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16 November 2022FeaturesInfluential Women in IPMuireann Bolger

Finding a creed of tolerance

Saiful Khan’s worst brush with intolerance occurred after the London terrorist attacks in 2005, when a colleague at his law firm said that there “must be something” inherent in Islam that supported such violence.

“A highly educated person said this, and it was completely Islamophobic,” reflects the senior patent attorney and member of IP Inclusive, who is a practising Muslim.

Despite the passage of time, the shock that an intelligent co-worker could harbour such ill-conceived and uninformed notions is still evident in his voice.

“These terrorist organisations prey on people’s frailties to motivate them to take an extreme position where they’ve got nothing to live for,” he says. “That reflects on the vulnerability of the human condition, rather than something to do with any one religion. Lots of people do lots of bad things in the name of x, y, and z.”

A flare-up of intolerance

Khan is not alone in his experience, however. Religious intolerance is on the rise, with a total of 76,884 racially and religiously aggravated offences recorded in the UK in 2021, up 15% from 2020, according to figures released by the police force in England and Wales.

In the aftermath of the COVID-19 outbreak, the United Nations felt compelled to warn against a rise in religious hatred and intolerance.

“The pandemic has caused a flare-up in existing religious intolerance in many countries. I am alarmed to see the upsurge in incitement to hatred, scapegoating religious or belief communities, including Christians, Jews, and Muslims for the spread of virus,” noted the UN Special Rapporteur on freedom of religion or belief, Ahmed Shaheed in April 2020.

And it seems the legal sector is not immune to this trend, according to a September 2021 study by diversity specialist, Rare Recruitment.

The summary report, One of us? The experience of Jews and Muslims in City Law, showed that Jews and Muslims have experienced antisemitism and Islamophobia at many leading UK firms, with 71% of the Jewish interviewees reporting having experienced antisemitism, and 50% of the Muslim lawyers encountering Islamophobia.

A wake-up call

Commenting on the findings, Raph Mokades, chief executive of Rare, cautioned that these findings should be a wake-up call for many firms.

“This research shows that antisemitism and Islamophobia both exist in law firms, and that Jews and Muslims are affected,” he warns.

“Firms would do well to acknowledge their existence and explicitly to say that discrimination based on religious heritage is as unacceptable as that based on ethnicity or gender, and to monitor outcomes for Jewish and Muslim heritage lawyers.”

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