Editorial
We did not want to focus on Shafilea Ahmed’s murder in our Special Report today. It was a harrowing story; one you couldn’t leave behind. What exactly is this level of shame — or, shall we say, brutality or hypocrisy — that forces parents to kill one of their own, in front of their other children.
The details of the trial were gory enough but the day of judgement was the worst. One could almost hear the cries of Shafilea’s siblings as they heard the verdict against their parents. A strange case where one felt angry about the perpetrators and at the same time felt sorry for the children for having lost their parents in this way.

overview
Town between cultures
The real devil behind the many incidents of honour crimes among the British 
Pakistani communities is a strong resistance to immersion in western culture and the spectre of ‘arranged marriage’
By Murtaza Ali Shah
The cold-blooded murder of the 17-year-old, Warrington-based Shafilea Ahmed at the hands of her parents, has grabbed headlines in the media over the past nine years before the British justice system eventually brought her killers to court. Shafilea’s offence, it transpired, was that she had been immersed in the British culture, against the wishes of her highly conservative Muslim parents of Pakistani origin. More importantly, perhaps, she had resisted an arranged marriage in her ancestral homeland. 

“Our agencies need to be 
more culturally aware and 
less culture-sensitive”
— Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, who was born of parents from a small town near Rawalpindi, Pakistan, and rose to become Britain’s first female Muslim minister in David Cameron’s Cabinet in 2010
When Baroness Sayeeda Warsi stood outside 10 Downing Street in a shalwar kameez before the first Coalition Cabinet meeting in May 2010, she made headlines for a number of reasons. Her inclusion in the Cabinet was hailed by equality and race campaigners but it was also a publicity stunt for Prime Minister David Cameron who wanted to send out a strong message that under him the party was on course to change its policies and image and that Tory was no more a “nasty” brand.

perspective
Community woes
The girl who would have turned 26 this year was betrayed not by the foreign 
culture but by her own folks within her very own home
By Anaam Raza
Shafilea Ahmed was the daughter of taxi driver Iftikhar Ahmed who, at the time of her birth, was married to a Danish woman named Vivi Lone Andersen. Years later, she was to be killed for having become “westernised”.
Andersen was Ahmed’s first wife whom he married in 1982 in Copenhagen where they also had a son. “Iftikhar was a very happy boy who enjoyed dancing, drinking beer and going to discos,” she is quoted as saying.

Local interest
A visit to the ancestral village of Shafilea Ahmad reveals much about the 
attitudes of the locals
By Waqar Gillani
Uttam, a backward village in Punjab, with lots of rain water collected in its unpaved streets, has another (completely contrary) side to it: the occasional large, multi-storey villas that indicate the existence of some connection to its several inmates who are now settled abroad in Scandinavian countries and the United Kingdom. 
Some eight kilometres from the part of the GT Road that cuts through Kharian in district Gujrat, at least one member of almost every other household in Uttam is based overseas. 

At the other end of the spectrum
A dynamic entrepreneur, Shazia Saleem represents a rare breed of British 
Pakistani women
In the midst of the din around Shafilea Ahmed’s tragic end, it may be relevant to look at stories within the British Asian communities, of women who have made a success of their lives by combining the best of eastern and western values. A young, educated business woman, Scotland-based Shazia Saleem is just a case in point. 
Much of Shazia’s extended family migrated to the UK in the 1950s. Her father had passed away when she was only two years old and she was raised by her mother and her maternal uncle who hail from Faisalabad, the industrial hub of Punjab, Pakistan. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Editorial

We did not want to focus on Shafilea Ahmed’s murder in our Special Report today. It was a harrowing story; one you couldn’t leave behind. What exactly is this level of shame — or, shall we say, brutality or hypocrisy — that forces parents to kill one of their own, in front of their other children.

The details of the trial were gory enough but the day of judgement was the worst. One could almost hear the cries of Shafilea’s siblings as they heard the verdict against their parents. A strange case where one felt angry about the perpetrators and at the same time felt sorry for the children for having lost their parents in this way.

The judge Evans almost said what needed to be said: “You squeezed Shafilea between two cultures, the way of life she saw around her and wanted to embrace and the one you wanted to impose upon her by intimidation, bullying and physical violence… You killed one daughter, but you have blighted the lives of your remaining children.”

It is perhaps too early to judge if a verdict like this is going to serve as a deterrent to what has come to be known as honour killing in the UK, though one only hopes that it does. If the system could not prevent the murder of Shafilea, this verdict and the lessons learnt might save the lives of other girls from all communities where such crimes are common.

For us in Pakistan, this might as well serve as an eye-opener. It is this misplaced cultural ‘value’ — where the woman serves as the repository of family honour — that the Pakistanis take with them as they go abroad in search of greener pastures. We are as guilty of honour crimes within the country that are justified in the name of tribal and feudal customs.

It is this hypocritical value system that makes women so vulnerable in the Western cultures.

As said earlier, we did not just want to focus on this particular murder. We wanted to focus on the actual crimes as much as the psychological, muted pressures on the girls who are born and raised abroad. At the same time, we wanted to focus on the positive examples, the Pakistani women who could serve as role models for other women in Western societies. Baroness Warsi, whose village in Pakistan is not too far from Shafilea’s, is an example worth emulating.

An effective legal system, a forward-looking society back home and positive shining examples among women in their own community may all come to the rescue of those who stand torn between cultures.

 

 

 

 

overview
Town between cultures
The real devil behind the many incidents of honour crimes among the British 
Pakistani communities is a strong resistance to immersion in western culture and the spectre of ‘arranged marriage’
By Murtaza Ali Shah

The cold-blooded murder of the 17-year-old, Warrington-based Shafilea Ahmed at the hands of her parents, has grabbed headlines in the media over the past nine years before the British justice system eventually brought her killers to court. Shafilea’s offence, it transpired, was that she had been immersed in the British culture, against the wishes of her highly conservative Muslim parents of Pakistani origin. More importantly, perhaps, she had resisted an arranged marriage in her ancestral homeland.

Shafilea’s murder has raised many a pertinent question, especially for the Pakistani communities based in the UK. Whereas the media hastened to term this particular case as another incident of “honour killing”, the investigating team as well as the state officials have both been cautious with their use of words. Following the completion of the murder trial, Detective Superintendent Geraint Jones said, “For me, it’s a simple case of murder. This is a case of domestic abuse… Domestic abuse is, sadly, something which the police have to deal with too often. It transcends culture, class, race, and religion.”

In today’s Britain, the terms ‘honour crimes’ and ‘forced marriage’ are both conveniently attributed to the Pakistanis (Muslims, obviously). The media here sees the former as a consequence of the latter: when women are accused of bringing a ‘bad name’ to their family by ‘overriding’ the ‘decrees’ of their elders, especially regarding an arranged marriage within the baradari (or community), or when they have a liaison with a person of another culture or religion, they are simply killed off.

A recent BBC Panorama poll on the attitudes of the younger Asian generation (in the UK?) found that 75 per cent of the males and 63 per cent of the females surveyed were in agreement that a family must take care of its collective ‘honour’ (izzat in Urdu). Those aged between 16-24 years (73 per cent) were more likely to agree on this than the ones between 25-34 years of age (64 per cent). 18 per cent of those interviewed (both male and female) agreed that certain actions of a woman are a reasonable justification for corporal punishment.

These may just be hasty conclusions. If we look deeper into the cultural folds of the British Asian community, we find that the real issue is actually ‘forced marriages’, and it is not specific to Pakistanis alone; a majority of cases have been reported among Indians and Bangladeshis based in the UK. Unfortunately, though, Pakistanis top any such statistics or data collected by the British government and campaigners and charities working to deal with the menace.

Dr Aisha Gill, a Reader in Criminology at the University of Roehampton, who provided expert evidence for the prosecution in the case against Shafilea’s parents, spoke to TNS on the issue. She was of the view that the government should adopt a more proactive approach in preventing violence against women among South Asian communities.

She said that Shafilea’s murder could easily have been prevented were it not for a series of misjudgments on the part of the policy makers regarding the implementation of domestic violence laws and guidelines in dealing with potential youngsters and vulnerable adults. She also outlined “a catalogue of mistakes” made by the state agencies in this connection.

Dr Gill said that no attention had been paid to why Shafilea would always talk about her suffering but never seek the help of police or social services. “Even though Shafilea was a teenager living in constant fear of her parents, no thought was ever given to finding a way to arrest and prosecute the perpetrators of domestic violence, despite a number of independent witnesses.”

According to the statistics provided by the Forced Marriage Unit (FMU), set up by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) to give advice and support to potential victims, 1,468 such instances were reported in 2011. 78 per cent of these instances involved female victims and 22 per cent male victims. Moreover, 18.9 per cent of the victims were from London, 13.4 per cent from West Midlands, and 12.7 per cent from North West. 66 instances (4.5 per cent) involved those with disabilities. 56 per cent cases involved people of Pakistani origin, 7.8 per cent those from Bangladesh, 6.2 per cent from India and 1.5 per cent from Afghanistan.

This year, so far, the FMU claims to have provided advice/support in 594 individual cases. 14 per cent of these involved victims below age 15; 31 per cent involved victims aged 16-17; 35 per cent involved victims aged 18-21; 87 per cent were about female victims and 13 per cent males. 46 per cent of the cases were about individuals from Pakistan, 9.2 per cent from Bangladesh, 7.2 per cent India, 2.7 per cent Afghanistan, 1.5 per cent Turkey and the rest from African and Middle Eastern countries.

The 2010 statistics quote cases involving individuals from Pakistan (52 per cent), Bangladesh (10.3 per cent), India (8.6 per cent), Africa (5 per cent), Turkey (1.7 per cent), Iran (1.3 per cent), Iraq (1.2 per cent) and Afghanistan (1 per cent).

No one better than Jasvinder Sanghera, a Sikh, knows how ill-fated are the women who dare to go against the wishes of their families in her community in the UK. A middle-aged lady who is married with three children, Sanghera says she was only 14 when her parents showed her the photo of the man they had chosen to be her husband. She remembered her four sisters who had all had bad marriages. So she rebelled and ran away.

Years later, she is still on the run — she hasn’t disclosed her whereabouts lest her folks will get hold of her.

Nonetheless, Sanghera has had the gumption to co-found Karma Nirvana, a community-based project that runs several refuge centres across the UK for those South Asian women who leave their homes in order to avoid a forced marriage.

Talking exclusively to TNS, Sanghera says Shafilea’s trial should serve as a wakeup call to all Asian communities across the length and breadth of Britain. “Such incidents are taking place across the myriad communities — most of them Asian. It means these attitudes are being handed down through generations.

“Shafilea’s is sadly one of the many (over 600) calls we receive on Karma Nirvana’s Helpline every month, out of which at least 50 per cent are from individuals of different Asian origins. Most common complaints are violence, forced marriage and, as Shafilea’s case shows, the risk involved in becoming intimate with the British culture. “How can a family put honour before their own child?” she asks, assertively.

According to the figures compiled by Karma Nirvana — which are often at variance with those provided by the other charities — in the first half of the current year, the charity has already received 3,900 calls, averaging 557 calls a month. 47 per cent of the callers were under the age of 21, and 12 per cent were males “who [had] resisted honour-based violence as well as a forced marriage”. 36 per cent were first-time callers, 36 per cent had rejected their family’s decisions for them, 23 per cent had said no to an arranged marriage, 20 per cent had said no because they were dating the person of their own choice.

38 per cent of these callers were British Pakistanis, 4 per cent were British Indians, 7 per cent British Bangladeshis and 4 per cent White British.

Sajida Mughal, who has been running a project called Mujboor (by JAN Trust) that deals exclusively with Pakistani women, says the figures of abuse compiled by the government and the charities are just the tip of the iceberg. “Many cases go unreported and so the real figures are expected to be a lot higher.”

She further says, “Generally, the victims do not want to incriminate their family members, as this would result in a complete breakup with them and their community. Besides, the victims are often [financially as well as emotionally] dependent on the perpetrators.”

Mughal claims that a majority of the victims are “young British Pakistani girls, with family origins in Mirpur, Azad Kashmir. …The perpetrators (i.e. the parents) use religion to endorse their actions. This is absolutely uncalled-for. Islam condemns forced marriage and provides the woman with the right to say no.”

 

 

 

“Our agencies need to be 
more culturally aware and 
less culture-sensitive”
— Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, who was born of parents from a small town near Rawalpindi, Pakistan, and rose to become Britain’s first female Muslim minister in David Cameron’s Cabinet in 2010

When Baroness Sayeeda Warsi stood outside 10 Downing Street in a shalwar kameez before the first Coalition Cabinet meeting in May 2010, she made headlines for a number of reasons. Her inclusion in the Cabinet was hailed by equality and race campaigners but it was also a publicity stunt for Prime Minister David Cameron who wanted to send out a strong message that under him the party was on course to change its policies and image and that Tory was no more a “nasty” brand.

It was noted that Warsi, Britain’s first Muslim woman Cabinet minister, chose to wear this particular dress to make a point — chiefly, to show that she took complete pride in her culture and belongings and also that she is at home with her multiple identities. She has held dialogues with world leaders over issues concerning Britain’s national interests and, at the same time, she has a family in Dewsbury whose everyday affairs she is deeply involved with. She is equally at ease delivering speeches in English to the upper crust and switches comfortably to Urdu and Punjabi — the languages of her ancestors.

Britain is her home but Warsi remains engaged in a number of charitable and educational projects in Pakistan, especially in a town near Rawalpindi where her parents come from.

Warsi has always spoken against ‘Islamophobia’ in the UK and has secured measures from the government to protect the Muslims in the country from racists. She has also spoken against a culture of complacency within the British Muslims communities, be it on the issue of children’s grooming or their marriage.

Speaking exclusively with TNS, following the court’s verdict on Shafilea Ahmed’s murder trial, Warsi said that the “so-called honour-based violence is unacceptable. We should condemn the practice.

“To begin with, we must stop calling murders such as that of Shafelia as ‘honour killings’. That would imply that the act should somehow be excused, put into context or even justified because it was undertaken in the name of ‘honour’,” she said. “However, the supposed pretext of ‘honour’ that the perpetrators use to justify their act is a farce. The reality is that honour violence is domestic violence and honour killings are murders.”

Warsi believes there are lessons to be learnt from the murder of Shafilea Ahmed. “The responsibility lies with every single one of us — every mother and father, every political and faith leader, every person from every walk of life. Our agencies need to be culturally aware but be less culture-sensitive. In other words, too often, the agencies overlook what takes place within certain communities because they think that to criticise or probe is to undermine or attack the people coming from diverse cultural backgrounds. The agencies must focus solely on supporting victims and tackling perpetrators. We must remember that domestic violence, forced marriages and murders happen across cultures and ethnicities, but if these crimes take place within a certain community that does not make it any less of an offence.”

Warsi said the issues around forced marriages and other forms of open and subtle discriminatory practices in certain communities should be openly dealt with — “Shying away is not the option.”

She admitted that there is resistance from some communities that do not want any one meddling with their cultural practices.

“Honour crimes and forced marriage are against the teachings of all major religions of the world,” she said. “I have always maintained that turning a blind eye to these crimes and practices is an inverse form of racism, motivated by not wanting to offend other cultures or appear racist. So, when we think of the terrible killing of a Shafelia Ahmed, we must not forget that there are no honour killings; there are only killings.”

— Murtaza Ali Shah

 

 

 

 

 

perspective
Community woes
The girl who would have turned 26 this year was betrayed not by the foreign 
culture but by her own folks within her very own home
By Anaam Raza

Shafilea Ahmed was the daughter of taxi driver Iftikhar Ahmed who, at the time of her birth, was married to a Danish woman named Vivi Lone Andersen. Years later, she was to be killed for having become “westernised”.

Andersen was Ahmed’s first wife whom he married in 1982 in Copenhagen where they also had a son. “Iftikhar was a very happy boy who enjoyed dancing, drinking beer and going to discos,” she is quoted as saying.

The couple stayed in Denmark till 1986 when, bowing to pressure from his relatives Ahmed agreed to an ‘arranged marriage’ with cousin Farzana (complicit in Shafilea’s murder).

The story that has made headlines around the world and garnered several hours and inches of valuable airtime and column space even during the recent London Olympics is sad as much as it points to a stark reality.

Shafilea was a resilient child who ran away from her home at the age of 11 and, a few years later, in September 2003. Her parents did not report her ‘absence’ this time over; it was a schoolteacher who had overheard Shafilea’s younger siblings discussing her disappearance, who reported it.

When the police came to investigate, Iftikhar Ahmed told them with disgust that Shafilea had fled in her “western clothes”.

Earlier, her parents flew down Shafilea to Pakistan, on a one-way ticket, in order to marry her off to an older cousin but when Shafilea drank bleach at her grandparents’ home as an act of resistence, she was brought back to Warrington for emergency treatment.

A few weeks later, her parents killed Shafilea brutally in front of her siblings by gagging her with a plastic carrier bag. Why, because she had (supposedly) brought bad name to the family.

The last words that Shafilea is said to have heard were those of her mother who was shouting to her husband: “Ethay khatam kar saro!” (Just finish her).

Shafilea’s younger sister Alesha, a prime witness in the case, told the court that she saw her father punching her sister’s dead body in the chest after he had killed her. Also, she spotted her mother preparing sheets, bin bags and rolls of tape in the kitchen so that Shafilea’s dismembered body could be dumped in the river.

Due to massive decomposition, the exact cause of Shafilea’s death still remains a mystery. But, suffice it to say that this cold-blooded ‘honour killing’ was nothing but a ‘vile murder’ because her body was only identifiable from her dental records and jewellery.

In today’s Britain, which is a melting pot of world’s communities and cultures, a host of Pakistani immigrants have integrated well, but there are numerous households where rural and feudal mindsets are still a potent force.

“Shafilea isn’t the only one to have suffered this kind of a fate,” says Sameem Ali, a Manchester councillor who herself was forced into a marriage in Pakistan when she was barely 13.

“Such incidents do not happen overnight,” she adds. “These are well planned out. The authorities must look into them without fear of being labelled as racists.”

In the present-day UK, most victims of honour killings are nearly always Muslim women, mostly of Pakistani origin. Though, a high-profile case in 2006 involved a 20-year-old Iraqi Kurd, named Banaz Mahmod, who left her violent husband to be with her boyfriend, only to be killed by her father and uncle. This, despite the fact that she had repeatedly told the police her life was in jeopardy.

Recent research by the Iranian and Kurdish Women’s Rights Organisation (IKWRO) has found that more than 2,800 incidents of ‘honour’-based violence, which include cases of acid burns, abduction, mutilation and beating, were reported to police across the UK last year. But those figures are considered a vast underestimation, given that 13 of the 52 police forces did not respond to the charity’s request for a breakdown in November 2011.

Talking to TNS, IKWRO’s campaigns officer Fionnuala Ni Mhurchu says, “These figures are important because they demonstrate that this is a serious issue affecting many people who are likely to suffer high levels of abuse before they seek help.”

Nazir Afzal, chief prosecutor and the man who brought the case to a successful conclusion, seconds Mhurchu by saying that the degree of honour crime in Britain — including murders meant to preserve a family’s ‘honour’ within their own community — is unknown.

He estimates that there are 10,000 forced marriages in Britain every year, and that a measure of multicultural sensitivity is likely part of the problem. “Forced marriage is the earthquake and what follows is a tsunami of domestic and sexual abuse, child protection issues, suicide and murder. If we can tackle forced marriages, we can prevent all the other things from happening.”

The latest Home Affairs Committee report on forced marriages in 2011 validates the same point that recent years have seen a progressive and constant increase in the number of forced marriages dealt with by the government’s Forced Protection Unit (FMU).

In 2008, at the time the previous report came out, FMU’s caseload was about 300 per year. This increased to 430 in 2009 and remained at approximately 400 in 2010 and 2011 and 594 between January-May this year, out of which 44 per cent involved children under 18.

Nowhere does Islam say that the honour of a family, community or an entire village is represented by the morality, chastity and proper behaviour of its women alone. Yet, the rate of incidents of suicide among women of South Asian descent is three times the national average. Sadly, for a lot of these women, suicide is the only way out.

Having said that, a more worrying reality is the prevalence of these attitudes and beliefs among the younger generation. About two-thirds of the young British Asians are said to conform to their elders’ notions of ‘honour’.

A poll for BBC Panorama suggests that out of the 500 young Asians questioned, 18 per cent felt that certain behaviour such as girls not obeying their father and wanting to leave an existing or prearranged marriage justified corporal punishment. Thankfully, only 3 per cent were found to believe that honour killings are justified.

Fortuitously forced marriages and a breach of the Forced Marriage Protection Order (FMPO) are due to be criminalised in the UK when legislation comes into effect next year. But the maximum sentence for the offence is still to be decided.

Critics like Dr Muhammad Abdul Bari who is also a parenting consultant and a founding member of The East London Communities Organisation, is of the view that criminal proceedings will only serve to deter the victims and ultimately result in forced marriages being driven underground. On the other hand, there are advocates who say it will act as a deterrent — just as it is doing in places where it has been recognised as a crime, such as Austria, Germany, Belgium, Cyprus and Denmark.

Plan UK, the British arm of the global children’s charity, has launched the nation’s first specialist film and lesson plan for use across the schools that have long shied away from discussing the issue, even though hundreds of girls go missing every year — they are cast away (usually for a forced marriage) during the summer holidays.

When Judge Evans sentenced Shafilea’s parents, he aptly concluded: “You squeezed Shafilea between two cultures, the way of life she saw around her and wanted to embrace and the one you wanted to impose upon her by intimidation, bullying and physical violence… You killed one daughter, but you have blighted the lives of your remaining children.”

About 98 per cent of the population of Warrington is white and only 0.8 per cent is that of people of Asian origins. It is no surprise that most of Shafilea’s friends were white and that their culture was what Shafilea warmed up to. But the girl who would have turned 26 this year was betrayed — not by the foreign culture but by her very own folks within her own home.

The writer is an Editorial Assistant at The News in London and can be contacted at anaam.raza@gmail.com

caption

A workshop on forced marriages.

 

 

 

 

 

Local interest
A visit to the ancestral village of Shafilea Ahmad reveals much about the 
attitudes of the locals
By Waqar Gillani

Uttam, a backward village in Punjab, with lots of rain water collected in its unpaved streets, has another (completely contrary) side to it: the occasional large, multi-storey villas that indicate the existence of some connection to its several inmates who are now settled abroad in Scandinavian countries and the United Kingdom.

Some eight kilometres from the part of the GT Road that cuts through Kharian in district Gujrat, at least one member of almost every other household in Uttam is based overseas.

Ironically, even though these overseas Pakistanis have been living and working abroad through a couple of generations, their mindset belies imbibing any positive values within the foreign culture. In fact, they become more resistant to change overtime. Iftikhar Ahmed, a British Pakistani and a former native of Uttam village, is just a case in point. Almost a decade ago, he and his wife Farzana killed their 17-year-old daughter Shafilea Ahmed in their hometown Warrington, because she had become too “westernised.” The murder was proved only recently, when a British court of law sentenced them to 25 years of life imprisonment.

Uttam is home to a rural community from pre-partition times when Sikhs were in majority. “Within this community of around 200 families, over 80 per cent have at least one member of the family working abroad, usually driving a cab,” says Imtiaz Ahmad, a resident of the village who is settled in Holland for the past 30 years now.

The smallish convenience stores such as Madni and Hilal Chicken, one-room set-ups crammed into the narrow and congested streets of the village, speak volumes for the poor living conditions of the locals. Those settled abroad are guilty of being illiterate and, as Ahmad puts it, “confused. They don’t properly teach their children about their religion and culture when they should, and later they force them not to blend in the western culture.”

Ahmad, who drives a taxi in Amsterdam together with his two young sons, says he did not take his wife and daughters with him to Holland. “You should be able to decide on your own what is good for you and your family. I decided to keep the women in my family away from the [western] culture because that could have an adverse effect on their religious values,” he says.

Hafiz Shahzad, a resident of Kharian, recalls a few incidents in Denmark where the women in the family were killed by the father or the husband because of their moral excesses.

Prior to her killing, poor Shafilea had made a visit to Uttam, in the year 2003, when her uber-conservative parents tried to force her into marriage with an older relative. As a show of protest, Shafilea drank bleach and had to be taken to a local clinic where she was kept for many days.

Generally speaking, Kharian is one region which is most inclined towards a conservative version of Islam and its local culture associates womenfolk with a family’s ‘honour’. Every second school in the district offers special Quranic and Islamic education. This is true even of the English medium schools.

On a recent visit to Kharian, it was observed that the locals know about Shafelia’s incident but they avoid talking about it in public. Besides, they do not necessarily believe her parents did anything wrong by killing her.

vaqargillani@gmail.com

caption

Kharian is most inclined towards a conservative version of Islam. Photo by Rahat Dar

 

At the other end of the spectrum
A dynamic entrepreneur, Shazia Saleem represents a rare breed of British 
Pakistani women

In the midst of the din around Shafilea Ahmed’s tragic end, it may be relevant to look at stories within the British Asian communities, of women who have made a success of their lives by combining the best of eastern and western values. A young, educated business woman, Scotland-based Shazia Saleem is just a case in point.

Much of Shazia’s extended family migrated to the UK in the 1950s. Her father had passed away when she was only two years old and she was raised by her mother and her maternal uncle who hail from Faisalabad, the industrial hub of Punjab, Pakistan.

Over the years, Shazia’s family developed an affinity with Scotland’s close-knit local culture, its rich folk music and a passionate political history. (It is no wonder why more than 45,000 Pakistanis choose Scotland as their second home.) Her mother ensured that both Shazia and her elder sister, a high-flying London city law lecturer, receive due support and encouragement in pursuance of higher education. The family has long owned a chain of local restaurants, takeaways and shops based on Asian cuisine. This eventually meant that Shazia would grow up benefiting from both worlds.

Her mother inspired confidence in Shazia to become a well-groomed and independent person, and also insisted on adopting the best values of Asian culture. Shazia was able to speak Urdu fluently — a rarity among most British Asians her age. At a Business school, she studied Accountancy and Marketing before joining a successful web and media marketing company. “I had a few female cousins, older than me, who had studied away from home. So, when it was my turn to move out, there were no raised eyebrows or issues,” she tells TNS.

Her success story does not end here. All this autonomy and self-reliance was simply preparing her for the next big step towards Florence in Italy where she wanted to study Fashion. “I must admit that my family treated my decision with some trepidation initially,” she says. “They were concerned about me leaving a secure job in favour of a degree in Fashion. Actually, they didn’t see it as an industry. For them, it was a risky career choice.”

Shazia says she was determined to prove her detractors wrong and headed for London after finishing her education, to take up work with well renowned designer Betty Jackson. In 2007, she founded her own company in the city. Today, her hand-woven textiles and designs are sold around the world, from Los Angeles to London and Shanghai.

She was also recently hailed by Ernest & Young as a Future Entrepreneur. “In hindsight, I am sure my parents are proud of my achievements. And, I’m glad they pushed me into Business education without which I would have crashed in designing.”

Is her mother looking to find a good match for her, as most Pakistani parents do? “Oh, that’s a tricky one,” she says, laughing. “It’s true that my mother would love it if I had been married and worked as an accountant, preferably in Edinburgh, but I have never been pressurised by my family to settle down.”

This is a refreshing picture of a young British-Pakistani woman coming from an otherwise regular household. The extraordinary thing about the Saleems is they respect their women’s choices and are willing to give her her due space.

— Anaam Raza

 

 

  

 


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