A sense of belonging

The school of hard knocks has helped Adeeba Malik be the driving force behindthe integration of Muslims into British life. Grant Woodward meets her.
Adeeba  Malik, deputy chief executive of QED in Bradford. Picture Bruce RollinsonAdeeba  Malik, deputy chief executive of QED in Bradford. Picture Bruce Rollinson
Adeeba Malik, deputy chief executive of QED in Bradford. Picture Bruce Rollinson

ADEEBA Malik is a woman of substance. Warm, engaging and open, her easy manner belies a steeliness that glints occasionally from beneath the surface. During the course of a remarkable life, she has needed it.

Bullied mercilessly at her Bradford primary school by a gang of pupils who subjected her to a daily torrent of racist abuse, one day she snapped, dishing out a physical retaliation that landed her in hot water but won the respect of her classmates.

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Some years later, her first posting as a rookie teacher took her to the Bransholme and Orchard Park estates in Hull, two areas with fearsome reputations.

To her young charges – and their parents – she may as well have just beamed down from another planet. Yet where others would have crumbled, she turned the culture clash into an experience that enriched her life and, she likes to think, the lives of her pupils. They acknowledged the differences between them, whilst also finding a great deal of common ground.

Her teaching career would prove short-lived, however. Within two years she had joined QED, a fledgling organisation committed to improving the opportunities for ethnic minorities, which was keen to tap into her capacity for inspiring those around her.

“I learned a lot at school, even though I wasn’t academically very bright,” says Malik with undue modesty. “But there are some things education doesn’t teach you, life skills you pick up along the way. I was tough – and that got me through a lot.”

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She recently heard a motto she likes: Deprivation and demography don’t determine destiny. On that score, she is living proof. Her inner strength was fuelled by her parents. Her late father taught himself English sitting under a street light in the Pakistani city of Sialkot, nestled at the foothills of the snow-covered peaks of Kashmir.

Having emigrated to Bradford in the 1950s, he proceeded to work around the clock at a local mill so he could send three of his four children to Bradford Grammar School. Adeeba was the odd one out, but there was never any danger of it holding her back.

Her role at QED, where she is now deputy chief executive, has been the springboard to all manner of roles. She spent six years on the board of regional development agency Yorkshire Forward as well as – among other things – becoming a governor of Sheffield Hallam University, chairing the Ethnic Minority Business Forum for the Department of Trade and Industry and joining the board of the Waterways Trust.

In January this year came one of the biggest surprises of all – she was awarded a CBE, to go alongside an earlier MBE.

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“It was a shock, a complete shock,” she recalls. “I was at home and my mum was with me. I opened the letter and started trembling. My mum was quietly delighted – she’s not one for big expressions of emotion.

“It’s incredibly humbling and I just feel extremely lucky. Everybody works hard but some people get acknowledgement for it. The CBE is not mine, it belongs to a lot of people.”

We are sitting in the offices of QED in Bradford, which along with founder Mohammed Ali, she has helped to grow into one of the most influential organisations of its kind in the UK.

From humble beginnings in 1990 it is now the country’s leading ethnic minority-focused education, employment and training provider.

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Throughout her 25 years of campaigning for ethnic minorities to play mainstream roles in all walks of British life, Malik has led by example. She is convinced the route which worked for her can serve other Muslims just as well.

“I really do think education holds the key,” she says. “My dad had great vision, he knew education was critical for his kids. What upsets me is that I still live in a city where educational attainment is way below the national average.

“When people talk about deprivation, the make-up of the communities, language issues... these things don’t make any difference to London, Manchester and Birmingham. It comes down to leadership in schools, as well as parents. They can’t just leave it to the teachers.

“The standard of education and training has to improve because that’s how you get businesses to want to invest in somewhere like Bradford. Places like Sheffield have been very good at that, we need to get better.”

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Malik is full of impassioned optimism, which falters only when talk turns to how Britain has changed in the 10 years since the July 7 bombings.

She was at Kings Cross on that fateful morning and still shudders at the memory of the wail of sirens, the chaos and confusion.

She remembers too the sense of disbelief that the London bombers had been born and bred in Yorkshire. Dismissing, with characteristic bluntness, the architects of such terror as “bloody nutters”, she nevertheless believes it is time for Britain to ask itself some tough questions.

“It’s not just (the terror attacks) or Isis,” she insists. “A lot of things have set us back. It’s a culmination of events and it doesn’t seem to stop. You meet people who say it’s so and so’s fault, we shouldn’t have gone to war and so on... you could spend all day doing that.

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“I don’t have the answer but we need to look at what sends people over that tipping point. Is it something they have seen on the internet? Was it being called a ‘Paki’ in the street? We need to have that debate.”

At the heart of it, she maintains, is the question of identity. Malik feels strongly it’s time we stopped being so hung up on it.

“I know that whenever I go to Pakistan I realise how lucky I’ve been to be born in this country, because it really is one of the best in the world. But I think the identity question frustrates young people who are made to feel that somehow they can’t be British as well as Muslim.

“Identity can depend on lots of things. When I’m in London I’m a Yorkshire woman telling them they should get themselves up North. When the SNP lot are at Westminster they’re far more Scottish than they are when they are up in Scotland.

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“But when we talk about anger, it’s people sometimes not feeling they are being accepted into a society that they were born and brought up in. That’s something we need to address.

“I still fundamentally believe that if we can get the economic and social integration right in our communities then that will make a huge difference.

“It’s about people getting a good education and having the opportunities to succeed in their careers so that they can earn a decent wage to spend on themselves and their families.”

If anything, the last decade has made QED’s work promoting understanding and breaking down prejudices more important than ever.

There is no question that creating lasting change will continue to be tough, but, as ever, Adeeba Malik is more than up for the fight.

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