Sahar F. Aziz has the distinction of having at least two racial identities. “In the U.S, I am a racial, ethnic minority,” says Aziz, the daughter of Egyptian immigrants who was also born in Cairo herself. “In Egypt, I am not completely a member of the majority because I was not raised there. I have outsider status and so I straddle both worlds.”
Th at dual identity has piqued her interest in writing about legal and social justice in both the United States and the Middle East.
As an associate law professor at Texas A&M University, Aziz has been spending quite a bit of time thinking about
“individual rights” in the years since the Sept. 11 attacks. During that time, she was still in law school at The University of Texas at Austin and watched as Islam was demonized.
“I spent many of my law school years researching and engaging the issue,” says Aziz, who works with the American Civil Liberties Union to advocate for Arab Americans who are discriminated by the law. “Th e media demonized people who were Muslims. That caused me to research the topic.”
At the same time that she was exploring issues of race and ethnicity in the United States, several years later, the Arab Spring — a revolutionary wave of demonstrations and protests that began in 2010 — took hold of Egypt and positioned the country as a regional powerhouse. She realized then that more research was needed to examine legal issues in the burgeoning democracy.
When Aziz entered law school, she knew that she wanted to be a civil rights lawyer who would actively champion the causes of other Arabs facing discrimination in the United States.
“I felt we were the vanguard of individual rights,” she says of the small group of Arab American lawyers she knew. “I took very seriously the ideas that I was taught in law school.”
