Haleh Afshar, Baroness Afshar

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The Right Honourable

The Baroness Afshar

OBE FAcSS
Official portrait of Baroness Afshar crop 2.jpg
Member of the House of Lords
Lord Temporal
Assumed office
13 December 2007
Life Peerage
Personal details
Born (1944-05-21) 21 May 1944 (age 77)
Tehran, Iran
NationalityBritish
Spouse(s)
Maurice Dodson
​
(m. 1974)​
Children2
Personal
ReligionShi'a Islam

Haleh Afshar, Baroness Afshar, OBE FAcSS (Persian: هاله افشار‎; born 21 May 1944) is a British life peer in the House of Lords.

Early life[]

Afshar grew up in a privileged family based in Tehran, Iran. With a father involved in academe and politics, her parents were part of the establishment. The family moved to Paris in the late 1940s, where her father represented the government. Until she was fourteen, she had a nanny who bathed and dressed her; at that point she read Jane Eyre and began to realise her privilege and how dependent on others she was. She persuaded her parents to allow her to go to England, where she attended a boarding school in Solihull, initially speaking no English.

Education[]

Career[]

Afshar is a professor of politics and women's studies at the University of York, England and a visiting professor of Islamic law at the Faculté internationale de droit comparé (international faculty of comparative law) at Robert Schuman University in Strasbourg, France. Afshar serves on several bodies, notably the British Council and the United Nations Association, of which she is honorary president of international services. She was appointed to the board of the Women's National Commission in September 2008. She has served as the chair for the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies. Afshar is a founding member of the . She has served on the Home Office's working groups, on "engaging with women" and "preventing extremism together".

She was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in the 2005 Birthday Honours.[1][2] for services to equal opportunities. On 18 October 2007 it was announced that she would be made a baroness and join the House of Lords as a cross-bench life peer. She was formally introduced into the House of Lords on 11 December 2007, as Baroness Afshar, of Heslington in the County of North Yorkshire.[3]

In March 2009, she was named as one of the twenty most successful Muslim women in the UK on the Muslim Women Power List 2009. The list was a collaboration between the Equality and Human Rights Commission, Emel Magazine and The Times, to celebrate the achievements of Muslim women in the UK.[4][5]

In April 2009, she was appointed an academician of the Academy of Social Sciences.[6]

Honours[]

In 2011, Afshar received an honorary doctorate from the University of Essex.[7]

In January 2013, Afshar was nominated for the Services to Education award at the British Muslim Awards.[8]

In 2017, Afshar received an honorary doctorate from the University of Bradford.[9]

Personal life[]

In 1974, Afshar married Maurice Dodson, an academic from New Zealand. They have two children together, Molly (born 1977) and James (born 1978). She initially thought motherhood was not for her, considering it to be "de-skilling" and incredibly difficult in Britain, where the system did not allow a woman to be both a mother and a worker. She was seven months pregnant before she realised her condition, but now considers her two children to be "the best things I ever did in my life".[according to whom?] She is a grandmother.

Afshar is the third generation of women not to veil; her maternal grandmother rejected the hijab. Her family wanted to extend possibilities for women, and Afshar was one of the first cohort of Iranian women to vote, feeling she was fulfilling her mother's wishes. Many of the people she grew up with were killed in the Iranian Revolution. She thinks it would be unwise to return to her homeland, having criticised Ayatollah Khomeni's stance on women, saying it was un-Islamic, and has been threatened because of this.

Works[]

Afshar has written extensively on Iran and Iranian politics both for academia and the media in Europe, the United States, the Middle East and South East Asia. Her books include Islam and Feminisms: An Iranian Case Study (Macmillan, 1998), and Islam and the Post Revolutionary State in Iran (Macmillan, 1994). She has also edited thirteen books on women and development.

  • Afshar, Haleh (1985). Women, work, and ideology in the Third World. London New York: Tavistock Publications. ISBN 9780422797108.
  • Afshar, Haleh (1985). Iran, a revolution in turmoil. Albany: State University of New York Press. ISBN 9780887061264.
  • Afshar, Haleh (1987). Women, state, and ideology: studies from Africa and Asia. Albany: State University of New York Press. ISBN 9780887063947.
  • Afshar, Haleh; Agarwal, Bina (1989). Women, poverty and ideology in Asia: contradictory pressures, uneasy resolutions. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire England: Macmillan. ISBN 9780333444092.
  • Afshar, Haleh (1991). Women, development, and survival in the Third World. London New York: Longman. ISBN 9780582034945.
  • Afshar, Haleh (1993). Women in the Middle East: perceptions, realities and struggles for liberation. Basingstoke: Macmillan. ISBN 9780333575659.
  • Afshar, Haleh; Maynard, Mary (1994). The dynamics of "race" and gender: some feminist interventions. London Bristol, PA: Taylor & Francis. ISBN 9780748402113.
  • Afshar, Haleh (1996). Women and politics in the Third World. London New York: Routledge. ISBN 9780415138536.
  • Afshar, Haleh (1998). Women and empowerment : illustrations from the Third World. New York: St. Martin's Press. ISBN 9780333719732.
  • Afshar, Haleh (1998). Islam and feminisms: an Iranian case-study. New York: St. Martin's Press. ISBN 9780312214326.
  • Afshar, Haleh; Barrientos, Stephanie (1999). Women, globalization and fragmentation in the developing world. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire New York: Palgrave Macmillam. ISBN 9780312216597.

References[]

  1. ^ "No. 57665". The London Gazette (Supplement). 11 June 2005. p. 9.
  2. ^ "Queen's Birthday Honours List". Retrieved 10 March 2008.
  3. ^ "No. 58543". The London Gazette. 17 December 2007. p. 18246.
  4. ^ The Muslim Women Power List 2009[permanent dead link]
  5. ^ Muslim Women Power List.
  6. ^ Afshar named Academician of the Academy of Social Sciences Archived 26 April 2009 at the Wayback Machine
  7. ^ "University of Essex Calendar". Archived from the original on 7 October 2012.
  8. ^ "Winners honoured at British Muslim Awards". Asian Image. 31 January 2013. Retrieved 1 November 2015.
  9. ^ "University honours seven at graduations".

External links[]

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