Naz Shah’s first memory is of her father buying her a huge bags of sweets. “I had the dad everyone wanted,” she says. Her second memory is of watching him beat up her mother. “I had to run across the road to the people who lived opposite when he was hitting her and they would come and stop it.”
When she was six, her father ran off with a neighbour’s daughter he used to drive to school, soon after the girl’s 16th birthday.
At 15, Ms Shah was forced into a marriage in rural Pakistan with a cousin who “used his fists” to communicate. Then, as she turned 18, her mother was convicted of the murder of an abusive partner who had oppressed her for years, having used arsenic to poison him.
This is the extraordinary life of Labour’s candidate for Bradford West, who will stand against George Galloway, the Respect party MP, on May 7. The Punch and Judy bust-ups of politics would seem easy in comparison with the violence she has suffered. “When you have experienced my kind of stuff, which has broken every taboo in your community, there’s not much that’s going to hurt you,” she says.
Ms Shah, who once worked in a laundry and a crisp factory, and is now chairwoman of a mental health charity, could not be further from the Westminster elite of professional politicians. Born and bred in Bradford, she still remembers the day her father left, abandoning her mother, Zoora, with two children and pregnant with her third. Bundled into the back of a taxi with all their belongings, the family went to live with her grandmother — “packed off for our own safety because my father had taken someone else’s daughter and honour is a big thing in our community”.
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They moved 14 times in under two years, each house more squalid than the last. “They were horrendous places with outside toilets. There was no central heating so we all slept in the living room as it was too cold upstairs. My brother and I both got tuberculosis. I was in hospital a lot.”
Her mother got a job as a cleaner, volunteering as a carer for the disabled in her spare time. “We would sometimes go with her to the cleaning jobs. I had to translate for her. I became an interpreter at the age of six. It did make me feel responsible.”
Although she didn’t see her father for years, she went to visit him when he was dying. “I couldn’t stop crying. It wasn’t because I had loved my dad, but because he was always betraying me.”
Her mother, ground down by “helplessness and hopelessness”, sold her wedding jewellery to buy a home, but could only get a mortgage with the help of a local drug dealer, Mohammed Azam. “He was the neighbour’s nephew. He bought us fruit. He was the knight in shining armour for her.”
Looking back, she realises how much pressure Zoora was under. “My uncles had said to her, ‘Give the kids away, they are only young, then you can remarry quickly’. She couldn’t do that, but she needed a man about the house. She was seen to have dishonoured her family when her husband left.”
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Before long, though, Azam turned violent and Naz was sent to live with relatives in Pakistan. “My mother wanted to protect me but I hated it there,” she says. “After a couple of months reality kicked in and I realised I couldn’t leave. Then the family wanted me to marry my first cousin.”
Arranged marriage did not come as a shock to her — “I was not raised to think that marriage was for love, it was just a practical thing” — but she felt emotional blackmail forcing her into the match. “My uncle said, if you do not marry my son, your mother will fall out with even more uncles and you don’t want that. It was a lot of pressure.”
Soon she returned to England with her new husband, but it was not long before they separated. “I left because he used his fist on me. I have permanent damage in one ear. My mum said, ‘Put up and shut up’. But I escaped.”
Her mother found it harder to flee her abuser. “Their relationship was a secret, no one could talk about it, he was a married man. He had all the power over her.” One day, though, Azam’s attitude changed and took a darker turn. “He indicated to my mum that he found my sister more attractive now,” Ms Shah says. “She thought she was at risk of abuse.”
To begin with Zoora gave him a small dose of arsenic. “She wanted to make him impotent, it worked for a bit but he became violent again and then she was at breaking point.” She got a larger dose of the poison from Pakistan and put it in his food. Although she was convicted of murder and jailed for 20 years, Ms Shah says the circumstances were misunderstood.
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“She was given all the blame, she had shamed the community, but she was a destitute woman whose family had nothing. She had no support or understanding . . . Women are seen as nurturers so when a woman deviates you punish her twice as much. The majority of women in prison have suffered some kind of abuse and when you punish the woman you are punishing the whole family.” Although they lost an appeal in 1998, the sentence was reduced and she was released eight years ago.
At 18, Ms Shah became responsible for her brother and sister, who were then 14 and 11.
Now she has three young children. Although she left school at 12, her life has given her an insight into some of the most crucial political issues of the day. She is not afraid to point the finger of blame at “Pakistani men” for grooming girls for sexual abuse in Rotherham, Rochdale, Oxford and Bradford. “They got away with it but they’re not going to get away with it any more.” In her view, there is a “patriarchal Pakistani culture” that has been handed down the generations. “Let’s be clear, it’s about a man not being able to control what he wants, it’s not about how women dress. Abuse happens whether you are covered in a hijab or a niquab or dressed in a miniskirt. It’s about the perpetrator.”
As a Muslim feminist, she says she feels “empowered” by Islam and she worries that her faith’s attitude to women has been misunderstood.
Although she does not wear a headscarf, she says: “Many younger woman have adopted the hijab because they find it liberating. My sister wore it last year. It changes the way people perceive you and the way people respond to you. To a Muslim man you’re more respectable, it’s not because you’re a victim. I’m liberal, I’m not tied to my kitchen sink but I love cooking, I loved being a housewife. Why can’t I enjoy both?”
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Having acted as an interpreter for her mother for years, she disagrees with those who say that speaking English is an essential part of being British. “People can live amongst each other with different identities and different languages because that’s the way the world is. I haven’t learnt to make Yorkshire puddings. I don’t expect you to learn how to make curry. That doesn’t mean we don’t get on or have shared values.”
Although she insists that Sharia is a “no-no for me”, she thinks those who insist on integration may be naive. “People naturally gravitate towards people who are similar to them,” she says. “Kids aren’t born with prejudice . . . but on his first day at [a C of E] school my seven-year-old said to me, ‘Mummy I want to be white and a Christian, my skin is too dark’.”
Britain should be more positive about Islam, she thinks. “We need to change our language and celebrate the things which are good about Muslims, not seeing women in hijabs as suppressed and oppressed. Charlie Hebdo really brought that to the fore. One of the greatest leaders ever to walk this earth was Muhammad but we don’t get that, it’s all Isis and Jihadi John.”
Although she thinks that Muslim communities need to do more to protect children at risk of radicalisation, such as the three runaway London schoolgirls feared to have gone to Syria, she says: “We have to have difficult conversations with communities and understand why they are the way they are, but we’re not going to do that if we keep them at arm’s length.”
Ms Shah voted for Mr Galloway when he stood in a by-election in 2012, but she says: “He let me down. He said he was going to change Bradford and he hasn’t.”
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There has, she admits, been a problem with what she calls “clan politics” in the city, but she wants a campaign that appeals to everyone rather than just community leaders who tell other people how to vote.
“We have had issues. There are clan politics, but clan politics are no different to the unions or any kind of clan,” she says. “You can talk about women as clans, I got selected with help from my feminist friends, we have common ground, that’s no different to here, people have common ground.”
Politics should never involve individuals “telling you which way to vote in your own home” or the dominance of “patriarchal” views, she insists. But loyalty is natural within a group. “It’s tribal politics. It can be geographical, points of interest, class, religion, anything. It’s no different to a girls’ network or an old boys’ network or old Etonians or the rotary club. In Bradford West I hope we can be inclusive.”
Although Barack Obama wrote Dreams from My Father, she says that becoming a parliamentary candidate is the dream of her mother. “I have given my mum her respect back. Just by getting selected. It has exonerated her. She can say, ‘This is what I’ve produced, she is a Labour candidate. My daughter could change the world’.”
Curriculum vitae
Born November 13, 1973
Educated Green Lane nursery and Waverley Middle school, in Bradford. She left when she was 12 and was sent to Pakistan
Career She worked at an industrial dry cleaners and packing crisps in a factory, before becoming a carer for children and adults with disabilities, becoming an NHS commissioner and director of a local government regional leadership programme. She served as a Samaritan and is now chairwoman of the mental health charity Sharing Voices Bradford.
Family She is divorced, with three children, aged 3, 7 and 10
Quick fire
Malala or Mandela? They both inspire me differently
Fight or flight? Flight
Selma or the Second Exotic Marigold Hotel? I don’t watch films
Big Brother or Top Gear? I don’t have time for TV
Tony Blair or Gordon Brown? Gordon Brown
Jane Austen or Virginia Woolf? I wouldn’t know the difference, I left school at 12
David Hockney or L S Lowry? I don’t know either of them
Guacamole or mushy peas? What is guacamole?