By YASMIN WHITTAKER-KHAN

Last updated at 23:35 08 September 2007

I was six-years-old when my mother, Shakeela Begum Khan, a beautiful, sassy, educated young Muslim woman, was murdered.

Returning home from school one day in 1976 to the one-room bedsit in East London where we both lived, I found police officers and an ambulance crew removing her body.

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I remember that scene now as if it were a vague dream.

Did it really happen, or did I just imagine it?

I have no memory of how I felt, only of what I witnessed.

As I grew up, older relatives had to reassure me that my memories weren't delusional.

Many years later, I also discovered the killer had set up the room to make it look as though it were a brothel, and my mother a prostitute.

As anyone from a Muslim background would instantly recognise, it was the ultimate way to dishonour a woman in the eyes of her family and community.

Soon after my mother's death, her estranged husband, Rasib - my father - was accused of the murder, charged and tried, but he was acquitted.

Taken by Rasib to live with his new wife and a half-brother, both of whom were cruel and abusive to me when my father was not around, I was never allowed to utter a word about my mother.

For the next eight years, I lived in an atmosphere of secrets, lies and crippling fear, reluctantly protecting my vicious stepmother and half-brother from the fury my father would have unleashed on them if he'd known what they did to me.

I lived in constant dread that if I told anybody, the ultimate punishment for them would be death.

Now, three decades later, I have attained a form of poetic justice.

As a playwright, I challenge the forces that try to impose silence and censorship on me.

Having been silenced for so many years of my life, I am now determined to say the unsayable whenever necessary.

My father, Rasib Khan, was born in Pakistan, one of six sons.

Although his family were wealthy landowners, he grew up illiterate.

Apparently, in his teens, my father got into a fight with his youngest brother and, in an outburst of anger, pushed him; the younger boy accidentally landed on a sharp farming tool and died.

My father's family bribed the police and placed the dead body at a neighbour's house to shift the blame.

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Soon after, Rasib emigrated to England to start a new life, settling in East London with an older brother.

Like most Asian immigrants in the early Sixties, Rasib worked in a factory - in his case,The London Rubber Company, which manufactured washing-up gloves and condoms among other things.

Like many immigrants, he worked hard and lived frugally, saving every penny he could from his 12-hour shifts to buy run-down properties which he did up and then sold again.

Gradually, he built up his capital until, in 1965, he was able to return to Pakistan a wealthy man and marry my mother, Shakeela.

When they got back to London, my mother took on Rasib's illegitimate son, Khalid, who was the result of a youthful liaison between my father and a woman from a nearby village and now lived in London with our father.

For five years after their marriage, my parents tried unsuccessfully for a child.

Then, I was born.

According to old family friends and relatives I have talked to about this time, Rasib was the happiest man around, and my memories of how he treated me are of a doting, loving and fun father.

Despite the fact that I was a girl, he called me his Sher Puttar ('Tiger Son'), training me to stand up for myself and, if anyone hit me, to "kick 'em in the shins".

He proudly displayed a half-moon shaped scar on his forehead that apparently was a toothmark from where I'd bitten him.

For this he rewarded me with praise, hugs and kisses.

My father could be a tough man, with a loud, harsh voice, and he treated my half-brother particularly sternly, in marked contrast to the loving way in which he treated me.

In my father's presence, my half-brother would cower and sometimes wet himself.

In my father's absence, though, Khalid would show me resentment, even hatred.

My mother didn't fear her husband because he treated her kindly, encouraging her to explore the delights of London's shops and go out with her friends.

To any intellectual feminist this may not seem liberating, but compared with her peers my mother had a good lifestyle - helped, no doubt, by the fact that she had only one young child.

Other Pakistani wives, with many children to help support, were homeworkers, sewing dresses in dark cellars for exploitative employers.

Both my parents were relatively "progressive", particularly in the way they raised me.

My mother always kitted me out in trendy flares and psychedelic minidresses.

My female cousins envied me because I had a chic pageboy haircut, instead of the standard two long, oiled plaits with bright red ribbons.

But while my cousins envied my pageboy, I really envied their plaits.

My cousins had to go to the mosque every day to learn the Koran.

They thought of any excuse to skive off, but their parents, with the support of the mullah's cane, insisted they would grow up to be heathens, overtly sexual, undignified and non-Islamic if they didn't go.

It was due to these ridiculous fears that my father kept himself and me well away from the mosque and the mullah.

He only faked prayers, twice a year for Eid, and even then he used a make-do prayer hat, a white handkerchief with a knot tied in each corner.

He objected to hypocrisy and thought religion caused hatred.

Plus, being illiterate didn't help restore his faith in Koranic words, whether written or spoken, as he resented the taboo against debating or disagreeing with them.

My father's main focus, other than my mother and me, was to make money, buy property and make more money.

This he thought would then lead to his Sher Puttar having a dowry to be reckoned with.

School and education were important to him, and that was all I should concentrate on, not housework or religion; just play and school.

As soon as I was putting basic letters together into words, I remember having to read his post for him.

There were big words like "leasehold" and "freehold", not "Peter and Jane went for a walk".

But my life changed dramatically for the worse when I was aged just four, with what was supposed to be a happy family holiday to Pakistan.

Without telling Rasib, so relatives later told me, my mother decided to give away her gold jewellery to a poor relative.

My father apparently felt betrayed by my mother not consulting him before making this impulsive gesture, and flew into a rage.

As my father and I were inseparable at that time, my mother left me with him for what she assumed would be a few days and went to stay with her mother until he calmed down.

In her absence, however, my father did an extraordinary thing, at least to Western eyes.

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While my mother was away he vengefully entered into a hastily arranged marriage with a woman from a nearby village - under Islamic law, a man is permitted to take up to four wives - and illegally brought her back to London, using my mother's passport.

He moved her into our family home and she took over the care of Khalid and me, as though my mother had never existed.

With the benefits of A-levels and her basic English, however, Shakeela managed to get herself back to England.

After a court hearing, my parents were separated and my mother won custody of me, with my father having only weekend access.

Not many Pakistani women would have defied and shamed their husbands in Seventies London in such a way.

My father had never been challenged like that before in his life and here was a woman, his own wife, doing this; it was such a big insult.

On weekends, my loyalties were torn.

I couldn't bear to be parted from my mother, so I refused to visit my father.

My mother needed some peace and quiet though, as she worked long hours in a fish-and-chip shop to support us both and was usually exhausted.

So she wanted me to spend time with Rasib, who would turn up every Saturday and Sunday morning to collect me - only to be rejected by me each time.

Then, on that terrible day in 1976, my mother was murdered.

I have one hazy memory of leaving our bedsit holding my father's hand, to start my new life with my stepmother and my half-brother.

I can remember walking around the local shops and seeing pictures of my mother posted on billboards, in shop windows and cinema doorways, but I was never allowed to acknowledge the posters or ever utter a word about my mother again.

Was she a celebrity, I used to wonder, who had perhaps left me for the bright lights of television . . . for Charlie's Angels, perhaps?

After my father was arrested for her murder, he spent time in jail on remand, but he denied responsibility and was eventually acquitted for lack of evidence.

Having taken the easy option of arresting my father, the police never solved the crime, and I doubt they tried all that hard, given the racial prejudice rife in Seventies Britain and the lack of cultural understanding.

I think it highly likely, though, that my beautiful mother, still only in her 20s at the time of her death, was the victim of a so-called "honour killing" - one of countless thousands of young women from Muslim communities who are murdered, often by close male relatives, for stepping out of line.

After my father's trial, I retreated into a world of silence and invisibility.

Aunts and uncles would greet me when they realised I was in the room and speak to me in tones of sympathy and pity.

But none was brave enough to stand up to my father, speak openly of my dead mother or defend me from my "wicked stepmother" and even more wicked half-brother.

I spent eight unhappy years with my father and his new family, keeping quiet about how I was being treated by my stepmother and half-brother.

I hated these two for what they did to me, crying myself to sleep on many occasions, not knowing what to do or who to tell.

I lived in fear of what my father would do if he ever discovered what was happening to me, and he loved me dearly, behind his back.

Eventually, having managed to persuade Social Services to take me into care when I was 14, I was placed with a wonderful family.

It was then that I first challenged the censorship and silence that had been imposed on me.

From the safety of my new home in the country far from London, I wrote to my father and told him exactly how I felt and what his second wife and son had done to me.

My father, a man feared by everyone around him, withered into a sobbing wreck and died a few years later.

Unsurprisingly, those miserable years after my mother's death gave me a deep horror of enforced silence. On leaving school, I became a youth and community worker in London, where I came across many other people who had had horrific experiences of exploitation, abuse, violence, injustice and fundamentalist intolerance but who were, for various reasons, silenced, ignored or denied any chance to defend themselves.

One only has to open a newspaper or watch the news to see this still repeated on a national and international level today.

So if I couldn't help people through my own intervention, and in most instances, of course, I couldn't, then I could at least try to help by exploring and questioning issues to raise awareness and encourage those in power to take action.

Around six years ago, after the director of a London theatre company encouraged me to try my hand at writing for the stage, I began writing plays.

I went on to explore once-taboo subjects such as "honour killings" of women in British-Pakistani families and the sex trafficking of Asian women, in the hope I could provide a voice for victims of abuse and injustice.

However, the political climate in the West following 9/11 has not been helpful, encouraging many Muslims to close ranks against perceived Islamaphobia.

For instance, I wrote about "honour killings" in my play Reshaam before 9/11 had happened, and the feedback I received from Pakistani communities at the time was: "Thank you for writing about this."

People wrote to me saying "My sister went through a similar experience," and "Men are gossips who hide behind the veil of the mosque."

Since 2001 though, any attempt to publicly examine and expose sensitive subjects within Muslim communities can result in a hostile response, as I discovered after another of my plays, Bells, attracted national Press coverage.

This play,which I am now hoping might be made into a film, exposed the secret, seedy world of mujra, or courtesan clubs, a centuries-old tradition in Pakistan that has emerged in Britain in a bastardised form and is now growing through sex trafficking.

During the day, a shop is a halal butchers, at night it becomes Bells, a members-only club upstairs where girls wearing traditional dress dance seductively for the male customers who throw money at their feet - the girls go a lot further for those who pay more.

The club seems glamorous, but it is tarnished by the secret, sordid lives beneath the surface: a place where meat is bought and sold.

To discover this world exists in the UK, perhaps just around the corner, was a fascinating realisation - and a culture shock.

In sections of the media, Bells was described as "a play about Muslim brothels" - sensationalist shorthand that placed the focus on religion over and above the desperate circumstances of the women, which is what I was trying to convey.

Birmingham Repertory Theatre, which staged Bells two years ago, was threatened with riots on the opening night.

The theatre management assured me that no matter what happened, they would not give in to protesters and drop my play - unlike Sikh playwright Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti's Behzti (Punjabi for "dishonour").

The play was notoriously cancelled by the same theatre after protests from members of the Sikh community in 2004 about the play's depiction of a rape and murder in a Sikh temple.

Nevertheless, I suffered during and after the national tour of Bells.

For daring to write about this sensitive subject, I was set upon by jeering young Asian men howling obscenities, and by elderly men who spat at me.

My car was blown up in an arson attack, apparently as a punishment from a self-righteous religious fundamentalist incensed at my reputation as a "non-believer in God".

Biologically, I'm not mixed race, but mentally and socially I am half English and half Pakistani, and proud to be both.

My heritage is Muslim; but I'm not a follower of any religion.

Despite the intimidation, I declared publicly that I was not going to give in to bullies.

But last year, writing my latest play, In No Sense, I was shocked to realise I was censoring myself, fearful of encouraging further attacks from people insulted by my "evil" writing.

At first I thought it was just a case of writer's block.

But once I acknowledged to myself that it was fear constraining me, I had to choose either to stay quiet - as I had as a frightened child - or to continue to confront the bullies.

I chose the latter course.

That experience gave me a new sense of resolve: never to be silenced again. Speaking out, even at the risk of causing offence - or perhaps more accurately, deliberately risking offence --is the only method available to me to challenge injustice and fundamentalist intolerance.

Otherwise, I'm not much better than my uncles, aunts, the police and those in the law courts who stood by for years, either ignoring what was happening to me or watching and just whispering their concerns behind closed doors.