumultuous, from what I remember — I remember things like Kosovo, Bosnia and Yugoslavia being important things that were happening. I remember when Tony Blair was elected in ’97 — genuinely, my community felt a feeling of euphoria, we had all the banners up, and I was like, oh cool, politics is like a real thing, it changes people’s lives, and my family’s happy, and our street is happy, and we’re going to have a street party. It’s the summer, and we don’t — I don’t know this guy, but Blair seems to be like our guy, he’s our guy, like we won. I didn’t know what a state was, but our team won, and that was New Labour.
I grew up in an area where — probably that was the last election where people felt something was at stake, because after that we sort of fall into political apathy, and people describe Brits as not really caring, and “the left is the same as the right.” But New Labour is something that sticks in my head as a kid — I was about six or seven, and I was like, oh, politics is a real thing, voting and democracy is for real, it means something, and it means something to us — not that I knew what any of these concepts were.
So I was a very political child who grew up watching the news. I remember asking my mum if I could stay up late to watch Newsnight at ten o’clock — full nerd behaviour, because I loved it, and people like Jeremy Paxman were incredible to me — still an incredible, amazing journalist. So my life since then, becoming a broadcast journalist — well, not a broadcast journalist — it’s not an accident.
And then I guess the changing moment of my young life was actually 9/11. As a kid who was already switched on to the world pre-9/11, 9/11 becomes the moment where all these politics things I’m into actually end up being the most formative thing that happens to me. I was ten or eleven — I’d just started high school, so it would have been literally September, my first couple of weeks in secondary school. So, eleven years old.
Elizabeth Oldfield: And how much were you aware — how much were you around other Muslims, and that was just your world? How much were you aware of yourself as a Muslim before that?
Mehreen Khan: So Bosnia and Kosovo become very important for me to understand that Muslimness isn’t just something Pakistanis are — because on the telly, you’re seeing white European Muslims being killed for being Muslim. And I understood that quite early on, because my mum will tell me that I — I remember going to sleep, and she said I woke up crying and said, “Mum, our people are going to kill us because we’re Muslims too.”
Elizabeth Oldfield: Gosh.
Mehreen Khan: I understood that conflict as one of ethnic cleansing and a genocide based on a religiosity element — that Muslims were victims of a regime targeting them because of their religion. I didn’t understand where these places were, didn’t understand there were white Muslims and European Muslims too. So in that sense, there was this thing about being Muslim that some people don’t like, and Muslims can die for being Muslim. And then you had other things — Chechnya was going on.
Elizabeth Oldfield: You had extraordinary levels of media and geopolitical literacy for a child.
Mehreen Khan: I think it was purely through exposure and interest — I was just exposed to it. At this point I’m like, my parents should have just not allowed us to watch the news constantly.
Elizabeth Oldfield: I think it’s a combination of those two things. You also have an older brother who wasn’t particularly locked into international relations in primary school.
Mehreen Khan: But I was like, this is my job. I’m also really locked into football, so I just go all in — you can say that’s personality.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Yeah, it’s a personality trait. And there’s also no internet, so the TV is basically where all media comes from.
Mehreen Khan: And I just realised all this stuff is probably quite important, and the world just seemed like an important thing, and lots of important things were happening in it. One thing I’m not mentioning here is economics — I have no understanding of economics, and I won’t get that until much later; the financial crisis will become that kind of 9/11 moment. But my young life is very much bombarded with big stories about international affairs — I remember the siege of the opera house, I remember knowing who Vladimir Putin is, I remember understanding things like Chechnya and Muslim conflicts where there’s a territorial dimension. Kashmir is much closer to home for my family — these types of things are just in my mind.
So 9/11 becomes a moment where this kind of febrile nature of international relations, and Muslims’ place in the world, suddenly becomes the story in a way that will go on to define my very young life and my attachment to my religion.
Elizabeth Oldfield: If it had never happened, would your interest in world affairs, or Islam, have really crystallised the way it has?
Mehreen Khan: No — it was very important because it was real. Because people in the UK, my school friends and everyone around me, were now judging me through the lens of 9/11. It was a thing that was happening in the West — everything else was kind of far away and could be ignored by Brits. But not this. This was also going to happen in Peterborough. And I was going to live in the post-9/11 reality, and what it means to be a British Muslim, and a Brit, in the UK.
Elizabeth Oldfield: And your parents — if I understood correctly — I don’t know whether the word is “religious” or “pious,” but their kind of faith was a bit quieter prior to this stage. Is that right?
Mehreen Khan: Yeah. I’m third-generation — that means I was born in the UK, my grandparents were the first generation to come over, my parents were born here. So their religiosity is very much tied to their culture, which is being South Asian, Pakistani, desis. Their religiosity and their version of Islam is very much the kind that is of “back home.” And I guess my generation — and this has been written and spoken about quite a lot — our attachment to Islam has to be European and British, rooted in a different tradition.
So, on a surface level, I have a more formal religiosity than the kind of passed-on, lived religiosity of my grandparents and my parents, for whom religion is just — well, one, you don’t need to be showy about it, because everyone’s Muslim, and two, I think the relationship with the Qur’an is much more different. So I learn Arabic, and then I want to learn the meaning of the Qur’an, and I’m sort of tapping into what I now recognise — Islam becomes important for me because I’m a bit unattached from my Pakistani culture, so I’m tapping into this universal, trans-historical force that is Islam — which had suddenly become the most sensitive ideology and the most terrible thing in the West, which, in hindsight, as a young, slightly rebellious intellectual dissident that I thought I was, was the best thing that ever happened to me.
Elizabeth Oldfield: So you didn’t decide to shrink away or hide it, did you? How did you react?
Mehreen Khan: I was like — so if Islam is like punk music and I’m like a punk now, and I’m twelve or thirteen, and everyone’s like, “she’s embracing this” — it was incredible. I had my teachers scared.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Yeah, you had your teachers scared.
Mehreen Khan: I always thought — do you remember Roald Dahl, the Matilda movie?
Elizabeth Oldfield: Yes.
Mehreen Khan: I thought that I was her. Nobody understands me — I’m operating on a different level, guys, you don’t know which level I’m operating at.
So, in a way — the fact that Islam becomes such a sensitive thing, and Muslims become persona non grata — I’m like, bring it on. It’s like having pink hair and saying “death to the Queen.” It was the most subversive thing you could do in my small town in East Anglia, because there weren’t loads of other Muslims around, not at school, and the Muslims I was around were my family, whose attachment to Islam was very much from that South Asian tradition. Whereas I was like, okay, now everyone’s like “we hate Muslims” — I was like, I’m a Muslim, so do you hate me?
I’m also, I have to explain — if you’ve got football fans — I’m also a Chelsea fan. So the idea of being hated for my affiliation is probably a unifying theme in my life. When I became a Chelsea fan, which was also the worst thing you could do as a young brown kid, because Chelsea, along with Millwall, have a reputation for being the most right-wing, racist, hooligan element — and I’m like, that’s my people, I’m going to bring them back into the fold, we’re going to change the whole reputation of what it means to be a Chelsea fan. So, in a way, being a Chelsea fan and being a Muslim means I don’t really mind the whole “everyone hates us, we don’t care” thing. I was obviously quite attracted to that.
And actually, what I’m doing as a young person is cosplaying what it means to be a Muslim, because I know it’s scary to people, so I’m embracing the scariness of the identity. I’m reading, as a kid, books by Sayyid Qutb — figures of political Islam in the twentieth century, modernists trying to understand why the Muslim world fell so badly at the hands of colonial powers, and why it stopped. And what they really say is, well, we got beaten, so let’s not try to beat them, let’s join them — let’s copy the mould of the West, let’s create nation states, let’s use Islam as the basis for our constitutional nation states. They’re quite subversive figures for their time — I don’t think eleven- or twelve- or thirteen-year-old me understood the context of it, but I just knew it was a subversive ideology. I guess twenty years ago it was like being a communist or a Marxist, and before that, an anarchist. Islam represented a real intellectual rebellion for me as a young person because of the 9/11 environment.
Elizabeth Oldfield: How did your school react?
Mehreen Khan: Bless them, they just didn’t know how to handle it. In hindsight, I’d say they handled me much more sensitively than they could have done — now we have things like Prevent, this very systematic way of dealing with kids who might be falling into what we call extremism, but “extremism” wasn’t even a word then. Initially it was a little bit jarring for them, and so their knee-jerk reaction was to inform my parents that Mehreen might be reading books that aren’t appropriate — they’d use the word “appropriate” for an eleven- or twelve-year-old. And my blessed, poor parents were also just incredibly frightened, and it was very much, you’ve got to keep your head down, go to school, learn stuff — it’s a kind of assimilation generation, the quieter generation. And they’re living with this existential threat — you always got told they’re going to send us back. And I’m like, back where? You’ve never even been to Pakistan — no, I still haven’t been to Pakistan to this day, not for any particular reason, it just hasn’t happened. And I was like, I’m going nowhere, I’m here, I’m rooted here, this is my country and my place.
And now I understand that for a generation of my grandparents who lived through Partition, the idea that one day you wake up and your home is not your home is a real thing — it’s not just something you scare the grandkids with, it was a trauma of that generation. I understand this in hindsight, but the younger me was like, what are you talking about?
So there’s a kind of brashness to my early Islamic identity — I’d describe a kind of naive chauvinism about it. I believe I’ve got the truth, and everyone at school is wrong, and everyone on the news is wrong, and the Iraq war is clearly wrong, and everything we’ve done in Afghanistan — I have a moral righteousness about me. Bush is bad, Blair is bad, why are we going to war? It’s wrapped up in anti-colonialism — Muslims are going to die because these oppressors are making us pay for crimes we didn’t commit. And figures like the Taliban and bin Laden — I don’t really know anything about them, but there’s a natural sense of, well, if they’re fighting for something, then they’re fighting the baddies, and they can’t be that bad, can they? Now, in hindsight, I understand that’s all just part of the shock-jock thing of being a kid, trying to provoke the authority figures in my life, who are basically my teachers.
And we know this is often how people react, right — there’s a sociologist, his name’s gone, but he wrote a book called Mutual Radicalisation, and the way that when you feel othered and dismissed or sidelined, someone kind of forces an identity on you — you see it with the gay rights movement, the feminist movement — the sense of, right then, we’re going to dig in. It’s not that your dismissal or your prejudice towards me is going to make me more like you — it will make me less like you, because I will pull away.
Elizabeth Oldfield: This is a big question — how has your sense of your Muslim identity developed since then? Has it changed shape or colour over time?
Mehreen Khan: Yeah, “maturation” would be the best way to explain it. So at the beginning, I’m a punk, and that’s what it means to be a Muslim — to say “eff you” to everyone, and it’s the best subversive idea, I’m outside society, and it fuels my sense of being a loner and an outsider. I’m also doing my Islam in a way that’s completely alien to my parents and to everyone around me, by reading political Islamic texts and understanding the political ideology of Islam. It’s a very rudimentary understanding — I’m reading books I don’t really understand, but it’s kind of virtue signalling, I’m performatively Muslim because I’m twelve or thirteen.
And then, around puberty age, really — fourteen, fifteen — I still, to this moment, remember the feeling of what it means to actually believe in God. This is when my brain develops to the extent that I’m like, okay, so I pray — why do I pray? Who is God, what does he want from us, why am I living in such a tumultuous time, why are Muslims suffering so much, how do I understand why God would want us to suffer so much? I’m seeing pictures — just as I saw the pictures from Srebrenica, and then Iraq, Afghanistan — there’s so much tumult in the Muslim world, and I don’t understand. I feel the hurt and the pain, and I have no way to process it. And the feeling, when I really embrace Islam, is that I understand there’s wisdom to what’s happening, and that’s God’s wisdom.
And there’s a sense in which, from that moment onwards, bizarrely, I go from being a hyper-politicised young person to being someone who is accepting of God’s will and God’s reality. And I’d say, weirdly, by the time most people become politically active — eighteen, nineteen — I’ve kind of checked out.
Elizabeth Oldfield: You’ve gone through it.
Mehreen Khan: Yeah, I’ve checked out of the activism — the anger has gone out of me, the frustration has left me, the feeling of fighting, of having to fight, has already left me at that age. So I think I go through the process much earlier than most people, for whom, when they start university at eighteen or nineteen, that’s when they discover the world is unjust and we have to fight for stuff. I’d already gone through my anti-war phase, my anti-colonial phase — I’d read Noam Chomsky, done all of that stuff earlier — so you could say, to some degree, I became much more passive in that phase of my life, at eighteen, nineteen, because being Muslim for me at that point meant understanding that there are some things I can control, and other things, other forces, that God is in control of. So I have to police the degree to which I can be upset and angry and agitate for change — not that I stop doing it, because I’m gobby, obviously — but the spiritual element of it is that I have a much greater contentedness. I accept that the world is going to be very difficult, and the age I’m living in is going to be very, very difficult, and Islam and God at that point become a life raft for me to sail on these choppier seas. So I get to that point towards the end of my teenage years.
Elizabeth Oldfield: It’s making me think about the difference between religion as spirituality — as an inner, though often still collective, posture or orientation that steadies us — and religion as a political identity. I think it’s possible, there are places where those two things can hold together in healthy ways, but it’s actually quite a difficult thing to balance. And I think what we’re seeing in the world — we’ve talked a little bit about seeing your faith in public represented in ways that make no sense and are very different from your expression of it — and my faith at the moment feels like… the worst forms — there are healthy forms of political identity, often when minorities have had to push out to create some space for themselves — but I think what we’re seeing with Christianity at the moment, as political identity, is almost entirely evacuated of any of its actual content. You’re going through a lot of what Muslims have been through in the West.
Mehreen Khan: And so I think the interesting thing is — I know you had Sheikh Abdal Hakim Murad on, and he said this phrase, especially pointed at younger people in my generation: “Islam is not an ideology.” When I was younger, Islam was a political ideology for me. And weirdly enough, I dropped that just at the point where identity politics was becoming the way to do politics on the progressive left — which, I’m not putting myself on that part of the political spectrum, but of my generation, that’s kind of my natural tribe. So as soon as identity politics — “woke,” call it whatever you want — becomes all the rage in the 2010s, for me, thinking of Islam as an identity, I’m through that. I’m now embracing it as a holistic, totalising vision of the world, which is political and non-political, spiritual and temporal, but I’m not doing identity politics with Islam, at a point when Muslims are becoming the lightning rod for identity politics. So there’s a tension.
And then I’d say what happens is, in my early twenties — and in journalism, we can talk about why I became a journalist — a lot of my focus is still on Islamophobia, and just trying to find ways to counter the bad narratives, because once we did identity politics, Islam was basically in the middle of that. So, in a way, I couldn’t leave it behind.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Even if you wanted to — because that’s what people associate with you.
Mehreen Khan: The world just went in that direction.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Yeah. Okay, so what did you study when you went to university?
Mehreen Khan: I studied history and politics. Made a lot of sense — I didn’t want to do PPE, because I thought economics was useless.
Elizabeth Oldfield: I’m going to come back to this — foreshadowing.
Mehreen Khan: Yeah. And then I go to university — I think literally the month Lehman Brothers collapses. So the credit crunch thing we used to talk about, and Northern Rock — I have no idea, as someone who watches the news, what any of this stuff is. So my journey into trying to understand finance and economics basically starts from that moment onwards. I did a history degree because I thought I was going to study lots of political history — I ended up doing a lot of economic history, because the world was like this and I was like, I don’t understand any of this, maybe I should understand more of it. You discover political philosophy, intellectual history, political theory — I start thinking about the origins of liberalism, and I read Marx for the first time, seriously.
I’m right now in the process of writing a book, and the part of the book I enjoy is intellectual discovery — those early years, I look back and every single day was intellectual discovery.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Oxford or Cambridge? I always forget which one people went to.
Mehreen Khan: I love that you presume it had to be one of the two.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Yeah, I went to Oxford — I knew it was one of the two. It’s a running thing on the podcast where I forget who went where, and people are quite offended if you get the wrong one.
Mehreen Khan: Now I’m like, I get offended when people associate me with those institutions — “not another one.”
Elizabeth Oldfield: No, but it’s fine.
Mehreen Khan: No, I went to Oxford, and I actually loved it. Oxford, for me, was like — I hate to say it — like a Brideshead Revisited, full-blown, beautiful time, punting and reading Marx. It was just — I loved it. I know for some people it’s not everything, but for me it was everything, outside of the learning as well. And as the first person in my family to go to university, I can’t extol enough the virtues of how wonderful it was to just do intellectual discovery every day.
Elizabeth Oldfield: And so, why journalism?
Mehreen Khan: So, in a way, now that I’ve told you the story about being obsessed with Jeremy Paxman, it makes a lot of sense. But at the time, it was completely accidental. My entry into journalism was not what you’d think. When I explain my childhood story, it seems obvious that I’ve become a journalist because journalism is my exposure to the world, my window to the world, TV — but actually, it’s totally accidental. My entry into journalism is not what you’d think for the serious girl who’s into geopolitics — I became a football journalist. I became a sports writer, because that was my other, kind of fun part of me — I love football, I love sport. I started a little football blog, just because it meant a lot to me, and I did it in a very nerdy way — I’d write little pieces about the intersection between football and international politics, and bigger stuff, intellectualising sport — because I also have to justify everything by some bizarre intellectual veneer, when actually I’m basically just a bit of a loud, hooligan sports nut.
So my first job is as an intern on the sports desk of the Daily Mirror — a real tabloid. I write blogs, I go to The Guardian for a little bit, and I’m like, I’m going to be a sports journalist. And actually, I do become one — I get my first job as a graduate trainee with the Daily Telegraph, and they put you around the whole paper, but the point was I was going to be a sports journalist. So that’s how I become a journalist — because I’m going to be a football girl.
Elizabeth Oldfield: And why are you now not writing about sport, but writing about economics, which you weren’t even interested enough to study at university?
Mehreen Khan: Yeah, and I knew nothing about it. I deliberately didn’t want to do PPE because I thought economics was completely irrelevant to the world. So, actually, I very quickly realised I wasn’t going to make it in sports journalism. There were a couple of reasons — this is like ten years ago now, so it’s probably much more common now to have female football writers, to see women on TV as pundits and commentators — they’re often ex-players, or just great sports journalists — but at that time there wasn’t really anyone I could think of where I was like, I want to be a bit like that person.
Everyone was like — I know we spoke about Tim Winter, but his brother Henry was, at that point, the chief sports writer of the Telegraph — he’s the doyen of football journalism.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Don’t know who Dwayne is — is that a sports person?
Mehreen Khan: He’s the pinnacle of serious mainstream sports journalism. So I’ve got Tim on one hand, my spiritual guide, and his brother Henry as my career path. And actually, I end up not taking that path, because I found it difficult how people reacted to me in the space — I was a young, non-white woman in a still very traditional part of journalism, sports journalism, dominated by these quite patrician figures. People would just look at me strangely when I turned up in the press box — not my colleagues at the Telegraph, they were all brilliant, but everyone else. And I was like, I know my stuff, why are people assuming I’m some kind of DEI candidate or something? So I actually just found it difficult to have to keep proving myself. I also didn’t find it very intellectually challenging — I realised sport was my escape from the world, so if it became my job, that became much more difficult.
So, quite early on, I told my editors this probably wasn’t going to be for me, and they were fantastically supportive — they said, we will support you, we’ll give you everything you want, we want you to have a voice and develop your voice in the paper and online. They were absolutely great. And I turned around and said, I think I’ve got to do something else, guys — it’s not really you, it’s just not the dream I thought it was. So it was a mixture of a bit of sexism, a bit of — you can’t disentangle the “isms,” is it chauvinism, ageism, racism, sexism — there was just a feeling of it being a little bit frosty.
And so I flipped into financial journalism, which was also quite natural to me, because I’d spent a couple of years at university trying to understand the state of the world and why banks were going down — how the economy works, the intersection between politics and economics. And at that point the Eurozone debt crisis was going on, so it’s a very political story about the economy, which is kind of my sweet spot — it’s what I love doing. And they were a great enough paper that developed me and allowed me to learn on the job. So, to some degree, I never looked back. It’s kind of an accidental route into financial journalism — most financial journalists end up there by accident. But after the great financial crisis, financial journalism became a quite sexy form of journalism — people like Paul Mason and Robert Peston became household names, because they’re explaining to us whether or not we should be queuing up outside the ATM, or what’s going to happen to Greece, are we going to bail this country out — it’s all very high politics, high drama. So I fall into financial journalism at a time when it’s the big story of the late 2010s, and I like being where the action is.
Elizabeth Oldfield: The language I use for this kind of stuff is “vocation.” I think of what I do as a vocation — not everyone’s comfortable with it, but I get the impression, whether you use that word or not, that you have a quite high view of what journalism is and can be. Can you say what you’re trying to do, and why, when you’re doing great journalism?
Mehreen Khan: So I have both a high and a very low view of journalism. Going back to younger me — reading a lot, I used to read newspapers in the library, I’d read The Guardian, and I also watched TV — I knew very early on about the power of this medium to shape narratives. And at that point, I felt myself as a victim of the narrative. We have a kind of established right-wing press in this country, and I described the demonisation of Muslims after 9/11 — it’s primarily happening through the media. Even before 9/11, I remember asylum seekers and refugees being a thing in the late ’90s, when this country was probably accepting refugees from places like Kosovo and Bosnia. I remember being so brainwashed by the media that when people used the phrase “ethnic cleansing,” I thought it was a good thing, because I associated “ethnic” with being bad — because “ethnic” was a slur. So I was like, well, if you clean people of their ethnicity, that’s clearly — to juxtapose those two words felt like a good thing to me, it was a purity thing.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Oh, it’s making my hair stand up.
Mehreen Khan: That was the degree to which a younger me was exposed to the discourse of the media, without really understanding what was going on. And so I went into the sausage-making, because I knew the power of the sausage-making, and I knew how powerfully, horribly toxic media can be. So I’m not in there with this highfalutin idea about the fourth estate — I’m like, you guys have been on the other end of me, you’ve otherised me, my people, my race, my religion, and now I want to see how it’s done. So I’m going into newsrooms with my back up, because I understand the power of the media, and how powerfully it can make a hostile environment for people who don’t have a voice. So I understand the power of the voice, and the voiceless.
That’s my view of journalism — I’m going in like, okay, these guys are important. I didn’t know any journalists, I’d never met a journalist, until I went to Oxford, where everyone’s dad’s running — the editor of The Times or something, it’s bizarre — and you realise, oh, it’s actually quite a closed world, a lot of nepotism, it’s a kind of job for people who have wealth, because it’s not going to pay you very well, so it’s like a luxury industry. So I’m learning all the socioeconomic dynamics of what British journalism is — both broadcast and print — it’s all Oxbridgey, all very elite, and I’m like, of course you don’t know how to tell my story, look at you, you’ve never met someone like me before, of course I’m alien, of course I’m other, of course I’m scary — in the same way I am to my teachers.
So that’s the — I go into journalism thinking, you guys are at the top. I’m going to get into the machine, I’m going to change it from the inside, let’s redo the sausage-making — halal sausage. That’s what we’re doing, we’re going to change it up. So I’m actually very ambitious about my ability to change narratives in journalism. And now that I’ve done this for nearly ten years, when I think about journalism, and the value of it, and how I marry it with my Islamic faith, I’ve really attached myself to the idea that when journalism is doing its job properly, we are bearing witness to what’s happening in the world.
When you become a Muslim, the first words you say are ash-hadu, “I bear witness” — and then you go on to say, I bear witness that there’s one God, and Muhammad is a messenger. But the act of bearing witness, to me, is a fundamentally moral behaviour, and it has a moral value. So when I put on my highfalutin fourth-estate hat for journalism, my bar for why this job is important is that I’m bearing witness to a truth, and I’m doing my best, in the act of bearing witness, to have fealty to something I see or hear, and then to transmit it and show it to the world. That’s the complete other end of how I’ve reconciled myself to an industry I still, to this day, find difficult to be in, to be around, and to call my tribe.
And I’ve also learned — people might say this is just me coping — that being a person of faith makes the act of bearing witness much easier. Because when you bear witness, there’s already a distance you’re attaching to whatever it is you’re bearing witness to. I’ve told this story before, but when I got serious jobs at serious newspapers, I really attracted a lot of — some of my editors said bizarre things to me. One of them, I’ll never forget — a very senior person at a very serious newspaper — basically said to me that I wasn’t qualified to do what I do, because I believe in God, and therefore have no objective grasp on reality. And I was in my mid-twenties — I think Richard Dawkins has said this about people like Mehdi Hasan, that you can’t possibly be a good journalist if you believe that Muhammad sat on a horse and went up to the skies in Jerusalem — you’re clearly some delusional, mentally ill person, how are you ever going to tell us what’s happening in the White House?
Elizabeth Oldfield: I got it at the BBC.
Mehreen Khan: Oh, exactly.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Working on The Moral Maze — people being like — it was slightly softened, I think, because I’m Christian and white and the signifiers are slightly different — but a very senior presenter at the BBC was like, I don’t understand how you can be this intelligent in all the other areas, and so delusional in this one.
Mehreen Khan: Yeah, that’s the one. I was like, are you trying to — I can’t tell what’s happening here. That’s a really common thing you get. So I flip it on people and say, because “I’m delusional” is one thing — that’s what makes me so good at all the other things, because I can see things differently.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Yes. And so, what’s the danger of journalism, what are the pitfalls?
Mehreen Khan: One, you get too close to your sources. You get too seduced by the proximity to power and wealth, and that means you become part of the circle — journalists see themselves as an extension of the elites they’re writing about, the political elites, the business elites, the financial elites, the global elites. They see themselves in the same milieu. So outsider-ness keeps you very honest. And being a Muslim, you have this constant feeling that the dunya — that this world is temporary. This is reality now, but there’s something everlasting and eternal, and that’s the afterlife.
So I now tell young kids who are Muslims and want to become journalists — the first thing they say to me is, I don’t know if I’m going to be able to handle the newsroom, I don’t know if I’ll be able to deal with the Islamophobic narratives, I don’t know how I’m going to write stories I’m uncomfortable with morally. And I say, yeah, you’re going to have to go through all of that, but ultimately, the reason you’re probably going to be a better journalist than anyone else in that newsroom is that you already have this kind of superpower — this outsider superpower that will make you honest, keep you honest and objective, and hopefully mean you don’t fall into the traps of the seduction of power and wealth. So I say being religious and being in journalism marries really well — I think it’s a superpower in the kind of job I do.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Because you’re in at least two significantly influential, powerful worlds, right? You’re the youngest ever, we think, Economics Editor of The Times.
Mehreen Khan: Yeah, but that’s because people who have this job title are usually super old.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Yeah, but it’s still a thing.
Mehreen Khan: I think I was thirty-two when I got the job.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Yeah, but you’re definitely the first woman at The Times.
Mehreen Khan: First woman, first person of colour, as far as we know.
Elizabeth Oldfield: For sure, definitely. Spending a load of time in places like Davos — you’re at the peak of the elite media world and the peak of the elite economics world.
I interviewed Sam Bowman recently, who’s an economist, a policy guy at the Adam Smith Institute — we had a lovely conversation, he’s a lovely guy, and I think we really differ, because I think he thinks economics is sort of morally neutral, and you just have to make the pot bigger and then give people freedom to spend the pot however they want to spend it. My guess is you don’t think that. And I’d love to know what values you see at play in these places where you’re spending time — particularly, what are the values driving the economic system, for dunces like me who don’t really understand it?
Mehreen Khan: Nothing, to me, is morally neutral. I’m going to put out my metaphysical worldview — that all human activity, decisions we make, activities we do, how we structure societies — we can either decide to accept that they should be moral enterprises, or we can say they’re not moral enterprises at all.
As somebody that — I’m going to use a scary word — the word is Sharia. What is the Sharia? It’s how people describe Islamic law, but it’s much bigger than that — the Sharia is a system and a framework in which every part of your lived reality has to be infused with a morality that’s derived from the divine. I live that life in my personal life, but I also apply it to everything, including economics. When people like Sam say economics should be a morally neutral sphere, they’ve already made a moral decision — to separate the fact from the value, the “is” from the “ought,” which Hume famously does, as the founding philosopher of the Enlightenment.
I rely on other thinkers who say that the defining feature of modernity is the separation of the is and the ought, the fact and the value. What I’m trying to do is marry those things together — I think the ought should never be secondary to the is, they’re one and the same. I think it’s just impossible to live — it’s an illusion — that there’s a kind of neutral reality that isn’t oriented to the good, or away from the good, at any time. I think money is key to that.
But I feel unusual for seeing how clearly economics seems moral to me. If we think back to the founding fathers of modern economics in the West — people like Adam Smith — Adam Smith is a moral philosopher. The book I feel everyone should read is called The Theory of Moral Sentiments, where he talks about why, as human beings — and he’s not referring to the divine — but he’s constantly talking about what it is about us that makes us want to exchange with each other, cooperate with each other, what it is about human nature. And the funny thing about Adam Smith is that a lot of his ideas, which we now associate with the free market and capitalism, are already present in tenth- and eleventh-century Islamic philosophers.
Smith comes up with the idea of the pin factory — that we should all specialise in little things, because when we work together we can create beautiful things. All of that is there, and thinkers like al-Ghazali talk about the needle factory. But the Islamic philosophers are thinking about it as a system that has to be suffused with something of the divine.
And so I’ve made myself even more unpopular recently, having already been someone trying to fight anti-Muslim racism — I’m now thinking really about how Islam did a version of capitalism that was suffused with morality. This has made me very unpopular with people — I’d say my friends on the left think I’m Islam-washing capitalism, that we need to abandon capitalism and embrace something much more radical, part of social justice — so why am I putting a religious veneer on capitalism? And the reason I’m not doing that is: economics, at its core and its essence — if it’s about exchange, profit, private property — these are elements which are, to me, divinely ordained.
So, as Muslims, for example, the notion of ownership, of private property at all, is a little bit difficult, because ultimately God tells us we are custodians of everything we have — we’re custodians of the earth, and all the wealth we may have in this life is part of the benevolence of God, through his rizq, he’s decided to gift this to you, and how you handle this wealth is a test of your character. So, whereas Hume and Smith speak about private property as part of individual liberty, as part of your rights as a human being, that’s also present in Islam, but with the additional factor that it’s been given to you by God, and you’re a custodian of the private property.
And profit — Islam has no problem, traditionally, with people making profit, as long as the means by which that profit is earned is just, and what you do with that profit. Do you use it to distribute it to help the poor? Do you use it to create institutions of wealth that will go on to help the poor? Are you sharing that wealth and that profit? As long as the notion of profit in and of itself is fine, because there’s a morality attached to what you do with the thing.
So economics, to me, is far from a neutral sphere. And the fact that we’ve decided it’s neutral explains to me why we live in this hyper-capitalist, neoliberal age, where we’ve decided to take all morality out of profit, decided to attach no moral value to things like property, and decided that we, as people, can use and abuse this earth, which we’re custodians of, in the advancement of wealth.
So if there’s a bigger project I’d like to achieve somehow, God willing, I want to bring back the moral elements of money, the moral elements of economic activity, and understand how we’ve got to this deracinated version of capitalism we live in now — was there a time when we were doing this suffused with a moral ethic, and people like Smith are actually much closer to that than we are in the twenty-first century, having created this anonymised place where the state supposedly shouldn’t exist — although it really does exist.
Elizabeth Oldfield: It very much does exist — state power exists, monopolies exist, exploitation exists.
Mehreen Khan: Being it right now, right? The world economy is grinding to a halt because of state actions. And the prioritisation of the profit motive and shareholder wealth — all of these things have become the thing we strive for, rather than: what does it mean to live a good life? What does it mean to have a balanced economy? What does it mean to provide for people? What should the relationship between private and public actors be? These are all moral questions for me. And economics, having become a science, has been a way to strip it of all morality, to mathematise it, to create models and say this is how humans behave — and we all know it doesn’t even pass the eye test, we all know it’s complete rubbish.
So now you probably ask me, well, do you do any of this in your day job? Actually, probably not, but it’s something I’ve really started to think about seriously, as an intellectual enterprise — let’s not throw the capitalist baby out with the bathwater. We probably used to do this much better, in a way, than we do now. Let’s bring the is and the ought back to economics.
Elizabeth Oldfield: I was going to say, it feels like at the moment you’re reporting on the is, and your book is like, what could this be? I’m really excited to read it.
You said, in passing, “people hate me even more” — and I do want to talk to you about unpopularity in public. Listening to some of your old interviews, you said you really liked it when people got annoyed with you, and you had this Scrappy-Doo energy — I think you need a bit of that to write in public, because people are going to disagree with you, and rudely, sometimes cruelly. But you said you’re finding it more difficult now. Could you say a little more about what was going on when you were enjoying it, and what shifted, that’s making it harder?
Mehreen Khan: So I’ve probably changed my mind in the last four or five years. I think when I was enjoying the scrap, it’s because I was in it — if someone comes at me on social media, I’m going to come straight back at you, I’m going to provoke people. And often it’s basically racist — but often, actually, I’d be going after good people too. My whole thing was hitting liberals and saying, you need to be better, I need you to be better, stop acquiescing to bad stuff, there are bad people around, we need to fight it.
Now, in the 2020s, it seems obvious we’ve maybe ceded so much of the narrative to uglier people that part of me is like — well, I hate to say I told you so — and also, I’ve decided, I’ve tried, I’ve stopped scrapping, so I’m not really fighting any more. I’ll describe the process as trying to actively go through ego death, because when I was doing that, I was doing it out of ego — out of some degree of amour propre, self-love. In Arabic it’s called the nafs.
Elizabeth Oldfield: The nafs. What a great word.
Mehreen Khan: Yeah, the nafs — the id, maybe. Defending your sense of self. And also, I was doing it because it was probably doing something to my brain chemistry, right, a little dopamine hit — I was online, I was too online. This is also partly COVID and other things. And I’m fighting, and I’m scrapping, and I’ve got a righteous cause, I’m going after powerful people and accusing them of X, Y, Z, and saying you’re wrong, how dare you be this awful. So I’m driven by a moral righteousness. But what I learned was that what I was also doing, if I really looked into myself, was doing because it made me feel good, and made me feel powerful, and made me feel important.
Through various professional incidents I’ve been through, I’ve realised that what I was doing was showing off — my nafs was showing off, it was arrogance. So I’ve stopped scrapping, and I’ve tried to go through this process of ego death, where I’m trying to embrace, as radically as possible, a degree of self-effacement and true modesty, by taking myself out of the question — not putting myself front and centre, not being the voice, not being the tweeter, not being the provocateur — and actually spending more time doing deeper thinking and analysing, understanding that my job, my role, is probably to educate people in a way where the tone is better, and to engage with people and educate them in a way that doesn’t get their backs up.
And so now what I’m struggling with is that when people come at me with the ferocity they always did, I now find it much more upsetting.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Right — now it bothers you more.
Mehreen Khan: Because their anger is a defence, right, it’s like armour. And also, their anger is because of the way I think the internet’s changed, and the algorithms have changed, in the last four or five years, and how Muslims have been perceived in the last couple of years. Now I realise — I always realise — my very existence is going to be a problem for people. That my name is a problem for people, the colour of my skin, the fact that I even have the temerity, as someone who works at a serious newspaper, to talk about her religious belief, which is not a Christian religious belief — the fact that I can even do that is already beyond the pale for people. And so now, even though I’ve decided to change my approach to being constructive, the actual world I’m living in — the temperature’s been dialled up so much — maybe I’m doing a little bit of what I did as a teenager, backing out from the fight and trying to really interrogate myself, what I believe and why I believe it.
And actually, the good thing about it is that I feel much more connected to my faith with this posture, which is not about scrapping, and much more about reflecting, and trying to come up — I’m going to lean on: you need to come back with something better. When somebody hits you with ferocity, with anger, with fear, with hate, you need to come back at them with something better. Be better, be more civil, be softer, be more intellectual, think harder, be rigorous — come back with something better, and you will soften those people’s hearts, even if it’s just one person, that’s better than nothing.
So now I’m surrounded by barrages of hate, and my approach is just not to match them with barrages of hate and anger, because it’s really very deleterious for your mental health — it’s a very lonely place to be, I’ve been there, and it’s just not a nice place to be. So now, for me, my Muslimness is much more about giving me a degree of more cerebral engagement with what it means to be hated, to have your faith demonised, to have every part of Muslimness in public life be a lightning rod. But now we say things like, “we don’t want you in this country any more” — that didn’t really happen, not even in the 9/11 era, where it was kind of the securitisation of Islam. Now it’s like, you, your thoughts, your hinterland, your intellectual heritage, is a threat to the way that we live, and we’ve decided we’re not going to tolerate it any more.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Which is tragic and ironic on all manner of levels — not least because I think I’ve heard you speak and write about Britishness, about your sense of yourself as British. Would you say?
Mehreen Khan: Yeah.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Tell me more about that — why does it feel so key to you? It’s almost presumptuous to even ask the question, because why would it be — but I almost feel like you have a more articulate commitment to it than I do, even though we were both born here, and both have heritage.
Mehreen Khan: I am so painfully British that it annoys me. My sense of humour is very British — I’m sarcastic, extremely dry, I take the piss out of people to show them that I love them. And that’s the one thing non-Brits don’t get — I’m horrible to you.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Yeah, that’s affection.
Mehreen Khan: Yeah, not because I’m horrible, because I don’t like you — because I do like you, because we’re so repressed. So I embrace all of that repression — this posture, this willingness to push back, to say no, to push the boundaries, where my South Asian parents would be like, shut up, get your head down, get through life, don’t attract attention to yourself. I’m like, no, I am going to. I have some truth. The fact that I love duking it out with people — this country and its mores have shaped me, and I’m actually so aligned and matched with the other parts of me, my religious beliefs, my heritage.
Let’s be honest — hundreds of years of my ancestors were subjects of the British Raj. It’s only in the last couple of generations that we get to call ourselves citizens — no longer of empire, but of Britain. So this country, and the way it does things, has had an imprint on my genealogy for hundreds of years — I haven’t really come out of nowhere, I’m locked into this British thing, whether I like it or not. And I don’t apologise for it, and I’m not squeamish about my Britishness. When I go to America, I’m the most British person you’ve ever met — I ham it up to the nth degree.
Elizabeth Oldfield: So when you look to the future, for where we are at this moment in this country, and particularly how we’re navigating a Muslim population and the discourse around it — what do you see unfolding?
Mehreen Khan: So, maybe I’m going to turn this back on you now — I’m really interested in how Christianity is developing a political identity that Islam went through when I was younger, but it’s also most obviously happened in the United States over the last twenty or thirty years. Now, in a way, there’s a lot of good that can come from this, because I think if we’re going to think about Christianity as part of the moral fibre and fabric of this country, I would really welcome that as a Muslim.
I’m speaking to you a day or two after the Pope visited Algeria — honestly, these beautiful images of the two men, the grand imam of Algiers, walking into a mosque, the Pope being handed something special, he went to the place where Aquinas used to meditate, and there’s still, I think, a tree or a plant that exists from the time of Aquinas. Understanding this monotheistic heritage that we share is something I’m going to take — honestly, I’m going to take the win, I’m going to take the opportunity.
Right now, it’s really not going in a great direction, if we think about who are the loudest proponents of the re-Christianisation of Britain — they want to take it in a direction that’s exclusionary, not inclusive of other monotheisms, and for them, Islam is obviously the other, it’s inherently anti-Christian. They’re defining some of their Christian identity against Islam being the thing they’re opposed to, rather than, say, secularism or liberalism — but I think it’s all kind of tied together.
So this is a new and important development for me as a monotheist in Britain. I’ve always said, and I think maybe other people have said this to you — I always feel very sorry for my Christian friends in Britain. One anecdote: I have never been called a God-botherer by anyone in my life. The only people I know who are called God-botherers are my Christian friends, and I’m like, what is this horrible phrase, “God-botherer”? I know journalists who are Christian, but they don’t talk about it, they’re scared to tell anyone, and I’m like, dude, this is a safe space, we can talk about God together, me and you.
I think maybe the otherness of being a Muslim, or being exotic and foreign, is that I’m allowed to have this bizarre religious belief, whereas my white Anglo Christian friends are not allowed to actually believe in God, because they’re excommunicated from serious life because of it. So if I’m going to take it upon myself, let’s help Christians be Christian again, and not insult them — and yeah, we can be intellectual, we can be serious people, and still believe in the Christian God.
So I’m actually welcoming the fact that Christianity is, to some degree, being revived as a political and moral ideology, because ultimately I’m kind of in this with the Christians. And even though there will be lots of people taking this discourse in a bad way, I’m seeing my secular, liberal, slightly agnostic friends bizarrely coming to understand Christianity as a moral anchor, to help them navigate a world they find dangerous and in flux. So I’m really latching on to why this can be positive.
Now, you might tell me I’m completely misguided, because my understanding of what’s happening in Britain is probably too naive. But I really want — I’m asking Muslims, and I want Muslims to understand the changes happening in this country, and for us to try to be at the vanguard of making sure we don’t just submit ourselves to being the other in this debate, that we help people understand our Christianity too, our love for Jesus as a prophet. I always tell my friends there are more people in my family named after Jesus than after Muhammad — there are more Isas in my extended family than Muhammads — because Isa is a very traditional, very fashionable name, and because we love Isa, we love Jesus. He’s a very important figure in our monotheism — we believe he’s going to be resurrected, we believe he’s going to come back, we believe in the Antichrist.
So if more people are trying to understand why they’re Christian — I hope, a bit like when people decide they don’t like Islam and then start looking into Islam and realise it’s actually not what they say — if more people can do that about Christianity, I think maybe we can settle somewhere better than rabid secularism, which is fundamentally the thing I’m uncomfortable with, I think.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Mehreen Khan, I could talk to you for another hour, but we’re going to honour your time. Thank you so much for being a guest on The Sacred.
Mehreen Khan: Thank you for having me.
Elizabeth Oldfield: I’m going to carry with me forever this picture of Mehreen as a punk brown Matilda — the picture of her really responding to the 9/11 moment, to her sense of how dangerous it was to be a Muslim in the world at that really tender age, and responding to it not by being cowed, but by being scrappy. Really scrappy, to the point that her parents and her school got really worried — actually, I think maybe they thought she was radicalising.
That sense of — that period was so profoundly formative for so many Muslims, that something had happened far away, and then their very identity, their sense of self and their community, was in the spotlight in this way, with people responding to them with such fear and hatred. And when we experience what we perceive to be fear and hatred from others, it can’t help but be psychologically formative. And the phrase that really struck me was imagining little Mehreen asking, “Mum, are we in danger, are people going to try and kill us because we’re Muslims?” And how Muslims experience that, gay people experience that, black people experience that, Christians in some parts of the world experience that, Jews feel it in many, many places where they live. And for those of us who haven’t carried that, who haven’t known what it feels like for something you can’t help about yourself, or that people are seeing in you, to put you and your family and your community in danger — I just don’t want to underestimate that experience, and I want to really listen to it with some humility.
And then I loved the self-awareness of someone who has moved through that completely understandable, spiky, scrappy season into this really grounded-seeming spiritual understanding of what Islam is — not a kind of identitarian project, but a spiritual path that helps you find some stability, some steadiness, even some ability, as she was speaking about, to respond to your critics with grace — or, in my tradition, we’d talk about turning the other cheek.
The interview really reminded me of a conversation I had with Jameela Jamil, who also talked about having a lot of that Scrappy-Doo energy — if you know the Enneagram, it’s the kind of Enneagram Eight energy, of people who really don’t care what other people think about them, who quite like to rise to an argument. I wonder if you’ve got people like this in your life — it can be very entertaining and energising, and quite difficult to be around. And to have noticed that in herself, and then gone, is this actually effective? For Mehreen to be able to say, what is my job, is it to educate people? And if I respond to hatred and critique with hatred and critique, is anything actually going to change? There was just a really inspiring maturity and self-awareness — she talked about ego death, right, it is soul work. It relates to this whole wider project of how we engage with people who are different from us, or who disagree with us — are we just going to eye-for-an-eye them, are we going to attack them back, are we going to run away, or are we going to find a way to do something more generative and disruptive? That’s what I really see her pointing us towards.
And then, maybe the last thing, is her really robust sense of her Britishness, in a time when someone like Tommy Robinson would want to question that — I really loved that. And her call — actually, she was echoing something Satnam Sanghera said to me — that there’s this sense that if you’re a religious person in public and you’re not white, people have different categories and boxes to put you in. That comes with all its own challenges, but one of the things it gives you is slightly more permission to be religious. And her call to Christians is to be more public about their faith, that she sees Christians and Muslims as being on the same team, having more in common, perhaps, than people who aren’t religious or don’t believe in God — and that she likes it when Christians are really proud of their heritage and their faith in public. It was just a really lovely, hopeful, unexpected perspective from her, that I think we probably need to hear right now.
