Listen to the podcast of Shazia and Shamshad performing at the Sacred Exhibition.

Shazia Murza’s come a long way since she rocked the comedy scene by donning a Burka for her stand-up routine.

“That was such a long time ago,” she laughs “I don’t wear it anymore so now I have to wash my hair.”

Now a mainstay at the Edinburgh festival, back in 2001 as Britain’s only female Muslim comic on tour she didn’t so much break taboos as eat them for breakfast. “I don’t think I’m outrageous,” she says, “I make jokes about Primark.” But it was references in gigs to bombs under her burka that got her noticed originally and made her the target of death threats. “Back then I thought I had to be a certain way to be a comedian, people expected me to make jokes about being a Muslim”.

Today, she says, that doesn’t come into her act at all. So what’s changed? “You find out the things you want to talk about, you become more yourself.” Wearing a burka on stage was a “joke” she says, but when it caused such a furore she decided to ditch it, “I thought, ‘God, I don’t want this, it’s not me.’ I don’t wear it in real life, I was trying out a character”.

If being a Muslim isn’t important to her show, why take part in an event designed to gather Jewish and Muslim artists on the same stage? “For the money. The Jews pay really well,” she says.

But during her set Shazia still leans on what makes her unique. Picking on a group of hijabed girls in the audience, she fires “Are you Muslim? Does your dad know you’re here? Is he waiting in the car outside?” Faced with an audience baying for religio-cultural comedy, she has reverted to type.

“I do believe in God. I don’t pray five times a day, but I do pray,” she reveals “Mostly when I want something” before the conversation becomes too serious she’s quick to add “Jean Paul Gaultier’s my God.”

Dressed in a tight plaid shirt and jeans it seems she hasn’t had many prayers answered yet, but it’s certainly different from a Burka.

Shazia Murza will be performing at the Edinburgh Festival in the Pleasance Theatre from August 1 to 27.

Shamshad Khan, is a leading female British Muslim poet, she doesn’t shun social stereotypes but uses them to her advantage. “Sometimes you think, ‘Sod it. You want to hear an angry Muslim woman poet. If you insist, I’ll show her to you and then we’ll go somewhere else once we’ve got that out the way.’”

But she also writes poetry about love, flowers, cars and politics. Her identity as a Muslim has, like the title of one of her poems “fluid borders”. “Sometimes I’m not even aware that I am a Muslim, mostly I’m not even aware that I’m human.”

The media constantly focus on her religion but her faith is not the dominant force when Shamshad writes. “You start writing, you pick up a pen to write and it’s just a body writing, it’s just your consciousness writing”.

The feeling of being a Muslim steals upon her when she’s watching the news and hears of Muslims being killed or killing others, she says, “Before that you were just sitting in your front room”.

Predominantly a poet, Shamshad wants to express through writing and performing the shifts that society is experiencing, things that affect everyone, things that are “beyond identity” and are in some way sacred to all. The words seem to live in her, pulse from her, beat within her, pound out of her, when she recites poetry that is as much shaped by performance as by form. This is poetry written to be heard.

Shamshad Khan’s first solo collection of poems Megalomaniac is published by Salt Publishing.

The Sacred Exhibition of texts of the three Abrahamic faiths, including the Dead Sea Scrolls, one of the earliest Qur’ans in the world, and an early codex of the Torah, runs at the British Library in London until September 23.

Picture by Steve Ullathorne