For Visibly Muslim Women, Islamophobia Is an Ever-Present Issue in UK
New
Age Islam News Bureau
01
December 2021
•
Taliban Local Administrators Persuaded to Reopen Girls' Schools in Herat,
Afghanistan
•
Over 120 European MPs Blast ‘Ongoing Persecution’ Of Saudi Women Rights
Defenders
•
Saudi Justice Ministry Praises Female Employees
•
Jordan Has ‘Crystal-Clear’ Decision to Support Women’s Political Participation
— Najjar
•
Project to Support Women Cooperatives Starts in Pilot Provinces of Turkey
•
Egypt Chairs African Peace And Security Council Session On Women
Compiled
by New Age Islam News Bureau
URL https://www.newageislam.com/islam-women-feminism/muslim-women-uk-islamophobia/d/125882
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For
Visibly Muslim Women, Islamophobia Is an Ever-Present Issue in UK
A
silhouette of a Muslim woman wearing a hijab
Getty
Images/iStockphoto
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November
30, 2021
“It’s
one of the worst identities you could be,” says Aysha Yaqub* on being a Muslim
woman in the UK. At 27-years-old, Yaqub has been on the receiving end of
countless death threats and verbal abuse because of her religion. According to
statistics from the Home Office, Muslims were the target of 2,703 religious
hate crimes in the year ending March 2021 – 45 per cent of all those recorded.
MEND,
a charity that seeks to tackle Islamophobia in the UK, predicts the true extent
of hate crime towards Muslims is likely much greater as many, like Yaqub, never
end up filing a report with the police. “As one woman once told me, ‘if you
want me to report the comments I receive for wearing a niqab, that’s all I
would be doing all day’,” says Shockat Patel, a MEND board member.
This
November marked Islamophobia Awareness Month (IAM); an annual campaign
co-founded by MEND which aims to highlight the discrimination Muslims face
across different sectors of society. This year, groups have been calling on the
government to adopt an official definition of Islamophobia as proposed by the
All-Party Parliamentary Group on British Muslims (APPG). In a 2018 report, the
APPG wrote: “Islamophobia is rooted in racism and is a type of racism that
targets expressions of Muslimness and perceived Muslimness.”
While
the definition has been accepted by the Labour Party, Liberal Democrats and the
London Mayor’s office, a government spokesperson told the BBC in 2019 that it
needed “careful consideration”. Two years later, there is still no formal
definition.
Although
there are no known statistics around which demographic is most affected by
Islamophobia, MEND’s work shows that those who appear visibly Muslim, such as
women who wear the hijab or niqab, are likely to be targeted. In a
parliamentary debate on 24 November, Labour politician Afzal Khan said defining
Islamophobia is “the first step in rooting it out” and will “establish a
mechanism for accountability”.
This
sentiment has been backed by MEND, which said the absence of a definition has
allowed Islamophobia against visibly Muslim women to “permeate all sections of
society”. “Lots of women say they are fearful of going out, just because of the
fact they are wearing a headscarf. For those that wear a niqab [the garment that
leaves only eyes visible] they find it even more difficult because they know,
almost certainly, that they are going to get verbal abuse,” Patel says.
Hamida
Agarwal*, who converted to Islam more than 15 years ago, says she had never
experienced any form of racism until she began wearing a headscarf, despite
being a brown woman. “I conformed, and I fitted in. I drank alcohol, I dressed
the way everyone else dressed. But as soon as I put the hijab on everything
changed,” she says. “The way people looked at me, the comments that were made,
I just couldn’t believe it. It was really difficult to now live this life where
everywhere you go, you’re now on the defensive and feel like you have to break
a stereotype.”
One
common assumption members of the public would make upon seeing Agarwal’s
headscarf is that she couldn’t speak English. “I would be in the supermarket
and the cashier would talk to my husband instead of me, thinking that I
couldn’t respond to them,” she recalls.
Muslim
women experience Islamophobic microagressions every day, whether it be at work,
at university or even online. Rana Yusuf*, a doctor who works in the NHS,
described a workplace where microaggressions happen often. She says these are
difficult to prove and hard to report.
Examples
include overhearing colleagues describe Muslims as “a little bit backwards and
weird” while discussing the news of Malala Yousafzai’s marriage, and being told
by a nurse that she could not wish a Muslim colleague “Ramadan Mubarak” – a
greeting Muslims use to wish each other a happy Ramadan – because she was not
“speaking English”. “It was just one phrase in a totally English conversation,”
Yusuf explains.
On
a separate occasion, she recalled doing ward rounds with a senior consultant
when the conversation turned to her personal life and he asked whether she
would marry an English man instead of a Muslim man, as he said it was
“important for your communities to integrate”. “It was really awkward because
this is supposed to be the person that I should feel comfortable going to if a
patient is not well, or if I feel out of my depth, but after having an
interaction like that it makes me feel like I want to limit my interaction with
him as much as possible,” she says.
When
contacted by The Independent, the NHS said that Islamophobia and any form of
discrimination is “unacceptable” and “will not be tolerated”. “It is absolutely
deplorable for anyone in the NHS to feel unsafe on the grounds of their
religious belief or practicing their faith and NHS organisations should take a
zero-tolerance approach to all and any form of discrimination and take
stringent action when reported,” a spokesperson said.
Khadija
Khan*, a former student at the University of Glasgow says a lack of
understanding of what Islamophobia is and how it affects Muslims made it
difficult for her to take part in discussions around the Middle East, Palestine
and religious extremism that were integral to her studies. “Some of the things
said in class by other students who were white and non-Muslim should 100 per
cent have been challenged as Islamophobic, but it was really exhausting to have
that onus on me because my tutor or lecturer was letting them be said,” she
says.
Khan
says she initially challenged some of these views but stopped over time after a
tutor told her that “a successful student should be able to detach themselves
from personal and emotional feelings they have towards a subject”. “It’s easy
for someone to make Islamophobic comments when it doesn’t affect them, but when
it’s your daily lived experience you’re obviously going to be affected,” Khan
says.
A
University of Glasgow spokesperson tells The Independent that they “encourage”
anyone from the university to come forward if they have experienced
“unacceptable behaviour” such as racial discrimination. “Our Understanding
Racism, Transforming University Cultures report published earlier this year
recognises that there can be a reluctance to report such harassment and we know
there is more for us to do to further strengthen our processes,” the spokesperson
explains. “Through the report’s action plan we are committed to being an
anti-racist organisation, to act decisively against racism and racial
harassment on campus.”
Patel
says one of the reasons why Muslim women are targeted is down to “irresponsible
reporting” by the media. On 30 November, the Muslim Council of Britain’s (MCB)
Centre for Media Monitoring released a report which found that 60 per cent of
online articles portray Muslims in a negative light. The report, titled British
Media’s Coverage of Muslims and Islam (2018-2020), examined 48,000 online
articles and 5,500 broadcast segments. The MCB said the use of stock images of
visibly Muslim women to illustrate conflict and terrorism is one of the ways
Muslims are often misrepresented by the media.
While
many Muslim women experience verbal and physical abuse in public, they are also
targets of hate online. Yaqub, an employee at the Muslim Association of
Britain, often faces racism on Twitter which gets worse if her profile picture
shows her hijab. “The minute they see a headscarf on your profile, that’s it,
you’re a target. They don’t care where you’re from, for them being a Muslim is
worse – it’s the worst identity you could have,” she says.
Yaqub
says she can receive abuse for sharing her views on social issues such as
universal credit or her opinions on the monarchy. “It’s crazy to me that my
experience as a Muslim woman using social media is completely different to
someone who doesn’t have those identity markers that make them a target for racial
abuse and hate,” she says. When she has the time, she reports the abuse, but
the response from Twitter is “hit and miss”. “If it’s very blatant racism, that
kind of language is easier for Twitter to pick up. But sometimes the language
is subtle,” she says.
While
Yusuf did not openly receive hateful remarks about her hijab at work, she often
felt nurses treated her less favourably than they did non-Muslim doctors. “As a
doctor on-call, my work depended on nurses being receptive to me, but as a
visibly Muslim woman coming on to new wards, I very much got a frosty
reception.” she says. Her suspicions were confirmed when she stopped wearing a
hijab one year later and felt a significant shift in the way she was treated.
“The principal reason behind my decision is that I wanted to be invisible. I
wanted to come in and do my job and go home, and not have people reacting to
me,” she says. “I noticed a massive difference when I stopped wearing the
hijab. I was very much the same person, with the same knowledge but I was just
getting much better responses from nurses and colleagues.”
According
to the latest figures from the Office for National Statistics, there are
approximately 3.4 million Muslims in the UK, making up around five per cent of
the total 67.2 million population. In 2018, a report by Ipsos MORI found that
57 per cent of the UK population feel they do not have a “good understanding”
of Islam. This figure increased to 72 per cent among those who do not
personally know someone who is Muslim. Researchers said this lack of
understanding is likely to give rise to misconceptions, with 62 per cent of
respondents stating that they believe Islam negatively impacts the quality of
life of Muslims.
One
common theme reported by Muslim women is how false perceptions of Islam often
make them feel “othered” and “silenced”. Khan eventually stopped participating
in seminar discussions in a bid to “blend into the background” but ultimately
had a less rewarding university experience because of it. “It was difficult to
be enthusiastic about going to university. Every day felt more exhausting than
the day before,” she says.
For
Yusuf, Islamophobia meant silencing her own beliefs, in order to feel accepted
at work. “It’s not fair and I miss my hijab, but it was just getting too hard
on a daily basis,” she says. Yaqub says the constant barrage of Islamophobic
abuse she receives on Twitter has affected her ability to tweet freely, making
her feel like she is being “driven out” of all aspects of public life. “I think
10 times about the language I’m using, about whether I’m going to get abuse for
what I’m writing, and whether I should be commenting on common affairs,” she
says. “This is what silencing looks like, when someone is driven away and made
to feel like they can’t participate in a space – there is no safe space for me
to be myself as a Muslim woman.”
Source:
Independent UK
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Taliban
Local Administrators Persuaded to Reopen Girls' Schools in Herat, Afghanistan
An
Afghan girl looks out at Tajrobawai Girls High School, in Herat, Afghanistan,
Thursday, Nov. 25, 2021, (AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris) PETROS GIANNAKOURIS AP
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Dec
1, 2021
KABUL:
High school girls are sitting at home almost everywhere in Afghanistan, forbidden
to attend class by the Taliban rulers. But there’s one major exception.
For
weeks, girls in the western province of Herat have been back in high school
classrooms — the fruit of a unique, concerted effort by teachers and parents to
persuade local Taliban administrators to allow them to reopen.
Taliban
officials never formally approved the reopening after the lobbying campaign,
but they also didn’t prevent it either when teachers and parents started
classes on their own in early October.
“Parents,
students and teachers joined hand in hand to do this,” said Mohammed Saber
Meshaal, the head of the Herat teachers’ union who helped organize the
campaign. “This is the only place where community activists and teachers took
the risk of staying and talking to the Taliban.”
The
teachers kept pressing. About 40 female principals, including Basiratkhah, met
with senior Taliban education officials in September to address their main
concerns.
“We
assured them that the classes are segregated, with only women teachers, and the
girls wear proper hijab,” Basiratkhah said. “We don’t need to change anything.
We are Muslims and we already observe everything Islam requires.”
By
October, the teachers felt they had the Taliban’s tacit agreement not to stand
in the way. Teachers began spreading the word on Facebook pages and messaging
app channels that girls’ high schools would reopen Oct. 3. Parents created a
telephone chain to pass along the news, and students told classmates.
Mastoura,
who has two daughters attending Tajrobawai in the first and eighth grades,
called other parents, urging them to bring their girls to school. Some worried
the Taliban would harass the girls or that militants might attack. Mastoura and
other women still escort their daughters to school daily.
“We
had concerns, and we have them still,” said Mastoura, who like many Afghans
uses one name. “But daughters must get an education. Without education, your
life is held back.”
Fadieh
Ismailzadeh, a 14-year-old in the ninth grade, said she cried with happiness at
the news. “We had lost all hope that schools would reopen,” she said.
Not
all the students showed up when the doors opened at Tajrobawai. But as parents
became more confident, classes filled after a few days, Basiratkhah said. About
3,900 students are in grades 1-12.
On
a recent day, girls in a 10th grade chemistry class took notes as a teacher
explained the elements that make up water. Lines of younger students marched
through the halls to the schoolyard.
Shehabeddin
Saqeb, the Taliban education director for Herat province, insists the group has
no problem with girls going to school.
“We
openly tell everyone that they should come to school,” he told The Associated
Press. “The schools are open without any problem. We never issued any official
order saying high-school aged girls should not go to school.”
Herat
is the only place where girls’ high schools are open across the province,
although schools also have reopened in a few individual districts in northern
Afghanistan, including the city of Mazar-e Sharif.
Meshaal
pointed to changes within the Taliban, saying some factions are more open.
“They understand that people will resist on the subject of education.”
He
said the Taliban are not corrupt, unlike the ousted, internationally backed
government.
“With
the previous government, if we proposed something for the good of the schools,
they would throw the idea into the trash because they couldn’t profit from it,”
he said.
“The
Taliban spent all their time in the mountains fighting. They don’t know
administration. So when we meet them, we try to give them advice and, after
negotiations, they start to come around,” he said.
Still,
teachers are struggling. Like other government employees, they have not been
paid for months. The education department has not provided funding for other
needs like maintenance and supplies, Meshaal said.
And
the opening of girls’ high school in Herat remains an exception. Other parts of
the country have had less success.
Teachers
in the southern city of Kandahar approached local Taliban officials about
reopening girls’ high schools but were refused, said Fahima Popal, principal of
Hino No. 1 High School for girls. Officials said they could do nothing without
orders from the central Education Ministry. In the meantime, Popal said parents
have been asking her when their daughters can return to class.
“We
hope that one day we’ll have good news for them,” Popal said. But she said she
believes it is better to wait for the central government to act rather than
repeat the Herat experiment. If provincial authorities allow a reopening, the
ministry could reverse their decision, which “would hurt students and teachers,”
she said.
A
full return of girls is a top demand of the international community and likely
must take place before U.N. agencies will agree to pay teachers’ salaries
directly.
So
far, the Taliban have refused to set a timetable and most schools are starting
a winter break until March. In a speech Saturday, Taliban Prime Minister
Mohammed Hassan Akhund insisted “women are already getting an education,”
adding only: “There is hope to broaden it, as God allows.”
Source:
Times of India
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Over
120 European MPs blast ‘ongoing persecution’ of Saudi women rights defenders
December
1, 2021
More
than 120 European Parliament members have denounced the “ongoing persecution”
of Saudi women human rights defenders by the Riyadh regime, saying the
activists freed from prison still face rights violations and harsh restrictions
in the kingdom.
The
legislators, in a joint letter signed on the occasion of the International
Women Human Rights Defenders Day, reiterated their call for Saudi authorities
“to immediately and unconditionally free all women targeted for their human
rights activism.”
While
all of the women activists arrested during a sweeping crackdown in 2018 have
now been released from prison, the campaigners, including prominent figures
Samar Badawi, Nassima al-Sadah and Loujain al-Hathloul, have been subjected to
heavy restrictions and curtailment of basic rights since their release, the
letter said.
“These
measures constitute further violations of their fundamental rights, including
free movement and association and free speech, and ostracize activists at the
critical threshold of starting a new life after release from prison,” the
legislators said.
Hathloul,
known for defying the ban on women driving in Saudi Arabia and for opposing the
Saudi male guardianship system, currently still faces three years of probation
and a five-year travel ban.
Some
of the women had to sign pledges that they would not disclose details of their
detention, while several of their family members are also under travel bans, as
a form of collective punishment and general harassment.
The
European parliamentarians further denounced Saudi Arabia’s repressive system
and the restrictions that women face in daily life there.
“The
male guardianship system as well as disobedience laws continue to negatively
affect all aspects of women's lives,” the letter read.
For
its part, the London-based Saudi rights group ALQST called on Saudi authorities
to immediately and unconditionally free all women targeted for their human
rights activism, to drop all charges against them, and to provide them
appropriate compensation.
The
group said the released women rights activists should be fully granted their
right to free movement, their travel bans and those on their family members
should be overturned, and they should be able to carry out their legitimate
human rights work without fear of reprisals.
Ever
since Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman became Saudi Arabia’s de facto leader in
2017, the kingdom has ramped up arrests of activists, bloggers, intellectuals,
and others perceived as political opponents, showing almost zero tolerance for
dissent even in the face of international condemnations of the crackdown.
Muslim
scholars have been executed and women’s rights campaigners have been put behind
bars and tortured as freedoms of expression, association, and belief continue
to be denied.
Source:
ABNA24
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Saudi
Justice Ministry praises female employees
December
01, 2021
RIYADH:
Female employees at the Justice Ministry have been praised for their positive
impact on service and performance, the Saudi Press Agency reported.
Women’s
entry into the ministry has contributed to their empowerment and to raising the
level of their participation in the public sector. Their roles have included
legal and social researchers, administrative assistants, program developers and
notaries.
The
ministry said that empowering women in the justice sector had reflected
positively on the service provided to people, enhancing the speed of
performance and achievement and raising the ceiling of work completion.
Noura
bint Abdullah Al-Ghunaim, director of the Women’s Administration, said the
female employees had provided services in all sectors, including 1.7 million in
the implementation sector, 551,000 in the judicial sector, 320,000 services in
the documentation sector, 240,000 services in the reconciliation system, in
addition to 180,000 services in the digital transformation agency and through
the unified communication center.
Al-Ghunaim
added that the ministry had allocated central departments fully staffed by
women, including the Cases Audit Center, the Case Preparation Center, the
Judicial Attribution Center for Execution, and the Documentation Operations
Audit Center.
The
ministry has empowered distinguished women leaders by assigning more than 85 of
them with supervisory tasks since the establishment of the women’s departments
at the ministry, in addition to the tasks assigned to female employees in
courts and notaries.
Source:
Arab News
https://www.arabnews.com/node/1978611/saudi-arabia
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Jordan
has ‘crystal-clear’ decision to support women’s political participation —
Najjar
Nov
21,2021
AMMAN
— Jordan has a “crystal-clear” political decision to support women’s
participation in political life, notably their representation in Parliament,
Culture Minister Haifa Najjar said on Sunday.
During
the launch of a field study implemented by the Arab Women Parliamentarians Network
for Equality "Ra'edat", ("Pioneers" in English), Najjar
said that this orientation is in line with the output of the Royal Committee to
Modernise the Political System, according to the Jordan News Agency, Petra.
The
study was conducted between March 2020 and September 2021, surveying 30 women
parliamentarians from 13 Arab countries: The UAE, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco,
Mauritania, Libya, Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan and Yemen.
The
results showed that women's representation in Arab parliamentary bodies has not
reached 20 per cent, as women participation rate in Arab countries is the
lowest at an average of 17.8 per cent in 2021, below the international average
of 25.5 per cent in 2021, Petra added.
Source:
Jordan Times
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Project
To Support Women Cooperatives Starts In Pilot Provinces Of Turkey
December
01 2021
A
project to support and improve women cooperatives in Turkey, conducted by three
ministries and funded by the European Union, has started in 24 out of the
country’s entire 81 provinces, daily Milliyet reported.
“The
Improvement of Women Cooperatives” project, coordinated by the Family and
Social Policies Ministry, Forestry and Agriculture Ministry and the Trade
Ministry, aims to help women cooperatives, established for or by especially the
victims of domestic violence.
The
EU has provided some 3.3 million euros to the project.
“We
formed a women’s cooperative in [the southern province of] Mersin with Turkish
and migrant women. We are producing food products,” Mehmet Sarıca, the head of
Inogar Innovation Cooperative, told the daily on Nov. 29.
Sarıca
advised that the municipalities should be encouraged to buy the products of
these women’s cooperatives.
The
Terra Development Cooperative is an institution that applied for the project.
“We focused working on migration, development, fight against poverty, and
social policies,” said Çağıl Öngen Köse, the head of the cooperative.
“We
also conducted projects for women living in shelters with their children,” she
said.
Gülsüm
Soyak is the head of a cooperative established to help women with disabled
children. “We have an atelier where women learn needlecraft while their
disabled children make ceramics under the guidance of special teachers,” she
said.
The
cooperative aims to enable the mother and the child socialize with the public,
while the women earn their money by selling the clothes they produce.
The
institution opened a drying center in the Finike district of the southern
province of Antalya where women make flour out of spinach and beet. “The
women’s cooperatives should be given the chance to sell their products to
public institutions,” she added.
Source:
Hurriyet Daily News
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Egypt
chairs African Peace and Security Council session on women
Sami
Hegazi
December
01 2021
Egypt’s
Ambassador to Ethiopia and Permanent Representative to the African Union, Ahmed
Omar Gadو chaired the last session of the African
Peace and Security Council in November under the Egyptian presidency.
The
meeting addressed the issue of women and their role in peace and security, and
the progress made in the agenda of women on the African continent and their
role in maintaining peace and security.
The
Egyptian Ambassador reviewed national efforts in this regard, especially
efforts to promote women’s participation in political and economic life in
Egypt.
He
also stressed the need to redouble efforts on the continent to support the
involvement of women, and the need to pay special attention to this issue in
light of the efforts to recover from the pandemic, in order to prevent the
doubling of the consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic on women and the neediest
groups.
He
also called for strengthening international partnerships with the African Union
and its Member States to push forward the role of women on the continent.
Source:
Daily News Egypt
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