"And I don't mean just for me and my family," she explains, gently shaking her head. She means for Australia.

"I sometimes wake up and listen to the early news and think, 'God, make today a better one than yesterday.' I don't want my grandchildren to go to school feeling ostracised, feeling that they do not belong as a second generation of Australian Muslims."

The head of the Muslim Women's Association, current NSW Human Rights Ambassador, mother to four and grandmother to nine has reason, perhaps, to entreat the powers on high. She is all too used to dealing with politicians whose mandate appears to have settled upon building social barriers rather than bridges. These days the 56-year-old daughter of the co-founder of Sydney's first mosque no longer enjoys walking alone. When she arrived in Sydney in 1970, she thought nothing of being by herself as she explored the ocean-front near her home in Coogee. Now, wearing the unmistakably Islamic sign of a hijab, she prefers to walk along George's River with her husband, for safety's sake.

"You look around and no matter where you are and what you are, at the moment being an Australian Muslim woman is not an easy image to carry. You're continuously feeling the need to justify why you put that piece of cloth on your head, why you eat halal food."

A fish tank, well beyond its prime, bubbles behind us as our meal arrives – two $12 plates of Imperial Jade Palace's lunch specials, jasmine tea on the side. The Bankstown Sports Club is an unlikely venue for our interview (I'd rather looked forward to Mezze).  But Maha is squeezing me into her schedule, and today she's come to the Disney-like complex to speak at a local domestic violence meeting, linking to her work with MWA's Going Home Staying Home project, Linking Hearts. Targeting all women victims of domestic violence in Canterbury Bankstown, it recently won a $1.8 million state government tender. Maha picks the prawns from her curry and politely leaves the remainder as staff fret over the approaching closing time.

"For me, as a woman of faith, I see that people are so angry with something. Instead of looking at the source of the anger and the frustration, it's easier to blame," she continues. "Muslims are blamed for every ill that is about now."

It wasn't always like this. In the 1960s, her father was contracted to an infrastructure project by the Australian government and left his family in the Lebanon for his new job. Arabic-speaking Maha and her six siblings eventually took one of British Airways' first Beirut-to-Sydney flights when she was 11.

"We thought Sydney was a little village. It didn't meet the standard of the city of Tripoli," she laughs.

"Australians loved Lebanese in those days, we were a very trusted group of people. I was like a celebrity at school. I could work out maths equations so quickly, I knew more about Captain Cook than they did."

Between photos, we talk about Daesh​ (Islamic State) flags flying in Tripoli, about her homeland's slide into "so much chaos".

"What's happening is beyond human ability to understand. Lebanon used to be a cradle of society. It was spiritual, it had Sufism​, people of all faiths gathered there with no distinction or discrimination."

But that was another time, another country. She's a foreigner there now; besides, many of the women she deals with on a daily basis can tell the same stories of horror and loss about their homelands.

When she entered into an arranged marriage aged 18 ("you have a choice as a young woman whether you think this the right person and you take it from there"), Maha was at first ready to settle into the life of a housewife. However domesticity, with four young children and P&C meetings was "fun, but it didn't last long."

We are only warming up when the Chinese restaurant locks its door, and we move to the club's enormous jungle-themed atrium, steps from banks of winking pokie machines.

"One day my daughter started asking me questions about Islam, how feminism would fit into Islam. And I would say, 'no, we don't do it that way'." Her daughter would ask why, and Maha's response would be, well, just because.

"And I don't want to be a hypocrite," so, thirsty to learn, in the early 1980s she began knocking on doors in Lakemba, found the MWA and began religious lessons.

She became a campaigner for women who breastfed her youngest son in meetings and took her toddler to forums with immigration officials – and has not stopped fighting domestic violence, a war on our doorsteps, ever since.

Then came 1988, and Salman Rushdie.

"I thought 'what is going one here?' These men are burning flags and I don't think that's right. The action of what we call Muslims on the screen doesn't fit with my understanding of what Islam is."

Next came the Gulf War, then, "before we could breathe came another issue. Tampa, the rape crisis, another war, September 11, the Bali bombing, I could roll them out."

Now, as the de facto leader of Australia's Muslim women, Maha finds herself rallying against Islamophobia​, in the shadow of far-flung war and the Martin Place siege.

"You're continuously sitting on the edge," she says, her voice hitting a fretful high note. "You want to create that space of hope but you are continuously being pushed back. You say 'I'm not going to give up' but it feels like we are always going up hill."

Maha's face is framed by a mint green hijab and on her fingers are an assortment of gold and gem-studded rings. Her husband, Palestinian-born Nasry, looks after the home – a "tremendous help", she says , that allows her to do what she does.

That includes taking on the likes of the Reverend Fred Nile and federal parliamentary speaker Bronwyn Bishop over their positions on Muslim dress.

Yet she concedes there's now greater trust between the NSW government and the Muslim community. She was impressed by the state's response to December's Lindt​ Chocolate Cafe siege when political leaders kept facts close and avoided showiness. And she applauds 2013's head coverings legislation which gives police and the public clear boundaries as to what constitutes a niqab.

The relationship with the federal government is another matter.

She demands more courageous leadership and is indignant at Tony Abbott's "divisive" Team Australia mantra. "What the heck?" she protests. "Don't create a narrative for me that I don't own."

Yet she is also too well aware of the uglier side of social media, particularly when it comes to the problem of Australians being recruited by the likes of IS. Where some parents worry about drug use, or "ice", Muslims are being told they must also worry about "spice" – the lure of Middle Eastern fighting.

"There was no fear before the media created the fear," her tone changes. "I'm being very serious here. Everybody looks into their home and starts to be concerned. Mothers are sincerely worried not because they've noticed anything wrong but because of what has been drummed into our ears and eyes and hearts from every angle in the media." She speaks about parents who are "physically hurting" from second-guessing their child's movements. "Now you can inject as much [education] as you can into children but there are other contributing factors around that you have no control over. And yet we become responsible for what we don't control," she says, exasperated. The result is a set of young people who have neither the freedom to make mistakes nor an outlet for their voices.

Of her own four children, one has become an endocrinologist, another an engineer, a third entered the media and the fourth is a religious scholar. But she says, "Imagine being a young Muslim person growing up in Australia right now. They can't enjoy being young anymore. They can't be rebellious and try certain things like every other young person, because we're coming down so hard on them."

"And who's going to be protecting [Islamophobes​] but a government that is honing down on boats, honing down on drugs and honing down on terrorism?" she asks. "You know what? Hone down on violence."

"You must be affected by what hurts me," she implores. "Unless you're affected, no evolving change will happen for the better."

Then, in what I sense might be a direct message to the prime minister, she repeats what she said when we first sat down to lunch: "Every action you make must be done with intention and sincerity." Its the pledge she makes to herself, every day, every duha.

TIMELINE

1957 Born in Tripoli

1970 Arrives in Sydney

1973 Left Randwick Girls bound for Picnic Point High School

1975 Graduates in administrative studies from Bankstown Technical College

1988 Joins the Muslim Women's Association

1999 Completed BA majoring in community work at the University of Western Sydney

2000 Becomes chief executive of the Muslim Women's Association

2008 Receives Order of Australia for services to Western Sydney's Muslim community

2010 Masters of social science majoring in young people's studies at UWS

2014 NSW's Human Rights Ambassador