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Further to your term being extended last year, what do you expect the final months of your posting to hold? One defining feature of my term here has been the unpredictability of events so I am somewhat reluctant to venture anything in the area of expectations. However, we were delighted to be able to host an in-person event for St Brigid’s Day this year and are looking forward to the St Patrick’s Day season. This is always an intense and fruitful period of activity for the Embassy. Through high-profile visits by Ministers and various events hosted by the Embassy, we have an opportunity to reach influential audiences and communicate key Government messages. And what comes next? The most difficult question at the end! What I know for sure is that I and my wife Aisling will depart London in August and will return to Ireland. After 38 wonderful years in the Department of Foreign Affairs, I have decided to retire from the civil service. I have been fortunate in my career and worked with great colleagues and mentors. Aisling and I have had four very fulfilling assignments abroad – Madrid, Boston, Washington and London – and made some great friends along the way. It’s time to let the next very talented generation of Irish diplomats – women and men – assume positions of leadership in the Department. Happily, there are a lot more women in the ranks of senior leadership than there were when I joined the Department in 1983. I have some vague ideas about what I might do in the future but no hard plans. I don’t know whether to be excited or terrified by the idea of writing on a blank page – but I am looking forward to it.
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Meet Roja Fazaeli Dr Roja Fazaeli, Associate Professor of Islamic Civilisation, Near & Middle Eastern Studies gives insights into her research and the Trinity Scholar at Risk network My research has and particularly the ways they have functioned as agents in addressed women’s negotiating the authority of courts, community, and religious rights in Muslim leadership structures. I’m interested in looking how Muslim majority contexts, in particular Iran, women’s agency and authority can be reconceived through as well as different articulations archival and contemporary studies of European court of Islamic feminisms. I have also proceedings, and particularly in understudied European worked, and continue to work, on peripheries. female religious authority in historic and modern contexts, both in the Middle Eastern and North Africa region and in European contexts. Outside of my research I’ve also been quite involved with the Scholars at Risk (SAR) network. Trinity College Dublin became a member of the SAR network in 2009, and in the past eleven In the past few years I have increasingly become interested in years has hosted seven at-risk scholars by providing them with questions of how migrant women, and in particular temporary academic and study positions. As a SAR Muslim women, access justice in European member Trinity has helped these scholars to courts, and also when and where they take escape dangerous conditions and to continue recourse in informal arbitrations, such as Trinity’s Scholar at Risk their important work. In return, the scholars shari’a councils. My interest in the topic have contributed to Trinity through their started when I was asked to be an expert has helped scholars to own work and research. witness on Islamic law at a court case in escape danger and to Ireland seven years ago. The judge asked continue their Alongside hosting scholars, Trinity has me if there was polygamy in Islamic law, important work also run a SAR public lecture series with and wanted a yes or no answer. There was little contributions from at-risk scholars from Iran, attention paid to the complex nature of Islamic law Iraq, and Eritrea, as well as a SAR speaker tour and and its schools of thought. I realized from the experience that conference, the latter of which was opened by President new gendered forms of knowledge are needed to address Michael D Higgins. Trinity’s Department of Near and Middle access to justice for Muslim women in Europe. Eastern Studies has also worked with students on SAR’s Academic Freedom Monitoring Project. In my work to advance the study of Islamic feminisms I have often focused on Islamic family laws, and there, quite often, the framing question is: how do these laws discriminate against women? This immediately puts Muslim women in positions of being either passive objects of law, or else victims – rather than agents with their own access to authority and power. Trinity’s SAR efforts receive wonderful support from the office of the Associate Vice Provost for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion, and college is currently hosting an at-risk scholar from Afghanistan. Securing sufficient funding to host these at- risk scholars is often a challenge, however, and alumni support for this work on academic freedom is always welcome. My current research seeks to address this by exploring how Muslim women have sought access to justice in Europe,
