I am British. I am Bangladeshi. I am Muslim. I am a teacher. But above all, I am human.

A moment that changed how I understood safety

On a summer afternoon in Surrey, my family and I were driving towards the hills for what should have been an ordinary day out. Without warning, two young men on bikes came up to the car, spat first at me and then at my daughter, and shouted, “Go back to your country… you bloody terrorists.” For several minutes afterwards, we could not speak. Then my daughter quietly asked, “Have we just realised what happened to us?” That moment has stayed with me ever since - not only because of the hatred it revealed, but because of how quickly it reduced a family, a father and a child into a stereotype. 

What that moment taught me is that anti-Muslim hate does not confine itself to one setting. It is not limited to the street, or to places we assume are less safe. It can surface anywhere - in neighbourhoods associated with security and aspiration, in professional environments and in institutions that are deeply committed to equality and inclusion. Sometimes it is overt. Sometimes it arrives more quietly, through implication, assumption or a look that tells you exactly how you have been read. But whether it is shouted at you from a bicycle or communicated in subtler ways, the effect is often the same: your contribution, your character and your humanity are collapsed into a stereotype. Higher education is not immune from that wider social reality. In some ways, our campuses can reproduce it in forms that are harder to name precisely because they are less visible, more procedural and easier to dismiss.

The quieter forms of anti-Muslim hate in higher education

In higher education, anti-Muslim hate is often less visible and therefore easier to overlook. Some of the most corrosive experiences are not dramatic at all; they arrive as small acts of exclusion, moments of diminished belonging, or assumptions that signal you are somehow out of place. I remember attending a reception early in my academic career, following a PhD seminar, and hearing a voice call across the room: “Who are you?” At first, I did not realise the question was directed at me. Then it came again, louder, until the room fell silent. I introduced myself: “I am Osama Khan. I am a lecturer.” There was no apology and no acknowledgement. It took me years to recognise that this was not curiosity; it was exclusion. These are the moments I think of not as micro-aggressions, but as micro-incivilities or micro-indignities - the small, cumulative signals that tell someone they do not quite belong. They may seem minor to others, but they are rarely forgotten by those who experience them. 

I think too of a brilliant PhD student, a British Muslim woman who wore a hijab, who won a prestigious research award at a national event hosted by one of the Royal Academies. When she was congratulated, she was told: “You are very talented… given that thing on your head.” What stays with me about that moment is not only its cruelty, but its logic. Even excellence was not enough to escape assumption. That, too, is one of the quieter ways anti-Muslim hate operates in higher education - not always by denying talent outright, but by qualifying it, diminishing it, or treating it as surprising when it is attached to a visibly Muslim identity

Sometimes these failures happen in the very spaces where dignity should be most protected: our classrooms. I think of one Muslim student, fasting during Ramadan during the long British summer days, who asked whether he could step out during a break because the length of the fast was affecting his concentration. Instead of understanding, he was met with public ridicule. In front of the class, he was asked whether he was “on drugs”. What made that moment so painful was not only the comment itself, but the fact that a student’s faith practice became a source of humiliation in a place that should have safeguarded his dignity. This was not simply an individual lapse in judgement. It revealed something more uncomfortable about institutional culture, confidence and empathy. Moments like this matter because they show whether our values are truly lived in everyday academic life, or only declared in policy statements and strategies. 

Why institutions can miss the problem

One reason anti-Muslim hate can remain under-recognised in higher education is that it does not always arrive in forms institutions find easy to name. It often appears not as a headline incident, but as assumption, diminished belonging or the steady accumulation of indignities that are easy to dismiss in isolation. Universities are generally more confident in acting on harms they have clear language and established categories to describe. Where experiences are absorbed into broad labels such as bullying, harassment or unacceptable behaviour, the specific patterns affecting Muslim staff and students can become harder to see, and therefore easier to miss. If institutions do not recognise these patterns clearly, they are much less likely to respond to them with confidence.

That difficulty matters because bias is not only cultural; it can become procedural. I have seen examples where Muslim students were subjected to heightened suspicion not because there was stronger evidence against them, but because assumptions shaped how that evidence was interpreted. In one setting, Muslim international students - particularly from the Middle East - were disproportionately referred for academic misconduct, even when prior attainment and English proficiency did not explain the pattern. What was especially revealing was that strong written work could itself become a cause for suspicion, as if excellence were somehow incompatible with Muslim identity. Excellence became grounds for doubt. If institutions are serious about tackling anti-Muslim hate, they must look not only at what is said in their communities, but at the decisions, thresholds and assumptions built into their systems. 

Leadership in contested times

These questions become even harder in periods of acute campus tension. One of the most difficult moments in my leadership came when global conflict was being lived, emotionally and politically, within the daily life of the university. In that context, I found myself listening at once to Muslim and Palestinian students and colleagues expressing anguish and moral urgency, and to Jewish students and leaders articulating fear, vulnerability and exclusion. What struck me was that these were not abstract positions; they were rooted in lived experiences of grief, identity and belonging. The task for leaders is not to erase difference or avoid difficulty, but to ensure that even in the most contested moments, belonging, dignity and fair judgement are not surrendered to the loudest voice or the simplest narrative. 

Why free speech and academic freedom matter

Universities exist to pursue knowledge through inquiry, disagreement and critique, and any serious commitment to inclusion has to sit within that wider mission. For that reason, addressing anti-Muslim hate cannot mean narrowing lawful debate or weakening academic freedom. There will be moments when scholarship or lawful expression touches deeply held convictions, including my own, but the test of an institution is whether it can protect that freedom while also protecting the dignity of those who may feel challenged by it. I may personally dislike certain forms of representation, but I must still defend the right of scholars to examine and teach difficult material within the law. For leaders, the harder task is to protect both - to defend free speech and academic freedom while also building a culture where people are not asked to give up their dignity in order to belong. If universities lose the confidence either to defend lawful academic inquiry or to challenge exclusion and intimidation, they will fail in both their educational mission and their inclusion responsibilities. 

Training matters - but it is not enough

Institutions do need training and confidence-building if they are to respond well to anti-Muslim hate, particularly where understanding is uneven or the language feels contested. But training becomes least effective when it is treated as the solution in itself, rather than as one part of a wider institutional response. Too often, it can become reactive or symbolic - a way of showing that something has been done while leaving untouched the deeper questions of culture, procedure, reporting and belonging. The strongest development I have seen does not rely on abstract compliance alone; it connects evidence of inequality with the lived experiences that give that evidence human meaning. If training is not linked to systems, reporting, policy and the voices of those most affected, it risks reassuring institutions without changing reality. What institutions need, then, is not simply more training, but a response that connects learning to policy, systems and lived experience. 

Three responsibilities of confident, inclusive leadership

When I reflect on these experiences, three things seem especially important to me. First, we have to see the problem clearly - not only in moments of overt abuse, but in the exclusions, assumptions and procedures that quietly shape people’s experience of belonging. Second, we have to act without fear or false balance, rather than waiting for perfect consensus or hiding behind generic responses. Third, we have to build institutions capable of holding belonging and debate together, so that academic freedom and lawful disagreement are protected without asking anyone to surrender their dignity. For me, all three responsibilities are rooted in a single principle: human dignity. If we lose sight of that, we will get both inclusion and the wider purpose of the university wrong.

Above all, we are human

I am British. I am Bangladeshi. I am Muslim. I am a teacher. These identities matter, and they shape how I move through the world. But they do not exhaust who I am, and they should never determine the worth that others assign to me or to anyone else who enters our campuses. For me, the real test of leadership is whether we can place human dignity at the centre of everything we do. If we can protect every voice, respect every life, and refuse to rank one person’s humanity above another’s, we will be closer to the values higher education so often claims to uphold. The moment we begin to rank human worth, we lose not only our claim to inclusion, but something more fundamental about what it means to be a university - and what it means to be human.