Muslim Women's achievement in Britian

Maleiha Malik teaches at the School of Law, Kings College, London. She studied at the University of London (LLB) and Oxford (Bachelor of Civil Law) and is also a barrister and a member of Grays Inn. She specializes in tort, jurisprudence and anti-discrimination law, with numerous publications in this field. In recent years she has offered nuanced and well-researched contributions on the ‘accomodation’ between Muslim faith needs and British liberal-secular values, interfaith relationships and Islamophobia.

In his Chatham House lecture in October 2004 Dr Williams, discussing the tension between individual rights and a minority community's rights in the liberal state, noted: "Maleiha Malik, a professional jurist of Muslim allegiance, has recently written at length on this conflict, arguing that, since we cannot just go back to conservative nationalism, and since the interests of minority groups are not adequately safeguarded by classical liberal principles of individual entitlement and non-discrimination, we need a more sophisticated model of the relation between the state and its minorities, which in turn requires some rethinking of the original picture of the state contracting with a mass of atomised individuals".

She was also quoted by the Archbishop in his famous 'shariah' speech at the Royal Courts of Justice in February 2008:"Maleiha Malik, following Alasdair MacIntyre, argues ...that there is a risk of assuming that 'mainstream' jurisprudence should routinely and unquestioningly bypass the variety of ways in which actions are as a matter of fact understood by agents in the light of the diverse sorts of communal belonging they are involved in".

Maleiha Malik is a former member of the governing council of the human rights body, Liberty. Since 1989 has has served on the editorial board of the international journal, 'Social and Legal Studies'. From 2000 to 2005 she was a member of the Home Secretary's Steering Group on the implementation of the recommendations of the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry. In March 2006 she participated in Georgetown University’s “Building Bridges" seminar. She was an important and hard-hitting contributor at the FCO-organised conference Engaging with the Islamic World, held in Istanbul in July 2006. She was also a speaker at the January 2007 event 'World Civilisation or a Clash of Civilisations’ organised by the Mayor of London. Her books include 'Feminism and Muslim Women' and 'Discrimination Law: Theory and Context’ (2008, co-authored with Nicholas Bamforth and Colm O'Cinneide).