Naema Tahir

Naema Tahir was born in Slough on August 23, 1970 into a Pakistani emigrant family. In 1980, the Tahir family moved from England to the Netherlands and settled in Etten-Leur. Tahir subsequently lived in Slough,Faisalabad in Pakistan (where her parents originally came from), Leiden, Nigeria, and Strasbourg. She studied Dutch law at Leiden University until 1996 and worked as a lawyer for Dutch and international institutions. She lived in Strasbourg, where she worked as a human rights lawyer for the Council of Europe. She took leave so that she could spend more time in the Netherlands and work on her Dutch-language books.^[1][2]

She was one of the six women interviewed in The Third Feminist Wave (2006) by the Flemish political philosopher Dirk Verhofstadt, alongside Yasmine Allas, Naima El Bezaz, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Irshad Manji, and Nahed Selim.^[1] She was also one of the guests on the 2008 season of Zomergasten.^[3]

In 2009, Gijsbert Pols concluded that she presented herself as an "enlightened" or "critical" Muslim woman.^[1]

From 2011 to 2012, she was a columnist for the television programmes Buitenhof and Altijd Wat. She later wrote columns for the newspaper Trouw. In November 2019, she received her doctorate on the subject of arranged marriage.^[2][4]

Tahir is married to Andreas Kinneging, a legal scholar and professor of philosophy of law at Leiden University.^[5]

• Migrant literature