On October 18, 2007 it
was announced that Haleh Afshar, an Iranian female professor, would be
created a Baroness and join the BHL as a non-party political peer. In this
article the life story of Professor Haleh Afshar as the First Iranian
Woman who got a Non-Political Seat in BHL would be briefly studied and
discussed.
HER LIFE
She was born in 1944 in
Tehran, Iran. Her father was late Hassan Afshar, a Professor of the
Faculty of Law at Tehran University.
She was an undergraduate
at the University of York, (a campus university in York, England) in the
1960s.
She worked as a
journalist before and after her initial studies at York, where she was to
return after receiving her PhD from Cambridge University.
Haleh Afshar has served
on the British Council and the United Nations Association of which she is
Honorary President of International Services. Haleh Afshar is now a
Professor in Politics and Women's Studies at the University of York. She
is also Visiting Professor of Islamic Law at the International Faculty of
Comparative Law, University of Strasbourg. Haleh Afshar is the founder and
Chair of the Muslim Women’s Network, and she is an advisor to the British
Government on public policy relating to Muslim women and Islamic law.
She is married to
Maurice Dodson who is a Professor in the Department of Mathematics at The
University of York, UK. (His research interests are Metrical Diophantine
Approximation, Harmonic Analysis and Applications to Signal Processing,
Chaos and Biology).
HER WORKS
In addition to working
in the fields of development studies and women's studies Haleh Afshar has
also been teaching and researching on issues concerned with Islam and
Politics, women and conflict as well as race and equality. She has edited
a volume entitled Iran: A Revolution in Turmoil, Macmillan 1989 , and has
written a book entitled Islam and the Post Revolutionary State in Iran,
written under the pseudonym (in Persian: Naam-e-Mossta-aar) Homa Omid,
Macmillan 1994 and Islam and Feminisms, Macmillan 1998.
There is an active group
of research students working with Afshar in these fields and the current
work include issues relating to women and work in Iran, women war violence
and survival in Palestine, Lebanon, Vietnam and Sri Lanka, Islam and
politics in Turkey and Islamist women in Turkey, as well as research
concerning Muslim women in the UK in terms of their faith, their lived
experiences and the impact of education on their lives.
Haleh Afshar is also
part of a group working on issues related to race and ethnicity. The group
recently completed its work on an ESRC research project to conduct a
comparative study of empowerment and dis-empowerment for British women in
their third age. ESRC, The Economic and Social Research Council, is the
UK's leading research and training agency addressing economic and social
concerns.
HER
REMARKS
In addition to her
academic studies, she has written widely as a journalist on Muslim women
and the War on Terror.
In 2002, a year after
9/11, she said in an interview with Stephen Lewis of the Press that,
'Fundamentally, the world hasn't changed at all. It is getting harder to
get on an aeroplane. But I don't think really that the world is any
different than it was a year ago. Terrorism did not start on September 11,
and it won't stop there. Perhaps what September 11 really succeeded in
doing was making us aware of just how dangerous a world it was that we
already lived in. There were both winners and losers from the tragedy that
was 9/11. The winner was the United States arms industry, which has grown
fat on the profits of fear. The main losers - apart, of course, from the
victims who lost their lives, and the families who were left behind to
grieve - have been ordinary Muslims. Ultimately there is only one way to
bring an end to terrorism, and it is not by going to war. It is by
tackling the injustices that are at the root of terrorism.'
In October 2007, after her appointment in the BHL, she said that, “I was
really very surprised and honored to be considered a People's Peer. In
fact, I was lost for words when I was told. I shall certainly be fighting
for equal opportunities for minorities and for women as I have always
done.”