The woman, Katie Freeman, is a 44-year-old National Health Service health-care assistant. She lives in a predominantly white area in northwest England. Before she started, Freeman said she had never spent any time with Muslims. And she admitted to holding some intolerant views. Driving through a Muslim neighborhood, she said, "you see them and think they're going to blow something up." At another point, she remarks, "you wouldn’t even think this was England."

AD

AD

But once she donned her Muslim attire, Freeman said she began to see things differently. She was shouted at while walking down the street, and heckled while passing her local pub. One man called her a “f---ing Muslim.” When the Manchester terrorist attack occurred two days into the shoot, Freeman wanted to back out. But she stayed after host Saima Alvi explained “this is what I face every day.”

“It makes me ashamed to live here,” Freeman said afterward. “I was raging and fuming inside. But I also felt vulnerable. What harm was I doing?”

Alvi, a Pakistani Muslim, said that Freeman experienced just a glimpse of the prejudice and threats she faces down each day. “It's very humiliating that I am pigeonholed, or put in the same box as a terrorist,” she said. Freeman’s experience is “what I face every day. This is me for life.”

AD

AD

Fozia Khan, the documentary’s executive producer, said she hoped his experiment would change minds and make people more tolerant. “We saw divided communities, people living side by side but not mixing,” Khan said. “We wanted to do something bold, a kind of social experiment: to take someone with no exposure to the Muslim community and give her a really authentic experience. The transformation in her appearance was important for that.”

Not everyone sees it that way. After a trailer aired this week, the response was swift, and nasty.

Fiyaz Mughal, the founder of Tell Mama, an organization that monitors anti-Muslim abuse and attacks, called the show “absolutely shocking” and “a complete catastrophe.”

AD

“Just think for one second if that was done against the Jewish community. There would be legitimate accusations of anti-Semitism, which would be correct and clear,” he told the Guardian. “So why is this okay for the Muslim community, in the desire to reach what I think is a laudable objective? They could have simply taken a secret camera and got Muslim women to record things that happen to them every day. But they tried to maximize their audience by putting a twist on it, a twist that has badly backfired."

AD

“The use of brownface and blackface has a long racist history and it is not surprising that it has caused deep offence amongst some communities. Had we been consulted, we would not have advised this approach,” the Muslim Council of Britain said in a statement. “We do, however, laud the apparent goals of the documentary — to better understand the reality of Islamophobia, which has become socially accepted across broader society.”

But Alvi defended the show, and her participation in it.

“People were negative about the idea,” she said, according to the Guardian. “But there are lots of people out there who just haven’t had the chance to engage with Muslims.”