British Barrister Sultana Tafadar is Educating The World About What It Means To Be A Muslim Woman in the Modern Age

Here’s how the first hijab-wearing criminal barrister in Britain is changing laws and breaking glass ceilings…

Earlier this year barrister Sultana Tafadar was appointed Queen’s Counsel. When she was given this honour she became the first hijab-wearing criminal barrister in Britain to receive the distinction. Less than 2 per cent of the entire legal profession in the United Kingdom reach this rank and those that receive it go through a rigorous and lengthy vetting process. Therefore becoming Queen’s Counsel is considered to be the highest mark of excellence a lawyer can attain in the country.

It’s a recognition from her peers that Sultana has more than earned with her tireless work in the fields of human rights and international law. Her focus as a criminal justice barrister, specialising in counter terrorism and national security issues, has seen her take on a number of high profile cases, and she has been instrumental in creating important legal precedents. Case in point: a campaign she has taken on to reverse a new law in France that bans advocates from wearing the hijab. It’s an issue that is, understandably, close to Sultana’s heart and she has turned to the United Nations in hopes of proving that the French government is, in fact, breaking international law.

Sultana, who was born and raised in Luton, a town in southeast England, is the daughter of parents who immigrated to the UK from Bangladesh. From an early age, she set her sights on using the power of the law to help empower the less fortunate. It was a dream she always felt was attainable seeing as she grew up surrounded by Muslim women in her family who proudly wore their hijabs as they pursued professional careers in teaching and medicine. And now, as she continues fighting the good fight, she herself has become an international role model to a new generation of women, women of colour and women of faith looking for heroines to show them how it’s done.

Harper’s Bazaar Arabia (HBA): When did you first realise that working in the world of law and justice was your life’s calling?

Sultana Tafadar (ST): I guess growing up, as a young girl, from a racial and religious minority background, I would always see injustices and feel that, if I could, I would want to remedy those. I wanted to be in a position to right those wrongs, to make sure that equality and fairness aren’t just empty words. So it was just a natural gravitation toward the law. For me being in the courtroom is the ultimate arena in which to give effect to those principles of fairness, equality, and justice.

HBA: During your career has there been one case that you really felt was a game-changer for you?

ST: It’s not always necessarily about winning the case. It’s the process, and ensuring that the process is fair. And in the line of work that I do, working on issues surrounding counter terrorism and national security work, the odds are really stacked against your client.

HBA: So how do you mentally prepare for cases that might look like a lost cause?

ST: It’s about ensuring that everybody has a right to a fair trial, irrespective of what they’ve been accused of. It’s ensuring that the system is fair, and the process is fair. That we start off from a presumption of innocence. Everybody has that basic human right to be represented, to have their voice heard, because they may not have the skills, the tools, or the ability to speak for themselves. And when you go through that process, a lot of my clients, even when they’re convicted at the end of that process, they feel like they’ve had a fair chance that they’ve had the opportunity to be heard. And that’s what gives me the motivation to do the work that I do.

HBA: And why did you decide to go into this particular niche of law, one that deals with counter terrorism and national security?

ST: It is perhaps some of the most challenging work. You’re always dealing with a new law or cutting edge law, so something that’s perhaps being used for the first time. From an intellectual perspective it’s quite invigorating. They’re also factually very complex. When you sit with some of the people I’ve represented, their stories are absolutely fascinating. You find yourself weaving together this narrative, a mix of the law and the facts.

Also, a lot of them are very high profile with a lot of media attention. So you are working in very pressurised circumstances. But I enjoy all of that, I enjoy the pressure, I enjoy grappling with these new areas of law, and I enjoy dealing with the facts of these cases.

HBA: And how do you feel about being a role model on so many different fronts? As a woman and as a Muslim, who is very much in the public eye representing her sex, her culture, and her faith in a very high profile and, for some, triggering job?

ST: You do have to deal with different preconceived notions that people have about you. So you constantly find that you’re battling those ideas. When I was more junior, I used to travel around the country and go to different courts, and people just couldn’t understand that I was a barrister. They would ask if I was an interpreter, they would ask if I was a defendant.

But today when I am working on high profile cases, it does help to break down those misconceptions. People now see that I am not a one-hit-wonder or part of some equality and diversity drive. They start realising there is some merit to you, to the work that you do, and that you do have the ability to operate at the highest levels. Those are some of the struggles I’ve had to overcome. But it’s ongoing.

Only around 575 women [since 1597] have ever been appointed Queen’s Counsel. If you look at people from black or ethnic minority backgrounds, there are about 34 women that have been appointed. And in terms of women that wear the hijab, there are just two of us. And I’m the first one at the criminal bar. So getting your foot in the door is incredibly competitive. And it gets harder and harder as you go up. In that sense, I hope I have broken through that glass ceiling.

HBA: I know you are currently working on some cases that deal with wearing the hijab in the workplace. Why is taking up this issue so important to you?

ST: This is ongoing work that I’m doing. Because, once again, it’s women who face intersectional discrimination. Because they’re from a minority background, because they’re of a religious faith, and because they’re women. You have laws, policies and practices that just keep battering these women who are already occupying the lowest strata of society, and there’s no justification for it. The hijab is a core part of somebody’s faith. And so it’s an infringement of their right to practice religion, which is a fundamental human right. It impacts women in terms of their race and ethnicity as well as being an assault on freedom of expression.

And ultimately, it’s a women’s rights issue. The right of women to make their own decisions in all spheres of public and private life. It just seems absurd that you can have patriarchal structures dictating to a woman that she can’t wear an item of clothing. It’s not anybody’s business whether a woman can or can’t wear an item of clothing; it is just an individual choice. It’s unjustifiable and there’s no place for this in modern society. On top of that, the knock-on effect is you have women or girls who are now excluded from public and private life. It seems that Muslim women are an easy target, unfortunately. And there needs to be a shift in this perception.

HBA: You have also approached this issue from a completely different avenue as well when you launched the Modest Fashion Festival in London a few years ago…

ST: I came up with the idea when I was sitting in a high-security prison with a client. I looked around my surroundings and I thought I need a little bit of glamour in my life. I need to do something that’s creative that I can engage in. And I always enjoyed fashion. Around the time I’d been to a few shows, and I thought, this looks like quite good fun and I could do a good job. And so that’s where the idea was born. We ended up holding quite a large show in London. We even had Halima Aden fly in from the U.S. for the event. The idea behind it was to actually champion the presence of modest fashion within mainstream media. And to say, there is a global market that’s not catered to. And it attracted, according to our PR team, a global audience size of about 1.65 billion. So it went a bit viral.

HBA: You are such a pillar within your community, on so many different levels. But how are you, other than leading by example, helping the next generation of women to one day step into your shoes?

ST: I mentor quite a lot of young women coming into the profession. I’m also the chair of the Muslim Lawyers’ Action Group. We have programmes running on how to support people from minority backgrounds to pursue judicial positions, to help them into the bar.

And I am in the process of setting up something called the Girls Human Rights Hub. I have a 9-year-old daughter, Safiyah, and she’s very much into women’s and girls’ rights. I thought it would be great to have this hub where they have information about all the issues that affect them. So just by looking at it they can know their rights when it comes to education, to sports. Then from a young age, they can start learning about what the law says about them, and what their human rights are. That way they are empowered.

It’s about building that knowledge base. From the outset they will have the confidence to tackle these types of issues. That way they don’t have to feel like an outsider, and they don’t have that impostor syndrome. Women and girls have the right to make their own choices and I hope I embody that to some extent.

Images by David Jensen

From Harper’s Bazaar Arabia’s June 2022 issue.