Sahar Aziz is a professor of law and Chancellor’s Social Justice Scholar at

Rutgers Law School Rutgers Law School is the law school of Rutgers University, with classrooms in Newark and Camden, New Jersey. It is the largest public law school and the 10th largest law school, overall, in the United States. Each class in the three-year J.D. pr ...

. Aziz argued that following the

9/11 attacks The September 11 attacks, commonly known as 9/11, were four coordinated Suicide attack, suicide List of terrorist incidents, terrorist attacks carried out by al-Qaeda against the United States on Tuesday, September 11, 2001. That morning, ...

, the Muslim community living in the U.S. was deprived of full legal protection and of the full benefit of their civil rights.

Biography

Sahar F. Aziz was born in

Cairo Cairo ( ; ar, القاهرة, al-Qāhirah, ) is the capital of Egypt and its largest city, home to 10 million people. It is also part of the largest urban agglomeration in Africa, the Arab world and the Middle East: The Greater Cairo metro ...

Egypt Egypt ( ar, مصر , ), officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, is a transcontinental country spanning the northeast corner of Africa and southwest corner of Asia via a land bridge formed by the Sinai Peninsula. It is bordered by the Mediter ...

and raised in the U.S. Aziz studied Middle East Studies at the University of Texas. She worked as clerk at the District Court of Maryland for Judge

Andre M. Davis Andre Maurice Davis (born February 11, 1949) is the former city solicitor for Baltimore and a former United States federal judge, United States circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. He was formerly a United ...

. Aziz also worked for private law firms as associate and at the

United States Department of Homeland Security The United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is the Federal government of the United States, U.S. United States federal executive departments, federal executive department responsible for public security, roughly comparable to the I ...

before becoming a full time professor.

Denouncing Islamophobia in the Global North

Aziz believes that in the

Western world The Western world, also known as the West, primarily refers to the various nations and state (polity), states in the regions of Europe, North America, and Oceania.

, Muslims as a group are assigned negative traits such as being violent and untrustworthy. Aziz described this attribution of negative traits to Muslims as a process of racialization, which took place in the U.S. after 9/11 terrorist attacks. One manifestation is that immigrants to the U.S. originally from Middle East and North Africa are perceived as forever foreign, according to Aziz. In the U.S., Aziz pointed out that the presidency of Donald Trump led to a backsliding of the rights of the Muslim community and to discrimination, such as for example bullying of Muslim children at schools. In Europe, the situation of the Muslim community is worse in comparative terms according to Aziz because fewer people practice religion in Europe compared to the U.S. Therefore pointing to religion as an excuse for unwelcome behaviour is less available to Muslims, because it is less central to the European legal tradition to start with.

Published works

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Aziz, Sahar Living people 1970s births Year of birth uncertain American women lawyers American women legal scholars American legal scholars Rutgers School of Law–Newark faculty