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New senator is no Tory hack - thestar.com
New senator is no Tory hack Pakistan-born Salma Ataullahjan helps to build schools and feed orphans
Published On Mon Aug 02 2010
Artist and now senator Salma Ataullahjan is seen July 27, 2010 in the backyard of her home in the Warden and Finch area of Scarborough. Canada's newest senator grew up as the daughter of a Pakistani senator and a schoolmate of Benazir Bhutto.
RICHARD LAUTENS/TORONTO STAR
The Prime Ministers Office tracked her down in northwest Pakistan.
How would you like to be a Canadian senator? asked the caller.
Would I! replied Salma Ataullahjan, nearing the end of an emotional trip this month that included buying clothes and dried food for 83 orphans displaced by the Taliban in the Swat Valley.
Reports of the appointment focused on Prime Minister Stephen Harpers need to pass an omnibus bill and suggested his move was, as one commentator put it, patronage . . . for a defeated Conservative candidate who can do Harpers bidding.
But Ataullahjan is no Tory hack.
A Muslim woman of ethnic Pashtun descent, she grew up in a prominent political family that included the Frontier Gandhi and was schoolgirl friends with Benazir Bhutto.
I realize how privileged I am to sit in the Senate, she said this week at her Toronto home, to be involved politically in a country where I will not get imprisoned or subject to suicide bombings.
Ataullahjan, 58, ran as the federal Conservative candidate for Mississauga-Brampton South in 2008 but is better known locally for her volunteer work at home and abroad.
Extremely dedicated, says Aziz Pakla, who knows her as co-founder with him and current vice-president of the Canadian branch of the Citizens Foundation, an international group that since 1995 has built 660 schools for Pakistans poorest children.
A wonderful woman, very hard-working, says Mashal Khan, president of the Canadian Pashtun Cultural Association, which includes Ataullahjan as an executive member. Last year I saw her going tent to tent to help displaced people, a completely elemental job.
Ataullahjan was born in Mardan, near the Afghan border in Pakistans North-West Frontier Province, now called Kyber Pukhtunkhwa.
Her great-grand uncle was Badshah Khan, nicknamed Frontier Gandhi for leading a Gandhi-like non-violent Muslim movement for independence from the British. Filmmaker Teri McLuhan, daughter of late Toronto media guru Marshall McLuhan, released a documentary about him last year.
For him to talk peace and for people to actually listen (was extraordinary), Ataullahjan says of Khans followers among the Pashtuns, a population of 50 million people straddling Pakistan and Afghanistan. There the men wear guns the way women wear jewellery like adornments.
As a girl, Ataullahjan wore a Western-style dress and attended classes in English at the Convent of Jesus and Mary, a school for 200 girls that included Bhutto, assassinated three years ago after twice serving as Pakistans prime minister.
Ataullahjans father is Saranjan Khan, a former Pakistan senator and until recently secretary-general of the Muslim League-N, the party with the second largest number of seats led by former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif.
More than once her family had to evacuate their home because of bomb threats, she says. Two years ago a suicide bomber blew himself up in a cousins home, killing several people.
In July 1980 Ataullahjan arrived in Toronto as a new bride, married by family arrangement to Saleem Ataullahjan, a Pashtun man who had come to study electrical engineering and stayed.
They met on their wedding day, have two daughters, and by both accounts enjoy a loving, intimate, mutually respectful marriage.
The Star wrote an article about us (in 1999), Ataullahjan says. It was picked up by a high school text taught by the Toronto Board of Education, a social studies course about arranged marriages.
When travelling in northwest Pakistan, Ataullahjan covers her hair with a duppatta, or loose scarf, but otherwise wears no head covering.
And although she expresses no opinion publicly about the tent-like burka and niqab, she is in a position as the first Pakistan-born senator to offer insight into the war against the Taliban and other regional troubles.
I feel my background will come in handy, she says. Because of my upbringing I can fit easily between the Eastern and Western cultures.
New senator is no Tory hack Pakistan-born Salma Ataullahjan helps to build schools and feed orphans
Published On Mon Aug 02 2010
Artist and now senator Salma Ataullahjan is seen July 27, 2010 in the backyard of her home in the Warden and Finch area of Scarborough. Canada's newest senator grew up as the daughter of a Pakistani senator and a schoolmate of Benazir Bhutto.
RICHARD LAUTENS/TORONTO STAR
The Prime Ministers Office tracked her down in northwest Pakistan.
How would you like to be a Canadian senator? asked the caller.
Would I! replied Salma Ataullahjan, nearing the end of an emotional trip this month that included buying clothes and dried food for 83 orphans displaced by the Taliban in the Swat Valley.
Reports of the appointment focused on Prime Minister Stephen Harpers need to pass an omnibus bill and suggested his move was, as one commentator put it, patronage . . . for a defeated Conservative candidate who can do Harpers bidding.
But Ataullahjan is no Tory hack.
A Muslim woman of ethnic Pashtun descent, she grew up in a prominent political family that included the Frontier Gandhi and was schoolgirl friends with Benazir Bhutto.
I realize how privileged I am to sit in the Senate, she said this week at her Toronto home, to be involved politically in a country where I will not get imprisoned or subject to suicide bombings.
Ataullahjan, 58, ran as the federal Conservative candidate for Mississauga-Brampton South in 2008 but is better known locally for her volunteer work at home and abroad.
Extremely dedicated, says Aziz Pakla, who knows her as co-founder with him and current vice-president of the Canadian branch of the Citizens Foundation, an international group that since 1995 has built 660 schools for Pakistans poorest children.
A wonderful woman, very hard-working, says Mashal Khan, president of the Canadian Pashtun Cultural Association, which includes Ataullahjan as an executive member. Last year I saw her going tent to tent to help displaced people, a completely elemental job.
Ataullahjan was born in Mardan, near the Afghan border in Pakistans North-West Frontier Province, now called Kyber Pukhtunkhwa.
Her great-grand uncle was Badshah Khan, nicknamed Frontier Gandhi for leading a Gandhi-like non-violent Muslim movement for independence from the British. Filmmaker Teri McLuhan, daughter of late Toronto media guru Marshall McLuhan, released a documentary about him last year.
For him to talk peace and for people to actually listen (was extraordinary), Ataullahjan says of Khans followers among the Pashtuns, a population of 50 million people straddling Pakistan and Afghanistan. There the men wear guns the way women wear jewellery like adornments.
As a girl, Ataullahjan wore a Western-style dress and attended classes in English at the Convent of Jesus and Mary, a school for 200 girls that included Bhutto, assassinated three years ago after twice serving as Pakistans prime minister.
Ataullahjans father is Saranjan Khan, a former Pakistan senator and until recently secretary-general of the Muslim League-N, the party with the second largest number of seats led by former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif.
More than once her family had to evacuate their home because of bomb threats, she says. Two years ago a suicide bomber blew himself up in a cousins home, killing several people.
In July 1980 Ataullahjan arrived in Toronto as a new bride, married by family arrangement to Saleem Ataullahjan, a Pashtun man who had come to study electrical engineering and stayed.
They met on their wedding day, have two daughters, and by both accounts enjoy a loving, intimate, mutually respectful marriage.
The Star wrote an article about us (in 1999), Ataullahjan says. It was picked up by a high school text taught by the Toronto Board of Education, a social studies course about arranged marriages.
When travelling in northwest Pakistan, Ataullahjan covers her hair with a duppatta, or loose scarf, but otherwise wears no head covering.
And although she expresses no opinion publicly about the tent-like burka and niqab, she is in a position as the first Pakistan-born senator to offer insight into the war against the Taliban and other regional troubles.
I feel my background will come in handy, she says. Because of my upbringing I can fit easily between the Eastern and Western cultures.
