Aasiya Bora
Aasiya Bora is a co-founder of Muslims Declare. She is a teacher, campaigner and mum of two. Aasiya was the teenager rattling the Greenpeace charity tin on her street and neighbours would open their doors to look askance and sceptically at her. She read Gerald Durrell’s My Family and other Animals in the library and had to stuff her fist in her mouth for fear her laughter at its hilarious prose would disturb other library users. But the message implicit in the title has stayed with Aasiya to this day. She is a local campaigner for the Green Party and always spouting climate related excerpts to the students she runs into. Her favourite quotation is by Dostoevsky: ‘Love the animals, God has given them rudiments of thought and joy untroubled. don’t trouble them, don’t harass them, don’t deprive them of their happiness, don’t work against God’s intent.’ Though always trying to be green in a personal capacity, it was the climate action movements of recent years that alerted Aasiya to the whole issue of climate justice, an awareness which she is now thankful to have.