PukhtunWomen

What can I say about Aneela Babar, besides the fact that she is an incredible woman and maybe is just about the smartest person I know! She has an impressive resume six pages long that actually needs an academician to interpret her myriad degrees, dissertations, research papers and books. I am just curious as to how and where she stores all her certificates of recognition.

Being such a down to earth, humble person I bet she just has her drawers stuffed, because I am pretty sure that should she ever wish to, her degrees and academic papers are sufficient to paper her whole house twice.

I first met Aneela online when she was busy with her efforts in collecting any information on the Khudai Khidmatgar movement and highlighting their passive resistance movement. She was visiting Pukhtun websites asking people if they could volunteer any information about Bacha Khan and his “Surkh Posh” workers.

Over the past ten years has made mark within the development and research sector being employed with non-governmental and international developmental agencies in South and South-East Asia.

She serves as a consultant for government and non-governmental organisations for Lao PDR, Indonesia, Thailand, Nepal, India and Pakistan, due to her skills in natural resource management, gender analysis in field methods, community-responsive development planning and environmental conflict resolution and mediation

Her work extends and enhances her academic training in development and cultural studies, at the same time making her academic research relevant to the development community at large, spanning several diverse areas including studies of migration and multiculturalism in Australia, racism and national identities; refugee issues, class, age, globalization, urban and social change.

With research interests in gender and migration, transnationalism, diaspora and religion, multiculturalism and intercultural relations, ethnographic and community based research, her passion seems to be promoting human rights, sustainable development and strengthening of civil society.

Her weekly editorials for The Post (Pakistan), are usually a thought provoking piece that make us search within ourselves for answers to the problems that plague our culture and society.

Aneela Holds a bachelor’s degree in Political Science and History and two masters degrees, one in Defense and Strategic Studies from QAIU and one in Gender Development Studies from AIT (Thailand). Her dissertations for her master’s degrees were on‘ Pakistan’s Security: An Evaluation of the Nuclear Option’ and on ‘Texts of War: Militarism and Gender Identity in Pakistan and India’.

This year she received her PhD at the Center for Cultural Research at University of Western Sydney. Her doctoral dissertation was on ‘Living Room Seminaries: Negotiating religious networks, gendered selves and intercommunal relationships within the Pakistani diaspora’.

Her new project in Australia is an effort to generate new understandings and more complex representations of Muslim and Pakhtun communities in Australia and beyond. Drawing from the history of a Pakhtun Muslim social movement that formulated and adopted an indigenous code of inter- communal harmony, she propose forums for inter-communal dialogues and identify a history of non-violence that has remained invisible in current public and security debates regarding Australian Muslim communities. Documenting their perspectives on political Islam, social equity and redefinition of the gendered self will contribute to any project on social cohesion, cultural and religious diversity in contemporary multicultural democracies hosting Muslim communities

Despite all the feathers in her belt she is a simple and kind woman, who looks forward to emails from her niece and nephews and loves tuber roses because they remind her of a happy time in her childhood. Her favorite colors orange and cream indicate that she is a
--Happy, courageous, successful, enthusiasm, bold, adventuresome, friendliness, warmth, informality, welcoming, movement, energy
“Orange is the happiest color"

Aneela Babar is the kind of Pukhtana I want my daughter to grow up to be, strong confident and independent. Over the last six months that I have got to know her, she has never backed off any subject, there is no topic that she hasn’t done her homework on and will always end up with everyone on her side of the line whether they will admit it or not.