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The Audio Long Read

Access denied: why Muslims worldwide are being ‘debanked’

The Audio Long Read

The Guardian

Society & Culture

4.22.5K Ratings

🗓️ 16 March 2026

⏱️ 32 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Innocent people are being frozen out of basic banking services – and it all traces back to reforms rushed through after 9/11 By Oliver Bullough. Read by Elis James. Help support our independent journalism at theguardian.com/longreadpod

Transcript

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0:00.0

This is The Guardian.

0:09.0

Welcome to The Guardian long read, showcasing the best long-form journalism covering culture, politics and new thinking.

0:15.8

For the text version of this and all our long reads, go to the Guardian.com forward slash long read.

0:47.5

Access to Nide, why Muslims worldwide are being debanked by Oliver Bolo, read by Ellis James. Hamish Wilson lives a few miles away from me, in a cosy farmhouse in the damp hills of Mid Wales.

0:52.6

He makes good coffee, tells great stories and is an excellent host.

1:01.0

Every summer, dozens of Somali guests visit Wilson's farm as part of a wonderfully wholesome project set up to celebrate their nation's culture and to honour his father's Second World War Service with a Somali comrade in arms.

1:06.0

Inadvertently, however, the project has revealed something else, a deep unfairness in today's

1:12.6

global financial system that not only threatens to ruin the Somali's holidays, but also excludes

1:18.1

marginalised communities from global banking services on a huge scale. The origins of the story lie in 1940,

1:32.3

when the then 27-year-old Captain Eric Wilson led a doomed stand against an Italian invasion

1:38.0

of the British colony of Somaliland.

1:41.0

Suffering from malaria, massively outnumbered and under heavy artillery fire, Wilson and a small band of Somali comrade, like the Spartans at Thermopylae, but wearing khaki shorts rather than leather drawers, held off the Italians for an astonishing five days.

1:57.7

After their position was overrun, Eric was presumed dead and was awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross,

2:03.7

which came as a nice surprise when he was liberated from a prisoner of war camp a few months later.

2:09.1

It was an extraordinary honour, the highest a British soldier can receive, but he was always troubled by it.

2:15.7

Why had he been recognised,

2:18.7

while his sergeant,

2:21.8

an old friend called Omar Kachogh who had died in the battle,

2:23.0

received nothing?

2:26.8

Wilson, my neighbour in Wales,

2:29.0

inherited his father's passion for East Africa and spends a lot of time there himself.

2:31.8

He and his friends,

...

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