Sania Mirza

Sania Mirza is an Indian former professional tennis player, born in Mumbai on 15 November 1986 and raised in Hyderabad. A former doubles world No. 1, she reached the top of the doubles rankings on 13 April 2015 and spent 91 weeks there, won six major titles and 43 doubles titles in all, and in singles reached world No. 27 in 2007, the highest ranking achieved by an Indian woman. ^{1 2 3 4}

She retired from professional tennis in February 2023 after a career that made her, in the article's words, one of the most known, highest-paid and influential athletes in India. ¹

Mirza was born in Mumbai to Imran Mirza, a sports journalist, and his wife Naseema, who worked in a printing business; shortly after her birth the family moved to Hyderabad, where she and her younger sister Anam were raised. She took up tennis at the age of six, was coached by her father, attended Nasr School in Hyderabad and later graduated from St. Mary's College in the same city. What the sources say about her family's religious background is set out, in their own terms, in the faith section below. ¹

As a junior, Mirza won the 2003 Wimbledon girls' doubles title partnering Alisa Kleybanova. In February 2005 she became the first Indian woman to win a WTA Tour singles title, winning her hometown Hyderabad Open, and later that year reached the fourth round of the US Open; the WTA named her its Newcomer of the Year for 2005. ¹

She reached her singles career-high of world No. 27 in August 2007 after a strong American hard-court summer, and her singles wins included Svetlana Kuznetsova, Martina Hingis, Dinara Safina and Victoria Azarenka. A persistent wrist injury then pushed her out of singles and into a doubles-focused career. ¹

Mirza's first major titles came in mixed doubles: the 2009 Australian Open and the 2012 French Open with Mahesh Bhupathi, and the 2014 US Open with Bruno Soares. In women's doubles she reached the summit with Martina Hingis, winning Wimbledon and the US Open in 2015 and the Australian Open in 2016; she became doubles world No. 1 on 13 April 2015, won the WTA Finals doubles title in 2014 with Cara Black and in 2015 with Hingis, and her partnership with Hingis produced a 44-match winning streak, one of the longest in history. She finished with 43 doubles titles and 91 weeks at world No. 1. ¹

She also won 14 medals, including six golds, across the Asian Games, the Commonwealth Games and the Afro-Asian Games, was appointed a UN Women Goodwill Ambassador for South Asia in 2013, and was named in Time magazine's 2016 list of the 100 most influential people in the world. ¹

Mirza retired from professional tennis after her final tournament in Dubai in February 2023. In her personal life, she married the Pakistani cricketer Shoaib Malik in 2010; in January 2024 her family announced that the marriage had ended. ^{1 4}

This section reports what the sources say, attributed to their speakers; it is not the museum's verdict. In September 2005 a fatwa against Mirza was issued by a cleric named Haseeb-ul-hasan Siddiqui of the Sunni Ulema Board, which said that her attire on the tennis court and in billboard advertisements was un-Islamic, as The Guardian reported in a piece cited by the article; Mirza subsequently decided to hire bodyguards. ¹

As for her religious background, the English article's Early life section says she was born "to Hyderabadi Muslim parents" and that the sisters "were raised in a Sunni Muslim family", and Wikidata gives the religion value "Islam". That wording describes her family's background, not a school attested for Mirza herself; under the museum's rules family background does not count, so her record's faith field stays "unknown" under the two-source rule and the doubt rule. ^{1 4}

Mirza's public significance lies in her standing as the most successful tennis player in India's history — the first Indian woman to win a WTA Tour title and the first to top a world tennis ranking — in her 43 doubles titles and six major titles, and in her cultural reach as a Muslim woman sports star from India whose career drew worldwide attention and public debate about women athletes' dress and faith, as the sources report it. ¹

• The defined source entities cited above, recorded in data/source/.