I am a British Pakistani Muslim woman, which means I spend half the time being told by the world that I am held back by my religion and the other half of the time, that I’m not religious enough.
Many young Muslim women growing up in Britain today are the daughters of first-generation migrants and, like me, these women are brought up in households where culture is held onto even more tightly than in their native country, for fear of losing it. This results in Muslim women in Britain arguably experiencing stricter restrictions than their global counterparts and feeling conflicted about living up to these expectations and finding their own individual identity.
Post 9/11, the perception of Islam changed rapidly in Britain. Muslims were suddenly thrown into the limelight for all the wrong reasons and their day-to-day life was heavily scrutinised. While Muslim men were increasingly being perceived as villains, Muslim women were by default the new victims – and over the years that followed, I realised Muslim girls needed positive role models more than ever.
It was a mixture of this responsibility and the sudden shift in the global perception of Islam which prompted me to learn more about the role of women in my religion. Slowly, I realised that my faith was no longer a personal matter. Instead, how I chose to speak about my religion and behave would either conform to, or challenge, existing stereotypes. I had a choice of either staying on the train when the Muslim man got on or disembarking with others.
It was around this time that the opportunity to participate in the BBC documentary Muslims Like Us came along. The show was dubbed the "Muslim Big Brother" as it relied on the premise of 10 strangers living in a house together – but rather than arguing over who made breakfast, the 10 days were spent debating crucial issues relating to Islamic values, with the intention to highlight the fact that Muslims are not a monolithic community.
I was initially sceptical of the medium and declined the show. I never considered myself a “Muslim representative” and was afraid of the backlash I would face as a result. When I shared these fears with my father, he simply responded: “I didn’t raise you to be weak and I didn’t raise you to be stupid. Just be yourself and you’ll be fine.” He advised me to see the show as an opportunity to reach a larger audience and counteract misrepresentations and I eventually accepted the offer.
The show presented a diverse range of Muslim women in Britain today: some refused to attend a karaoke party and others refused to pray in the conventional Islamic manner. Interestingly, the response to both the "liberal" and the "conservative" women was similar: the females who chose not to cover, like myself, were judged and criticised from within the Muslim community for not being religious enough while the visibly Muslim females were judged and criticised from outside the Muslim community for being submissive. Though the response I received was overwhelmingly positive, I was advised daily on social media that in order to represent Muslim women in the West, I should remove my nail varnish and cover my hair. To this, I merely responded with my mother's words: "You must first put a hijab on your heart and only then should you put a hijab on your head."
After the considerable interest in the show, I began working on the BBC documentary Islam, Women and Me, which was screened earlier this week. The question at the heart of the film was whether it is possible to be a strong, independent woman and a good Muslim. Muslim women are undeniably the most spoken-for group in the world. It seems that society is so busy ventriloquising for this silenced and allegedly oppressed minority group, it denies them an actual platform where they can speak for themselves. That was why the show was so important.
My very first meeting was with a young woman who had chosen to leave the faith altogether, who told me she felt there was no equality between the sexes in Islam and so had renounced the religion in order to have her voice heard, or "not disappear", as she put it. Although it was a challenging conversation, it addressed the wider perception of women being oppressed in the Muslim community around Britain and it armed me with the questions I wanted answers to during the rest of my exploration of the issue. I had to meet women who felt that the religion was inherently misogynistic, as well as the women who found liberation through Islam, to try to understand why such a dichotomy exists.
This led me to talk to a group of black Muslim women at a dinner I attended to mark Black History Month. There, a young woman passionately described why she wore the hijab: “Whatever my God tells me to do, He gives me a choice. I wear this out of love. This is my identity and I own it.” By talking to them as well as to Yassmin Abdel-Magied, a self-proclaimed Muslim feminist activist, I realised that British Muslim women are not being restricted by religion but by culture.
I hoped that after the show was broadcast, the Muslim community would begin to consider why the patriarchal aspects of Islam are emphasised at the expense of more fundamental values of equality. And as for the non-Muslim community, I hoped the show would create awareness that there are thousands of Muslim women who love their faith and are dynamic, powerful, ambitious, content and confident feminists and are tired of having to defend themselves and their religion daily.
Ultimately, British Muslim women need to reclaim the narrative that is currently being written for them – they need to be empowered to read, question, challenge and make informed choices. Only when we learn about our rights will we be able to exercise them and only then will things get better for future generations of young Muslim girls in the West.
Mehreen Baig began blogging as queenmehreen.com and is a TV and radio commentator on Muslims in Britain
The Brutalist
Director: Brady Corbet
Stars: Adrien Brody, Felicity Jones, Guy Pearce, Joe Alwyn
Rating: 3.5/5
Attacks on Egypt’s long rooted Copts
Egypt’s Copts belong to one of the world’s oldest Christian communities, with Mark the Evangelist credited with founding their church around 300 AD. Orthodox Christians account for the overwhelming majority of Christians in Egypt, with the rest mainly made up of Greek Orthodox, Catholics and Anglicans.
The community accounts for some 10 per cent of Egypt’s 100 million people, with the largest concentrations of Christians found in Cairo, Alexandria and the provinces of Minya and Assiut south of Cairo.
Egypt’s Christians have had a somewhat turbulent history in the Muslim majority Arab nation, with the community occasionally suffering outright persecution but generally living in peace with their Muslim compatriots. But radical Muslims who have first emerged in the 1970s have whipped up anti-Christian sentiments, something that has, in turn, led to an upsurge in attacks against their places of worship, church-linked facilities as well as their businesses and homes.
More recently, ISIS has vowed to go after the Christians, claiming responsibility for a series of attacks against churches packed with worshippers starting December 2016.
The discrimination many Christians complain about and the shift towards religious conservatism by many Egyptian Muslims over the last 50 years have forced hundreds of thousands of Christians to migrate, starting new lives in growing communities in places as far afield as Australia, Canada and the United States.
Here is a look at major attacks against Egypt's Coptic Christians in recent years:
November 2: Masked gunmen riding pickup trucks opened fire on three buses carrying pilgrims to the remote desert monastery of St. Samuel the Confessor south of Cairo, killing 7 and wounding about 20. IS claimed responsibility for the attack.
May 26, 2017: Masked militants riding in three all-terrain cars open fire on a bus carrying pilgrims on their way to the Monastery of St. Samuel the Confessor, killing 29 and wounding 22. ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack.
April 2017: Twin attacks by suicide bombers hit churches in the coastal city of Alexandria and the Nile Delta city of Tanta. At least 43 people are killed and scores of worshippers injured in the Palm Sunday attack, which narrowly missed a ceremony presided over by Pope Tawadros II, spiritual leader of Egypt Orthodox Copts, in Alexandria's St. Mark's Cathedral. ISIS claimed responsibility for the attacks.
February 2017: Hundreds of Egyptian Christians flee their homes in the northern part of the Sinai Peninsula, fearing attacks by ISIS. The group's North Sinai affiliate had killed at least seven Coptic Christians in the restive peninsula in less than a month.
December 2016: A bombing at a chapel adjacent to Egypt's main Coptic Christian cathedral in Cairo kills 30 people and wounds dozens during Sunday Mass in one of the deadliest attacks carried out against the religious minority in recent memory. ISIS claimed responsibility.
July 2016: Pope Tawadros II says that since 2013 there were 37 sectarian attacks on Christians in Egypt, nearly one incident a month. A Muslim mob stabs to death a 27-year-old Coptic Christian man, Fam Khalaf, in the central city of Minya over a personal feud.
May 2016: A Muslim mob ransacks and torches seven Christian homes in Minya after rumours spread that a Christian man had an affair with a Muslim woman. The elderly mother of the Christian man was stripped naked and dragged through a street by the mob.
New Year's Eve 2011: A bomb explodes in a Coptic Christian church in Alexandria as worshippers leave after a midnight mass, killing more than 20 people.
Mercer, the investment consulting arm of US services company Marsh & McLennan, expects its wealth division to at least double its assets under management (AUM) in the Middle East as wealth in the region continues to grow despite economic headwinds, a company official said.
Mercer Wealth, which globally has $160 billion in AUM, plans to boost its AUM in the region to $2-$3bn in the next 2-3 years from the present $1bn, said Yasir AbuShaban, a Dubai-based principal with Mercer Wealth.
“Within the next two to three years, we are looking at reaching $2 to $3 billion as a conservative estimate and we do see an opportunity to do so,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Mercer does not directly make investments, but allocates clients’ money they have discretion to, to professional asset managers. They also provide advice to clients.
“We have buying power. We can negotiate on their (client’s) behalf with asset managers to provide them lower fees than they otherwise would have to get on their own,” he added.
Mercer Wealth’s clients include sovereign wealth funds, family offices, and insurance companies among others.
From its office in Dubai, Mercer also looks after Africa, India and Turkey, where they also see opportunity for growth.
Wealth creation in Middle East and Africa (MEA) grew 8.5 per cent to $8.1 trillion last year from $7.5tn in 2015, higher than last year’s global average of 6 per cent and the second-highest growth in a region after Asia-Pacific which grew 9.9 per cent, according to consultancy Boston Consulting Group (BCG). In the region, where wealth grew just 1.9 per cent in 2015 compared with 2014, a pickup in oil prices has helped in wealth generation.
BCG is forecasting MEA wealth will rise to $12tn by 2021, growing at an annual average of 8 per cent.
Drivers of wealth generation in the region will be split evenly between new wealth creation and growth of performance of existing assets, according to BCG.
Another general trend in the region is clients’ looking for a comprehensive approach to investing, according to Mr AbuShaban.
“Institutional investors or some of the families are seeing a slowdown in the available capital they have to invest and in that sense they are looking at optimizing the way they manage their portfolios and making sure they are not investing haphazardly and different parts of their investment are working together,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Some clients also have a higher appetite for risk, given the low interest-rate environment that does not provide enough yield for some institutional investors. These clients are keen to invest in illiquid assets, such as private equity and infrastructure.
“What we have seen is a desire for higher returns in what has been a low-return environment specifically in various fixed income or bonds,” he said.
“In this environment, we have seen a de facto increase in the risk that clients are taking in things like illiquid investments, private equity investments, infrastructure and private debt, those kind of investments were higher illiquidity results in incrementally higher returns.”
The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, one of the largest sovereign wealth funds, said in its 2016 report that has gradually increased its exposure in direct private equity and private credit transactions, mainly in Asian markets and especially in China and India. The authority’s private equity department focused on structured equities owing to “their defensive characteristics.”
COMPANY%20PROFILE
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The specs
Engine: 3.0-litre six-cylinder turbo
Power: 398hp from 5,250rpm
Torque: 580Nm at 1,900-4,800rpm
Transmission: Eight-speed auto
Fuel economy, combined: 6.5L/100km
On sale: December
Price: From Dh330,000 (estimate)
Analysis
Members of Syria's Alawite minority community face threat in their heartland after one of the deadliest days in country’s recent history. Read more
TOURNAMENT INFO
Fixtures
Sunday January 5 - Oman v UAE
Monday January 6 - UAE v Namibia
Wednesday January 8 - Oman v Namibia
Thursday January 9 - Oman v UAE
Saturday January 11 - UAE v Namibia
Sunday January 12 – Oman v Namibia
UAE squad
Ahmed Raza (captain), Rohan Mustafa, Mohammed Usman, CP Rizwan, Waheed Ahmed, Zawar Farid, Darius D’Silva, Karthik Meiyappan, Jonathan Figy, Vriitya Aravind, Zahoor Khan, Junaid Siddique, Basil Hameed, Chirag Suri
Dr Afridi's warning signs of digital addiction
Spending an excessive amount of time on the phone.
Neglecting personal, social, or academic responsibilities.
Losing interest in other activities or hobbies that were once enjoyed.
Having withdrawal symptoms like feeling anxious, restless, or upset when the technology is not available.
Experiencing sleep disturbances or changes in sleep patterns.
What are the guidelines?
Under 18 months: Avoid screen time altogether, except for video chatting with family.
Aged 18-24 months: If screens are introduced, it should be high-quality content watched with a caregiver to help the child understand what they are seeing.
Aged 2-5 years: Limit to one-hour per day of high-quality programming, with co-viewing whenever possible.
Aged 6-12 years: Set consistent limits on screen time to ensure it does not interfere with sleep, physical activity, or social interactions.
Teenagers: Encourage a balanced approach – screens should not replace sleep, exercise, or face-to-face socialisation.
Source: American Paediatric Association
Our family matters legal consultant
Name: Hassan Mohsen Elhais
Position: legal consultant with Al Rowaad Advocates and Legal Consultants.
The biog
Favourite colour: Brown
Favourite Movie: Resident Evil
Hobbies: Painting, Cooking, Imitating Voices
Favourite food: Pizza
Trivia: Was the voice of three characters in the Emirati animation, Shaabiyat Al Cartoon
More on Quran memorisation:
