Shopping Mall Apologises After Requesting Giant Wall Mural Not Feature Islamic Veil

A Swedish shopping centre has been forced to apologise after insisting a wall mural they had commissioned did not feature a woman wearing a hijab. The secular organisation said they did not want to display religious symbols.

The shopping centre had commissioned the UNITY Burlov and Ungdomsgruppen Burlov youth groups from the Burlington area to paint a wall inside the local shopping centre, just outside Malmö.

The youngsters decided to draw a “diverse” range of people, but management saw it differently.

“It’s so horrible you almost can’t believe it’s true,” complained Pia Jönsson, whose husband Magnus Heberlein works for a local anti-racism group, in a post on Facebook.

“What kind of message are you sending to customers? How can you play into the hands of racists in such a disgusting way”, she added.

As the mural went up management called the youngsters into a meeting and explained that they did not want religious imagery in their building. The hijab was subsequently replaced with hair.

“The young people are angry and sad. They have grown up in this municipality, and are proud of its diversity and want to show it off as something beautiful. But they have been trampled on”, Ms. Jönsson wrote.

Speaking to SVT News Skåne, Ms. Jönsson’s husband, who works for the ‘Network Together in the Neighborhood’ anti-racism organisation, said:

“We think it’s very upsetting to censor young people’s work in this way… We want to promote solidarity and cohesion, and these young people want to emphasise that everyone has a place and will be accommodated here.

“When it becomes infected, it is very upsetting”.

Grosvenor Fund Management, a London-based firm which owns the shopping centre, put out a press release on Saturday apologising for what had happened.

“We apologise that a mural of a woman in a hijab was considered a religious symbol and was therefore altered,” they wrote.

“That the picture was changed was unfortunate. For us it is important to welcome all customers regardless of their religion, ethnicity or sex.”

Isis 'not my cup of tea' says British woman who went to Syria to join

A British woman who fled Islamic State with her five children after travelling to Syria to be with her husband has told of her experience of life under the group’s rule, describing the “gangster mentality” among supporters as “not my cup of tea”.

Shukee Begum, who fled Isis and says that she was then held by smugglers in northern Syria, said that she wanted to return to the UK but feared what the reception would be from British authorities. She is currently believed to be living in Syria.

“The UK is my home. I grew up there, my friends are there my family are there. That is where I consider to be home but I am just not sure at the moment of the track record of the current government if the UK is somewhere I can come back to and achieve justice.”

Begum travelled from Manchester to Syria with her children to find her husband, Jamal al-Harith, a former Guantánamo Bay detainee who left the UK 18 months ago.

But months after joining him, Begum said that she and her children aged nine, seven, five, three and 11 months, fled Isis-controlled territory and were held for a time by smugglers in Syria’s war-torn city of Aleppo.

Speaking about the reasons why she left the UK to join al-Harith, she said: “He’s my husband and all of a sudden he’s not there. It didn’t feel like home any more. I was trying to manage school runs, things like that.”

“I was thinking about the children’s futures. Was he part of it? Will he come back? All these things go through your mind.”

Insisting that she had never been a supporter of Isis, she said that she had taken her children to Syria because her husband was a family man, adding: “For me to take the children to see him and then come away from there that would have been more powerful than anything else I had to say to him at the time.”

She said that she wanted other women to know about the reality of life in Isis controlled territory.
Begum said: “You have got hundreds of families living in one hall and sharing perhaps one or two bathrooms between them. You have got children crying, children who are sick.”

“There was a gangster kind of mentality among single women there. Violence was talked about, war, killing.
They would sit together, huddle around their laptops, watch Isis videos. It just wasn’t my cup of tea.”

Begum said that she asked her husband to help her get out, to no avail, and permission to leave was denied by Isis courts.

“This is what I want to make clear as well to other women thinking of coming into Isis territory – that you can’t just expect to come into Isis territory and then expect that you can just leave again easily. There is no personal autonomy there at all.”

After managing to flee, she said that she and the children were held by smugglers close to the Turkish border and for a number of months in Aleppo before they were released. The circumstances of her release are unclear, although according to Channel 4 news, Syrian rebels from the Nusra Front intervened to facilitate it.