Wow – Maryam won a Journalist of the Year award yesterday.

I won “Journalist of the Year” for my blogging at today’s prestigious 2013 Dods Women in Public Life Awards. I was massively surprised (and pleased) given that other shortlisted candidates included “national treasure” BBC Olympics presenter Claire Balding.

Wow. Excuse my enthusiasm, but that’s really exciting. I’ve been following Maryam’s work for years and years, and I remember the days when the BBC kept phoning the Muslim Council of Britain for a comment while ignoring Maryam. I posted about it often. Those days are so over. Yesssssss!

Other winners at the award ceremony were the wonderful Malala Yousafzai (International Women’s Rights Champion); Michelle McDowell (Woman in Business); Rosemary Butler (Devolved Parliament or Assembly Member of the Year); Sanchia Alasia (Local Government Personality of the Year); Jo Swinson (MP of the Year); Meral Hussein-Ece (Peer of the Year); Denis Mukwege (Male Women’s Rights Champion); Fiona Logan (Public Servant of the Year); Francesca Martinez (Public Affairs Achiever of the Year) and Gee Walker (Voluntary Sector Achiever of the Year).

For more information on the winners, visit here.

By the way, a huge thanks to those who nominated me and also to those of you who read my blog which has now exceeded 2 million hits.

Here’s a photo of some of the winners at today’s ceremony. I’m the one with the ridiculous grin.

Massive congratulations, Maryam. I’m so proud to know you.

I’ve been following (and doing what I could to share and draw attention to) Maryam’s work for a long time – since 2004. I did a search at the ur-B&W and had to click “previous entries” a lot of times to get to the first ones.

One of the first ones is The Politics Behind Cultural Relativism, an International TV Interview that Maryam did with Fariborz Pooya and Bahram Soroush.

Bahram Soroush: You are absolutely right. When you talk about the West, it is accepted that there are political differentiations, that people have different value systems, that there are political parties. You don’t talk about one uniform, homogeneous culture. But why is it that when it comes to the rest of the world, suddenly the standards change? The way you look at society changes. It doesn’t make sense. But it makes political sense. We are living in the real world; there are political affiliations; there are economic ties; there are very powerful interests which require justifications. For example, how can you roll out the red carpet for the Islamic executioners from Iran, treat them as ‘respectable diplomats’ and at the same time dodge the issue that this government executes people, stones people to death, carries out public hangings, and that this is happening in the 21st century. It’s a question of how to justify that. So, if you say that cultures are relative; if you say that in Iran they stone people to death and they veil women because it is their culture, your conscience then is clean. This is the reason that we are seeing that something that doesn’t really make sense to anyone, and which they would not use to characterise anyone else in the Western world, they use it to characterise people from the third world. In fact it is very patronising, eurocentric and even racist to try to divide people in this way; to say, it’s OK for you. For example, to say to the Iranian woman that you should accept your fate because that’s your culture. This is part of the larger discussion of what lies behind this sort of thinking, but the motive is very political. [Read more…]