Nazir Afzal’s enemies are a diverse lot.
Some, like him, are Muslim men who were born in Britain but have roots in Pakistan or other South Asian countries and cannot understand how Mr. Afzal would be critical of forced marriages and honor crimes and give “racists another stick to beat us with.”
Others are from Britain’s far-right fringe and cannot accept that a Muslim is chief prosecutor for “their” queen and “their” country. They once wrote a letter to Prime Minister David Cameron, demanding that he fire and deport Mr. Afzal, who chuckled before responding, “I was born in Birmingham, England, and I’m not going back there.”
One of 13 chief crown prosecutors in Britain, he oversees more than 100,000 prosecutions a year and manages 800 lawyers and paralegals in England’s Northwest, the largest region after London. The first Muslim chief prosecutor ever appointed, he remains the nation’s most senior Muslim lawyer.
Mr. Afzal, 51, has prosecuted white-collar criminals and hooligans. But this fast-talking man with spiky salt-and-pepper hair and a slightly restless manner is also Britain’s go-to prosecutor on violence against women. And while most of his cases involve white perpetrators — he prosecuted a stalker of Princess Diana in 1996 and this year brought the former BBC presenter Stuart Hall to justice for sexually abusing minors — perhaps his biggest mark has been his aggressive pursuit of cases involving crimes against women in minority communities.
Before Mr. Afzal, few in multicultural Britain talked openly about the 10,000 girls, most from South Asia and two-thirds of them Muslims, who are married off against their will every year in Britain, much less the dozen or so killed each year in the name of family honor.
Mr. Afzal helped set up a national hot line for women at risk of forced marriage — something the United States government is talking to him about duplicating — and he is working with the Home Office to criminalize the practice. (A bill in Parliament that would do just that is expected to be passed next spring.)
Last year, he successfully prosecuted eight British men of Pakistani origin and an Afghan man for raping and trafficking white girls in Rochdale, a former mill town near Manchester, in the Northwest, in a high-profile case that was branded a “wake-up call” by many South Asians. The ringleader was sentenced to 19 years in prison, the other eight from 12 to 16 years.
Mr. Afzal does not mince words when he speaks about the “hundreds of young British girls who have their clitoris cut off in genital mutilation every year.” He is adamant that human rights must always trump cultural rights. “There are problems in minority communities that can’t be taboo,” he said. “No community should be allowed to give refuge to men who commit crimes against women.”
Being a man, a practicing Muslim and the son of immigrants from the conservative tribal area in northwestern Pakistan might make Mr. Afzal an unlikely feminist in the eyes of some. But that is how he describes himself — and his gender, he said, is by far his biggest asset.
“Women have been talking about these issues for a long time,” he said. “I’m not the first person to take up this fight in this country, I’m just the first man, and that makes it a lot easier.”
“I come from these communities. I understand their patriarchal nature. I can challenge them,” he continued. “And because I am a man, the men in the community are more likely to listen to me.”
Women’s rights campaigners have welcomed Mr. Afzal into their sisterhood. Efua Dorkenoo, advocacy director on female genital mutilation for Equality Now, said male allies were “critical” for the success of gender equality campaigns, especially when rights abuses are cloaked in cultural terms.
“When men like Afzal speak up about violence against women, it has much more resonance in Asian and African communities,” she said. “When we women speak up, we are often dismissed as westernized and no longer speaking for the community.”
It was in 2004 that Mr. Afzal, a father of one daughter and three sons, had his own wake-up call when a group of women came to see him. One told of a girl who had burned herself to death to avoid a forced marriage. She had been 17, the same age his daughter is now. Another recounted the story of a woman who had been on the run from her family for more than eight years after refusing to marry a man she did not know. His visitors pressed Mr. Afzal to use his office to bring honor crimes and forced marriages out of the shadows and into the courtroom.
“I didn’t know this was happening in this country,” he said. But the stories shook him, and that same year he organized a conference in London to learn more. Shortly after, he sat down with the police to pull together a national database on honor crimes. “Before I knew it, we had dozens and dozens of cases,” he said.
Two years later he successfully prosecuted the cousin and the brother of a young woman, Samaira Nazir, for her murder. Ms. Nazir had wanted to marry someone to whom her family objected, a desire for which she was stabbed 18 times in front of two infant nieces who were splattered with her blood. Her father was charged with arranging the stabbing, but he died before the trial. It was one of the first times an honor killing had drawn public attention in Britain.
Mr. Afzal’s crusade for women’s rights is a personal one. Born a “brown boy” in middle England a year after his parents arrived from Peshawar in 1961, he also bears the scars of inequality. He tells of being bullied and beaten at school, and of his father, a caterer for the British Army, telling him simply, “Get used to it.” And he did.
“I thought this was how it was, and I put up with it,” he said, “and I think a lot of women feel the same about the abuse they suffer.” The first in his family not only to go to college but also to attend high school, Mr. Afzal grows angry when he sees Muslim families take their daughters out of school.
His work on gender equality often intersects with his efforts to be a bridge between white Britons and the country’s South Asians, particularly since the 2005 suicide bombings on London buses and subway trains that killed 52 and injured nearly 800. Mr. Afzal remembers speaking at London City Hall a few weeks later. Islamophobia was on the rise. Then deputy chief prosecutor in London, Mr. Afzal had been asked to help engage the Muslim community, but his comments on gender-based violence irked some in the audience. A man stood up and said, “Nazir, why are you giving these racists another stick to beat us with?” His response, “The community should carry their own stick.”
He stopped posting on Twitter because, he said, the abuse got to be too much. After last year’s case verdict in Rochdale, a police guard was placed outside his house.
But Mr. Afzal is not one to lose his spirit or his sense of humor. “I’ve done my bit for multifaith engagement,” he likes to point out. “As a good Muslim boy, I’ve been married three times. First to an Irish Catholic, then to an Indian Hindu and then to a British Sikh.”