Meeting the Enemy How Deeyah Khan uses conversation to understand people drawn to extremism

Deeyah Khan chose to meet people whose beliefs she found deeply disturbing. By listening with curiosity rather than condemnation, she showed how honest conversation can challenge prejudice, reduce hostility, and reveal the person behind the label.

Deeyah Khan is a filmmaker and human rights activist whose work explores extremism, identity, and belonging. Rather than dismissing people whose beliefs she finds abhorrent, she has chosen to sit with them, listen to their stories, and try to understand how they came to see the world as they do.

Her work offers a powerful example of Conversational Leadership in action. It shows what becomes possible when conversation begins not with an attempt to persuade or defeat, but with curiosity and a willingness to listen.

Meeting the Enemy

As a Muslim woman of Pakistani and Afghan heritage, Deeyah Khan experienced racism, sexism, harassment, and threats from an early age. These experiences could easily have led her to see those who hated her only as enemies. Instead, they left her with a question: what leads people towards hatred and extremism?

This question took her into conversations with people from across the ideological spectrum, including white nationalists, former extremists, and Islamist radicals. Her documentaries, including White Right: Meeting the Enemy and Jihad: A Story of the Others, are built around these encounters.

Rather than arguing with the people she meets or trying to prove them wrong, Khan asks questions and listens. She explores their fears, frustrations, experiences, and personal histories. In doing so, she often discovers loneliness, anger, loss, and a search for identity and belonging beneath the ideology.

Understanding these stories does not mean accepting or excusing hateful beliefs. It means taking seriously the human experiences from which those beliefs may have grown.

The Power of Conversational Leadership

Deeyah Khan’s work illustrates Conversational Leadership in practice. She does not use conversation as a technique for persuading or manipulating people. She creates the space in which difficult experiences and beliefs can be spoken about openly.

Her approach recognises that condemnation alone rarely changes minds. It may deepen resentment and reinforce the feeling that no one is willing to listen. Conversation offers another possibility. It allows people to be heard while also being invited to reflect on their own assumptions.

Listening does not require agreement. Nor does it mean remaining silent in the face of hatred. It is a way of understanding what is happening before deciding how best to respond.

Engaging Across Difference

By talking with people whose views are often regarded as beyond redemption, Khan shows that no one is defined entirely by a single belief or label. People have stories, relationships, disappointments, and contradictions. When these are brought into the conversation, fixed images of one another can begin to soften.

Her work has shown that respectful conversation can reduce hostility and sometimes lead people to question beliefs they have held for years. Not every conversation produces visible change, and change rarely happens all at once. But a conversation can create a moment of uncertainty in which another way of seeing becomes possible.

The aim is not to win an argument. It is to make space for a different kind of encounter.

White Right: Meeting the Enemy

In White Right: Meeting the Enemy, Deeyah Khan spends time with members of white nationalist groups in the United States. She attends their gatherings, visits their homes, listens to their stories, and asks how they came to hold their beliefs.

The film does not avoid the harm caused by racism and white nationalism. Nor does it reduce the people involved to caricatures. It allows the discomfort, contradictions, and humanity of the encounters to remain visible.