Interview with Baroness Haleh Afshar – Muslim feminist, professor, British politician

“There are so many prejudices that cover the words ‘Muslim woman’ that a Muslim woman must always begin by saying who she is not before she is able to explain who she is and what she does.”

Haleh Afshar is so tiny that I almost trip over her the first time we meet, in the bustling lobby of the British parliament as I swing my bags off the security scanners a little too enthusiastically. “Being small is an enormous advantage,” she says, waving away my apologies with a mischievous wink as I follow her along dark carpeted corridors. “People always underestimate me,” she adds over her shoulder, nodding a friendly hello to a passing colleague, a looming Brit in linen jacket and matching tie who shuffles by, dwarfing her in his shadow.

Named one of the twenty most successful Muslim women in the UK, Baroness Haleh Afshar – author, journalist, professor of women’s studies, politics and Islamic Law, British parliamentarian and founder of the Muslim Women’s Network – is as short as her CV is long.

Haleh is a self-described Muslim feminist born in Tehran to a liberal, privileged Iranian family of academics and politicians. Her grandmother refused to wear the veil and her mother campaigned for a woman’s right to vote. “Being a feminist comes with the blood,” she smiles as we settle knee-to-knee in the deep blue two-seater couch in her office. I remark that, to many westerners, the words ‘Muslim’ and ‘feminist’ seem rather contradictory, perhaps even mutually exclusive.

“That’s because generalisations always hide the truth,” she shrugs. “Generalisations close the mind rather than opening it. Defining someone as Muslim entails many hidden generalisations that prevent you from taking the next step. It is interesting: there are so many prejudices that cover the words ‘Muslim woman’ that a Muslim woman must always begin by saying who she is not before she is able to explain who she is and what she does.”

Photos by Jillian Edelstein

Haleh’s razor-sharp intellect and eagerness to learn has defined her life from an early age. At fourteen, emerging from a luxury childhood of nannies, private schools and servants while growing up in France and Iran, she asked her parents to be sent to boarding school in England. “I’d read the book Jane Eyre and realised just how unrealistic my life was. I knew it wasn’t what I wanted; I wanted to stand on my own two feet. So I told my father that I wanted to attend boarding school in England. He agreed, and that summer my parents drove me all the way from Tehran to England. When we got here, my father put the money for my return flight in an account and told me I could return whenever I wanted.”

Haleh didn’t return. She made England her home, first studying at the University of York, where she met her future husband, the New Zealander Maurice Dodson, and later at Cambridge University, where she obtained her PhD.

And even though she now calls England ‘home’, it is clear that Iran is never far from her mind. “I went back to Iran in my late twenties for a while and worked in Tehran as journalist and civil servant in the field of land reform.”

But Haleh was critical of the Ayatollah Khomeni’s view on women, calling it “unIslamic” and has written extensively on Iranian politics, Islam and feminism. She admits that it is no longer safe for her to return to her country of her birth.

Still, Iran continues to define her. “As a teacher of Islamic law, I can tell you that Muslim women have many rights that are embedded in Islam, but which they did not exercise because they did not have access to education – Islamic education – for so long. The moment the hierarchy began to build, after the death of the Prophet, men began to claim the right of interpretation and analysis of the teachings, and women were excluded.”

Her eyes light up with a mischievous glint. “Since the nineteenth century, however, Muslim women have become increasing agitated about their rights. The most wonderful thing about being born in the twentieth century is that men now accept it as part of life that women will be troublesome,” she laughs.

Women’s rights run a red thread throughout Haleh’s life. She had the courage to forge a path beyond her own culture and country; she negotiated with her father to avoid and arranged marriage while studying and she famously declared motherhood to be ‘de-skilling’ and difficult to combine with a career.

Yet Haleh now sits before me a proud mother and doting grandmother who talks passionately about the joys of her large eclectic family and their chaotic Sunday lunches.

“I didn’t plan to get pregnant,” Haleh admits. “I was seven months along with Molly before I even realised I was pregnant. So there I was: I still wanted to do all the things I was committed to, but I had to find a way to make it all work.”

And she did. Having just given birth, she taught from her hospital bed. “One of my students had a van, and he would round up all the others and drive them to the maternity ward. I’d teach them while they sat around my hospital bed. I was simply multi-tasking,” she grins. “Once we had one child, I wanted another, so I had my two children within three years.”

Combining motherhood with a career, as she already knew, wasn’t easy. “One of the reasons for the inequalities in today’s labour market is that housework still isn’t recognised as work,” she points out.

“A couple of years ago I asked the British government, in the House of Lords, which is lead by a woman, ‘why don’t you pay wages for housework?’ to which I got the usual reply that it would diminish women. She frowns dismissively: “absolute nonsense!”

What was most difficult about motherhood for Haleh? “In Iranian culture, your mother is your mother, and you are proud of her. When my own children became teenagers and began to reflect on my ‘oddness’ as their mother – this foreign, outspoken woman – I couldn’t cope with that. I always told them: ‘I am the best mother you will ever get’.”

Afshar admits that if she weren’t married to a Westerner who understood how Western teenagers behave, she couldn’t have coped. “My students were never rude to me, ” she laughs, “so I thought ‘I know the younger generation; they’re lovely!’”

Her laugh fades, and she stares into the distance. “The adjustment to the way in which teenagers rebel here was very difficult. But I never pretended to the kids that it was easy or that I had all the answers. Sometimes we just fought like cats and dogs, but we always kissed and made up afterward. It was never a permanent state of being angry.”

At sixty-seven, Haleh now calls herself ‘a little old lady’, although I suspect that if we were having this talk walking along a country road, and we happened to pass a muddy puddle, she would be the first to jump in. Her exuberant energy always seems just about to burst the surface.

“I’ve always loved old age!” she exclaims. “I’ve done extensive research amongst women of the ‘third age’ here in the UK. Not about the usual stuff like poverty or health,” she says, waving away the topics like pesky flies, “but about kinship, family and relationships. It was an extremely moving experience. I spoke to an African-Caribbean woman who told me: ‘I now have roots in this country. I came and had ten children!’ She obviously felt a great sense of belonging and contentment here.”

The conversation turns to Haleh’s extended family, and she is clearly a great believer in the importance of these relationships and her sense of belonging.

“In our family, we are completely recreating the old tribal Persian culture. Every Sunday we all have lunch together – brothers, in-laws, children, grandchildren…it is absolute chaos! But it’s great – they’re all growing up together, the way we did as children. Of course being part of an extended family requires enormous commitment, but sharing the sadness and happiness of a bigger group means it is not only more demanding but also more rewarding.”

“People who have experienced this deep connectedness between generations are very different people to those who have only heard or read about it,” Haleh points out.

I see don’t see a little old lady in Haleh but a mischievous girl and wise matriarch, I tell Haleh, to which she replies with her signatory booming laugh: “But I am a little old lady! I’ve never had worries about being old,” she shrugs. “You see yourself aging, you see your face crinkling, and you think, ‘ok, so this is the pathway’. But I’ve never been beautiful, so my wrinkles don’t bother me. Now I think: ‘old people are like me and I like it.’ Some of my friends are fighting age – as an active occupation – but that’s just not what I want to spend my time on.”

Does she have other advice to share?

“This whole love business is overrated,” she states without a second’s hesitation. “There is this whole ethos surrounding romance that I think is very counter-productive to women because it assumes, almost from your school days, that you must have a lover.,” she frowns, “It starts very young, this whole idea that not having a boyfriend is a terrible thing. Girls and women define themselves by whether or not they have a lover. It’s terrible.”

But what should we do about it? “Learn to say no, to whatever it is you don’t want to do. And that holds for men as well as women,” she points out. “But more so for women…Learn to say ‘these are the boundaries, take it or leave it’. Coming to the UK as a young Muslim girl taught me to set and respect my own boundaries – maybe at a much younger age than I would have done had I grown up in my own culture.”

Haleh grins. “I didn’t have a boyfriend or go to bed with anyone at university, and by what I heard from my friends, the boys were rather incompetent anyway.” She winks as she jumps off the couch, slapping my knee. “Come on, let’s go! There’s a bill under discussion and I want to make sure I know what is being said,” the little old lady in Haleh nowhere to be seen.

Haleh Afshar
DOB: 21.05.1944
Date of Interview: 16 May 2011
Location: London, UK