Baroness Afshar
Politics scholar and ‘people’s peer’ who fought for women’s rights both within and outside Islam
BARONESS AFSHAR, who has died aged 77, was an Iranian-born academic who saw a place for feminism in even radical forms of Islam, as professor of Politics and Women’s Studies at the University of York and, since 2007, a crossbench member of the House of Lords.
Haleh Afshar was a secular Muslim until the backlash in the West against Islam after 9/11 led her to identify firmly as a Shi’a and campaign against Islamophobia.
Educated in Britain, she returned home to work as a civil servant and journalist, but left Iran after upsetting the Shah in a gossip column, and politely sidestepped recent invitations to return.
Settling in Yorkshire and marrying a British fellow academic, she wrote extensively on the role of women in Iran and the Middle East, analysing the denial of rights to women without presenting them as passive victims.
Haleh Afshar argued that neither feminism nor Islam should be seen as monolithic, and linked the need for women to have access to education with all Muslims having the right to interpret the Qur’an for themselves. Latterly, with herself as a role model, she urged teachers in Britain to understand that most Muslim girls aspired to far more than an arranged marriage and domesticity.
By 2009, she was rated one of Britain’s 20 most successful Muslim women, her influence recognised in her appointment as one of the first batch of “people’s peers”.
She served on Home Office working groups on engaging with women, preventing extremism, and drugs policy; she was a founding member of the Muslim
Women’s Network and an active member of the Women’s National Commission; she chaired the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies and held high office in the United Nations Association; and she was a visiting professor in Islamic Law at Robert Schuman University, Strasbourg.
Haleh Afshar was born in Tehran on May 21 1944 to Hassan Afshar and the former Pouran Khabir. Her maternal grandmother refused to wear the chador, while her mother campaigned for Iranian women to have the vote – but advised her daughter that the best way to get results was to be diplomatic and hold good parties. Haleh readily admitted that diplomacy and patience were not her strongest qualities.
Aged 14, while attending the École Jeanne d’arc in Tehran, she read Jane Eyre in French and determined to go to England. Boarding at St Martin’s School, Solihull, she reckoned her adopted country “dark and drab”, finding solace in chocolate.
She took her A-levels at David’s College, Brighton, where she “partied like mad”, rode pillion on Ranulph Fiennes’s motorcycle and won tickets to see The Beatles through her skill at poker.
Interviewed for a place at Girton College, Cambridge, she reckoned it “worse than boarding school”, and instead read Social Sciences at York, graduating in 1967. She went on to take a diploma in Comparative European Law at Strasbourg and a Cambridge PHD in Land Economy.
Back in Iran, she worked as a senior research officer with the Ministry of Co-operatives and Rural Development, educating women in outlying villages. “They were not aware of the Islamic rights they had: the right to property, payment for housework, all sorts of things.”
She caused a stir by publicly disagreeing with a minister over land reform, but it was her parallel role as a writer with the English-language newspaper Kayhan International that led to her leaving Iran in a hurry.
One of her columns, in 1974, made a passing reference to a relationship between one of the Shah’s sisters and a younger man; she realised she had overstepped the mark, and when she tried to renew her passport to leave the country it was declared “lost”.
Fortunately the husband of one of her cousins was even better connected, and the passport was “found” after he threatened to report the official in question to the Shah for preventing her covering a conference he was bound for in England. She attended the conference, and never returned.
Haleh Afshar took up a lectureship at Bradford University, then in 1985 moved to the University of York, initially lecturing in Health Economics. She joined the Department of Politics and Centre for Women’s Studies in 1987, taking up her chair 12 years later. Since 2011 she had been professor emeritus.
Her peerage came through her work with the Women’s National Commission, the former Labour Cabinet minister Patricia Hewitt urging her to join the upper house to “get things done”.
She played an active part for the rest of her life, dividing her week between Westminster and supervising her postgraduate students.
Her numerous books include Women in the Middle East (1993), Islam and the Post-revolutionary State in Iran (1994), Women and Politics in the Third World (1996) and Islam and Feminism (1998). She was on the editorial boards of 10 academic journals. She was appointed OBE in 2005. Haleh Afshar married Maurice Dodson, who became professor of Mathematics at York, in 1974. He survives her, with their son and daughter.