RIYADH: The founder of an anti-discrimination charity for Muslim women in the UK spoke at a Riyadh event about her journey from being a housewife to becoming a member of the House of Lords.
Baroness Shaista Gohir, OBE, spoke to an audience at the British Embassy about how she was inspired to represent her community and built a charity to help resolve the issues they face.
“When I was putting on the TV, you would only see Muslim men commenting on behalf of the British Muslim diaspora, whether it was Pakistanis or just Muslims generally,” she said, referencing a time when public discussions about Islam in the UK were intensifying after the 2005 London bombings.
She described how she contacted some of the most prominent Islamic societies in the country and was “pretty much rejected by them.”
Not put off by the rejection, Gohir went on to found her own organization — the Muslim Women’s Network.
“I think they probably thought, I’m a housewife at home, what can she contribute? And I think that’s another lesson; I think a lot of people underestimate women.
“If someone’s a CEO or a manager or a director, they might think, wow, she did something brilliant, but women at home have a skill set that you can apply that to anything, and if you’ve got drive and willpower, you can do anything.”
The Muslim Women’s Network carries out research and advocacy work, aiming to tackle anti-Muslim discrimination in the household and workplace.
It offers faith-sensitive counselling services and a helpline, conducts workshops, and guides policy.
“Everything we do is looking at how Muslim women are discriminated against in their families, in their communities and in wider society,” she said.
Gohir spoke about how she has managed to influence government policy from the inside after being appointed a member of the House of Lords in 2022.
“In terms of policy influencing, I would say it’s a lot easier now that I’m in the House of Lords.
“From the outside, you might write a letter, you might not get a response. You might get a response six months later.
“Now it’s a little bit easier because the minister’s probably thinking, ‘Oh my God, I’m going to see her in the corridors, she wrote to me last week, I better reply to her.’ So I get my responses a lot faster.”
The women’s rights campaigner believes that faith-based discrimination is currently underreported in the British legal system.
This, she said, is partly due to an issue with how the police record crimes — if a discriminatory crime is believed to have been race-based, the police may not record it as faith-based.
“I hope that the law will change,” she said, explaining that one of her aims with the Muslim Women’s Network is to change the law to include “dual” reporting that will allow discrimination to be recorded as both race- and faith-based.
