Q&A With Anila Ali: Empowering The Next Generation Of Muslim Peace Builders

Anila Ali with Isaac Herzog, president of Israel. Photo courtesy of Ali.

Earlier this summer, Pakistani-American interfaith activist and former teacher Anila Ali led a historic delegation to Israel that brought together political leaders and influential Muslims and Jews to foster trust and develop relationships between the Abrahamic faiths. The trip was sponsored by Ali’s American Muslim and Multifaith Women Empowerment Council and the Israeli organization Sharaka, of which Ali is a board member.

Notably, the delegation included several Pakistani- and Bangladeshi-Americans, Sikhs, a Pakistani Jew, and two Pakistani journalists. Pakistan does not have diplomatic ties with Israel, and the Pakistani Television Corporation later fired one of the journalists, Ahmed Quraishi, even though he flew from the U.S. and accompanied the delegation in a personal capacity.

Ali recently spoke with ReligionUnplugged.com about the trip, the Women Empowerment Council and uniting Muslim women, her philosophy of diplomacy, bridge building and education to fight hate and bring peace; and addressing antisemitism among the Muslim community in the U.S. and Pakistan.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Isabella Meibauer: To start off, why did you found the American Muslim and Multifaith Women Empowerment Council?

Anila Ali: Let’s go back to 9/11. 9/11 put a lot of responsibility on Muslims like me — just regular mothers, teachers, engineers who had children in America. My kids were coming back from school saying who had called them a terrorist and asking where they and I were born. It was up to us to unite, to get out there and knock on our neighbors’ doors and say hey, I’m a Muslim, not a terrorist.

I started working with the Council of Pakistan American Affairs and the Muslim Public Affairs Council at that time. After a couple of years, I realized that these were male-dominated organizations. They did not represent my point of view. I’m a person who lives in America, who wants to embrace it and not live in a cocoon (limited to other Muslims). I want to know who everybody is, and I want people to know who we are. There was nobody who represented us like that.

These organizations would often tell me not to work with the Jews or the Christian right-wing. But I wanted to talk to the Christian right, I wanted to talk to conservatives, I wanted to talk to the liberals. Liberals know me and love me, but I want to talk to the people who don’t know me. They don’t like me, or they have a fear of the other because they don’t know me.

And the treatment that I was getting there, that I was not equal, was not OK with me. One time, a New York Times journalist was sitting with me (and a number of male Muslim leaders). She clearly wanted to talk to me also, but the men would tell me to go to the kitchen. One time, over an email chain with many recipients, one Muslim leader said to me, “Honey, you don’t wear a hijab, so you shouldn’t be at the interfaith meeting.” I asked him, “Where does it say in the Quran that I’m not a Muslim if I don’t wear a hijab? What you just said is not Islamic at all. You don’t know me, and I’m not your honey, so don’t be patronizing to me.” Only one man out of about 100 on the chain stood up for me. You can see the hidden bigotry in my community.

I took this very personally. I wanted to reclaim my religion from a man who does not represent me. He comes from another country. He does not represent the diversity of Islam. He does not include me. He does not speak for me. And this is what the American Muslim and Multifaith Women Empowerment Council grew from.

Having a Muslim women’s organization was very important. Once in the middle of the night, a woman found my number and called me because someone had thrown feces in her house. She was really scared, she didn’t know any English, and she was not educated. She called one of the Muslim organizations, but they didn’t even listen to her.

By that time, I had built relations with the law enforcement. I called the chief of counter terrorism at that time. The whole group of law enforcement people got together to take action on these types of hate crimes. That sort of gave me an impetus on organizing a very powerful Muslim women’s platform where these women knew that I kind of looked like them and I would help them.

The government at that time knew what an important role women play when it comes to countering extremism. A woman came up to me and said, “Please don’t tell anyone, but my daughter has all of these ideas. She’s going to a liberal university. And she is saying that she doesn’t like Jews and Israel and they’re the reason Muslims are going down. What do I do?”

At that time, a lot of Muslim organizations did not want to tackle the real issues. But women do. Because it’s our children. As a teacher, I want to make sure that our kids are swayed away from people and organizations that are harmful to our country, to our thinking and to our religion.

My board is now a group of women who help other women. We will be the voice that speaks out for these women who are coming from a very vulnerable place.

We needed to be stronger than the bigotry and unequal treatment, and the Women Empowerment Council was that platform.

Meibauer: How did this trip happen? How did you connect with Sharaka?

Ali: What we had been doing for the past 13 years in America as Muslim women was building bridges. At one point, we had received so many hate messages against our Prophet Muhammad (Peace be upon him). For the first time in my life, I felt bad. I was actually hurting inside, though I’ve always been positive, and I’ve fought hate with love. I reached out to my brothers at the American Defense League and the temple where we have our interfaith Iftar with the Jewish community. I said, “Rabbi, I need your help. This is the time when I want to express how I’m feeling. I want the women to talk about it. If I expose all of this hate, every Muslim is going to hurt. These are really serious allegations (against the Prophet) and against me.”

So, we held a town hall meeting. We poured our hearts out. And we realized that the best way to fight hate is to stand with communities that have suffered from it for 5,000 years.

We did town halls also at academic centers, such as at the University of California, Irvine, where I worked for 10 years doing conflict mediation between Muslim and Jewish students. There had been a complete collapse of relations between the Muslims and the Jewish students at UCI, Cal State and Fullerton and in the whole of California.

I would tell the students that people of Abrahamic faiths are our people. If you are a Muslim, you have to co-exist with everybody. All of this antisemitism is only going to hurt you and our community. Why? Because they are our natural allies, and it is against Islamic principles to say and do all of these things. Plus, it’s unconstitutional. It’s not what American values are about. You were included in America, so you need to include everyone else. This was my premise behind my work at campuses with DHS and with the FBI.

As the other women got know the Jewish communities, they agreed that they are our natural allies.

Several years ago, I went to Israel. I toured all of the Palestinian cities, Jenin being the most sensitive. I spoke to Palestinians. I spoke to Arabs, both Christians and Muslims, in Israel. I met with a presidential candidate in Gaza. He complained of the corruption of his own political party and politicians and of the Palestinian Authority. I was asked to go ask President Trump to give them more money. I saw a very different side of the conflict. What actually really stirred me to action was that I saw a lot of posters in Jenin advertising money to parents if they send their children for jihad. That hurt me. That completely changed my point of view.

I came back and I said, for Muslims, saving a life is saving humanity. That is the commandment of God. I want to save lives. I don’t care what life — if it’s Palestinian or Israeli or Pakistani or Hindu, I want to save lives.

And the only way toward a path of peace is diplomacy. It’s going to be you and me talking. It’s going to be us talking to the other. We’re going to build peace. We are going to be the next generation of Muslim women peacebuilders.

I’m not saying the path to peace is easy. There are obstacles, such as the killing of the journalist (Shireen Abu Akleh). We are going to have to be steadfast in our desire to have peace. God knows, every time there is a life lost, it tells me that I need to work harder, that I need to make sure that we, as women peacebuilders, are doing our job. Yes, Israel will have to compromise. Palestine will have to compromise. But if they want children to stop dying, they will have to come to the table.

It’s time to save our future generations that are being poisoned with hate for Jewish people and for Judaism and for the state of Israel.

Even two days ago, one of my interns told me that after she shared a post of my trip to Israel, her friends called her and said that Israelis are the worst people. These are middle and high school kids that are being indoctrinated to hate not only one nation but to hate an entire faith community.

One of the Pakistani members of our trip told me that he was always told that Jews have horns on their heads, that Israelis are bad people. He told me how grateful he was to be able to go on this trip and check his biases.

To think that for the duration of their lives, the Pakistanis on the trip were told that Jews are bad people and taught that a small country was about to take the rest of the world over.

A former Pakistani minister, Shireen Mazari, got a hold of my picture with a woman politician (Maryam Nawaz Sharif) who I had met in Pakistan, whose party happened to be the one that deposed former Prime Minister Imran Khan’s party. I had seen a picture of Sharif with the top clergy in Pakistan sitting behind her. I looked at that picture, and I said I wish that my clergy in America would sit like that and support me. What an amazing thing it would be for Muslim clergy to stand with Muslim sisters who are building peace!

I want American clergy to include me in every conversation. I have a different point of view. I’m different. I don’t wear a hijab. More than 50% of Muslim women don’t wear a hijab. Nike wants to represent Muslims, so they portray the hijabi girl. But my daughter played basketball, and she doesn’t wear a hijab. Why isn’t she represented? That is hurting us. The stereotyping of putting Muslims in a monolithic box, saying that we’re Democrats. But we’re Republicans too. We’re independent thinkers. Don’t do a disservice to us. We’re of all sorts. We’re intelligent people.

I shared my picture with Maryam Nawaz Sharif because I was admiring a rising Muslim woman in a nuclear Muslim nation — Pakistan. Mazari, who is so highly educated herself, unfortunately used that against me to create this kind of vitriol. Hamas tweets against me, and people are doing fatwas that I am an agent of Israel and America. I’m telling all of them one thing: “I’m an agent of peace, and you go deal with it. If you can’t deal with it, you have no right to be in public service. We expect you to be honest, to be forward thinkers, and to have integrity. I feel that that does so much disservice to the cause for Pakistanis.”

But there is always a silver lining, which is that I have so many messages from people, young people in Pakistan, asking me to help them to get water technology or jobs from Israel.

Meibauer: How did you coordinate the safe passages of Pakistani Jew Fischel BenKhald and Ahmed Qureshi? Was it difficult for them to enter Israel?

Ali: The Pakistanis were welcome all the way. I want to see more Pakistanis and more Muslims traveling to Israel. I feel like I’m a travel agent now because many young people from Pakistan are asking me to take them to Israel. There is a big interest in academia to go to Israel, especially from agricultural universities.

Sudan is going to be able to grow vegetables for its people because it collaborated with Israel. Pakistan is going to be food insecure by 2050. By rejecting diplomacy with Israel, Pakistan is forgetting that Turkey has diplomatic ties with Israel, and Pakistanis love Turkey. Egypt has diplomatic ties — they have to improve, but they do have ties. This is not an abnormal thing. It’s a new normal. It’s best for Pakistan to think about its own people.

In Tharparkar (Pakistan) where I have schools, there is no hygiene, no electricity. They live in the most dire conditions. What can I take from Israel and give to these people living in dire poverty? I want to give them water and food (via Israeli irrigation technology). That’s my personal motivation.

The toughest thing with getting into Masjid Al-Aqsa and the Muslim Quarters was when they asked one of our team to recite the Quran. At Al-Aqsa, I spoke to a man there. I said that the fact that you aren’t believing that I’m a Muslim and asking me to recite from the Quran — that is compulsion. Islam says no compulsion. He said that he didn’t know if I was a Muslim. I said, “Allah knows; you don’t need to know. I’m here in a place of worship, which the caliph of Islam, Umar, had said must be a place of all faiths. You aren’t allowing my Sikh friends, or Jews to come.” But he was not happy. He told one of the other team members to tell me to shut up or I’m not allowed to come in.

But the feeling of going into the Church of the Sepulcher and the Wailing Wall (also called the Western Wall) is so welcoming. No one stops you. We even met the Hindu irrigation minister from India at the Wailing Wall. I talked to him, and I said, “Brother, you are here in a Jewish holy place; I’m a Muslim in a Jewish holy place. I hope that you will go back and tell your politicians that we want to come to India, and we want to build peace. We want to finish this hate we have between us. We are all one human race. Just like I am here, I want to do the same for you. I want to come to India and change the way people think about us.”

Meibauer: Your trip coincided with the killing of Shireen Abu Akleh. According to your Twitter post on May 21, you wrote that “the funeral happened, we didn’t feel or see fear.” Do you believe that the news coverage of her funeral was inflammatory?

Ali: That day, we were in Jerusalem. We got messages from friends in the U.S. about her death. Because we did not see it, we did not feel (any tension). The day of the funeral as well, concerned people in the U.S. kept asking us if we were okay. It was very safe there, and we walked the streets. We did not see anything to report. I’m not the only one. My board members are on record as saying that we didn’t see or hear anything.

I think that it’s important to not take one incident but to look at the bigger picture. I immediately sent a tweet out for my sympathies that this shouldn’t have happened.

The death of the journalist is very close to me because my father was a journalist. He started the first news agency in Pakistan, and he wrote for the Christian Science Monitor for 20 years. For me, it’s very important that journalists have the freedom to speak, but I think that journalism has a sense of responsibility. They can make peace, or they can break peace. They can help spread vitriol, or they can help spread peace. I think this journalist, by being there, was trying to see both sides, just like so many journalists have perished telling the truth.

At the same time, there are news agencies and outlets that sensationalize, that work on spreading hate, misinformation and propaganda. I felt that there was propaganda in that news. She was caught in the crossfire, and I think that that is exactly the reason why we have to stop this violence. It should not be happening in a mosque. A mosque is a sacred place.

Jerusalem has to be remembered as a place where people come together. It cannot be a place where people are divided and killing. That has to stop.

Isabella Meibauer is a freelance writer with a focus on South and Southeast Asia. She holds a degree in religion from The King’s College in New York City.