White thugs dump parcels of excrement on their porch and Zara cowers under the kitchen table, too scared to answer the door. The racists have mounted a mass demonstration, supported by the cops, which causes local bus services to be cancelled.

Every Muslim in town is terrified of a white vigilante gang who recently targeted a blameless Yemeni pensioner and kicked him to death. It gets worse. Zara and her daughter, Sofia, join a peaceful counter-demonstration, but the heavy-handed cops arrest ten innocent Muslims and charge them with violent disorder. Meanwhile, the white thugs are free to scrawl ‘Rape capital of the UK’ across the side of the local mosque. Then they burn it to the ground.

The useless cops arrest three of the white rioters as a token gesture. This vision of a Britain where law-abiding Muslims are hunted in the streets while English vigilantes commit arson and murder with impunity may not reflect the facts on the ground. But this is how a Muslim dramatist sees our society and she deserves attention. Her play is very easy to follow because her stiff, simplistic characters keep making clunky speeches that explain the over-elaborate plot in minute detail.  

Sofia tells her mum she won’t apply to university because academia is full of right-wing extremists. ‘A black man was stopped and searched on his way into uni. And he was a lecturer,’ she says quoting an unnamed internet source. Instead she joins ‘New Dawn’, a charity that confronts negative Muslim stereotypes in the press. The central character is Raheel’s aunt, Yazmin, who was forced into hiding after being condemned as a ‘stella’ (a Muslim apostate who enjoys alcohol).

Yazmin has returned to help the beleaguered family by investigating Raheel’s exposure as a rape suspect in the media. She discovers that Zara befriended a notorious child-abuser named Sajid and paid him to refit her kitchen where he raped young white girls (and some Muslim girls too).

At this point, a survivor enters. Jade Steel is a local woman who seems to have forgotten the trauma of being molested by Sajid as a child. She adores Raheel and his mum because they gave her food when she was hungry and she doesn’t care that she was abused numerous times in their home. Oh, hang on. There’s one more detail. Jade has signed a publishing deal and is due to write a book about the affair.