LONDON – Great British Bake Off winner Nadiya Hussain has revealed a huge amount of abusive comments she has been getting since she broke into stardom recently, with many saying she does not deserve to live in the UK because she is Muslim.
“Too brown to be English. Too Muslim to be British. Too Bengali to eat fish fingers!” she tweeted on Monday night.
“There is no end! I exist, we all do! Sometimes I hate myself for simply breathing the same air, that I am so often told, I am not entitled to. Tear away your flesh, you are skeleton underneath like me, like everybody!
“So let’s just breathe our air, let’s exist, because what else are we supposed to do?”
#peace pic.twitter.com/tPQdWMyyQd
— Nadiya Jamir Hussain (@BegumNadiya) October 30, 2017
Hussain, a second generation British Bangladeshi Muslim mother, won the popular series in 2015.
Since winning Bake Off, Hussain has appeared in her own series, The Chronicles Of Nadiya.
She launched her BBC TV show, Nadiya’s British Food Adventure, last July and released a book of the same name alongside it.
She has previously discussed how the current cultural climate has made it tough for her.
“I struggled at the beginning, because I thought, “Am I the token Muslim?” I’d never, in all my years, been labeled like that. I heard it constantly, “Oh, she’s the Muslim, she’s the Muslim,”” she told the Radio Times on Tuesday, October 31.
“And I was so shocked by the amount of negative comments I got.”