Monitoring Desk
New Jersey: A Pakistani-American woman, Fauzia Janjua, has been elected as the town mayor of New Jersey, USA. Janjua will be Mount Laurel’s first Muslim and South Asian woman to serve as mayor.
A first-generation Pakistani-American, she was raised in San Francisco by immigrant parents, from whom she “learned the value of hard work, education, and charity.” She has co-founded a non-profit organization, Community SJP, which provides meals for those in need, secures school supplies, and distributes blankets to hospitals and shelters. She is currently a first-grade teacher at Westfield Friends School in Cinnaminson.
She is not the only one; many South Asians and Muslim women are making their marks across the West. Another mayor, Senator Ghazala Hashmi, was also the first Muslim and the first South Asian American to serve in the Virginia Senate and represented the 10th Senatorial District within the Virginia General Assembly.
Muslim men are also challenging racist stereotypes by occupying key leadership roles in the West.
Amer Ghalib, a 42-year-old immigrant from Yemen, secured a significant election victory in Hamtramck, a city in the US state of Michigan. He was the first Arab American as well as the first Muslim mayor of the city. The 22-year-old Cllr Hamza Taouzzale of Westminster City Council was to vote for its first Muslim Lord Mayor in 2022 and its youngest ever incumbent.
The Labour Party’s Sadiq Khan won London’s mayoral race in 2016 and made history as the first Muslim elected to lead a major Western capital city. Ali Zaidi is the highest-ranking Pakistani American in President Biden’s administration as deputy White House national climate advisor.
Aisha Shah, as partnership manager at the White House Office of Digital Strategy from Kashmir origin breaking the stereotypes. Meanwhile, Sameera Fazili, a community and economic development expert, has been pegged to occupy the position of Deputy Director at the US National Economic Council (NEC). Fazili had previously served as a senior policy advisor on the White House’s NEC and as a senior advisor at the US Treasury Department.
The outcome is likely to resonate far beyond a change in the West, challenging the rise of anti-Islam political rhetoric in the West and giving another powerful voice to the West’s large Pakistani community just when the country is facing its own identity crisis.
