I WAS GOING to America. It was Allah’s will. All the loss, heartache, chance, and luck that had led to my boarding the plane had been His work. I didn’t get sick during this flight as I had while flying to Germany. I didn’t feel frightened this time. I felt eager and hopeful. I thought the worst of my suffering was behind me. I thought I’d be with family in a day’s time. I was wrong. I had no idea how wrong. This, too, was God’s will. I believe God determines everything and has His reasons for everything, reasons we don’t always understand. I believe He put me on that plane for a reason and drew Layli Miller Bashir and Karen Musalo and me together for a reason. We hadn’t met yet, but our lives had already begun to converge. I wouldn’t know for a long while how well God had prepared them before delivering my fate into their hands. I know now, and I am awed.
I need to introduce these two women now, for they are a big part of the rest of my story. Layli first, because she was there first. Layli means ‘the beloved one’ in Persian. That’s what she is to me. She was born on March 24, 1972, making her five years older than me. She was only fourteen years old, a scrawny, gawky, frizzy-haired kid living with her family in Atlanta, Georgia, when she settled on the life path that would eventually converge with mine. From a very early age Layli was the same serious, earnest, intense person I would come to know nearly ten years later.
I believe much of Layli’s seriousness of purpose has to do with her family’s religion – the Bahá’í faith. The Bahá’ís are very committed to a global vision of peace and justice for all, and they work hard for what they believe in. They have a saying: ‘You have to walk the spiritual path with practical feet.’ The Bahá’ís believe that God speaks to humankind through many divine messengers in order to help us evolve and grow spiritually. In some ways their religion bears particularly close resemblance to Islam, but in other ways it is totally different. Although they recognize the Qur’an as a holy book and Muhammad as one of God’s prophets, the Bahá’ís follow the teachings not of Muhammad but of Bahá’u’lláh, who lived and preached in Persia in the mid-nineteenth century. As with Muslims, prayer is an essential part of their faith and they fast once a year. They also go on pilgrimage, but to Haifa, Israel, not Mecca. Like us, they don’t drink alcohol, and they believe in chastity before marriage. There isn’t a lot of ritual in their faith, which is a big difference from ours. They don’t go to mosque the way we do, and they don’t have clergy either. They elect people to local and national decision-making bodies called Spiritual Assemblies, and to an international decision-making body called the Universal House of Justice. All decisions are made through a process of consultation, which involves talking things out until everyone agrees, a process that Layli says usually turns decision making into a very drawn-out affair but results in a valued sense of unity. The harmony between all races is very important to the Bahá’ís, as is the equality of the sexes. In fact, both are considered prerequisites to society’s being able to evolve to its next stage of development. But the equality between the sexes is particularly important. Like Muslims, the Bahá’ís believe parents are obligated to educate all their children, but if parents must choose between educating a son and educating a daughter because there is a lack of money, they educate the girl first: they feel that since girls grow up to become mothers and mothers are the first educators of children, their education is particularly important to the well-being of both family and community.
The Bahá’ís have been horribly persecuted in Iran because of their beliefs. When Islamic fundamentalists took power in 1979, they banned the Bahá’í faith, declared their marriages illegal and their children bastards, desecrated their holy places, and made killing a Bahá’í a legal act. Tens of thousands of Bahá’ís were murdered and tortured. Many thousands were forced to flee. The Bahá’ís know firsthand about persecution and suffering and exile. That’s what I mean when I say I think being Bahá’í contributed to Layli’s earnestness. She was thinking about all these issues when she was still a child.
Layli remembers the exact moment she first felt called to devote her life to good works. An African-American woman named Wilma Ellis, who was then Secretary General of the Bahá’í International Community Office at the United Nations, was giving a talk in Layli’s family’s living room about all the horrible injustice in the world and the importance of working to bring about equality and world peace. A wave washed over Layli as she listened to this woman speak, and she began thinking to herself that it was time to get serious about what she wanted to do with her life. At age fourteen! She spent the next summer working with a socioeconomic development project in south Georgia and organizing a Bahá’í youth project. That’s how she met her future husband, Roshan Bashir. He was a twenty-two-year-old first-year medical student who was a singer and keyboardist with a popular Bahá’í band in Washington, D.C. When she called to invite the band to perform at a youth event, she and Roshan ended up talking on the phone for a long time. She sounded serious, mature, older than her years. In the weeks that followed, Roshan kept calling her, just to talk, and nearly fell over when he met her in person and realized her true age. But he bided his time. Impatiently.
Layli was oblivious, thinking of Roshan as just a friend. During her next summer vacation she spent the first part interning with the Bahá’í office at the U.N., and the second part traveling to the Soviet Union with a youth program. She wanted to see and improve the world. She was sixteen then. I was eleven. I could have gone traveling that year, too, if I’d accepted the scholarship to study in Libya. But my father didn’t want me that far away from him, and I didn’t want to go that far either. The next summer Layli interned with the Human Rights Department of the Jimmy Carter Center in Atlanta, Georgia. By then Roshan had declared his love. Layli was equally smitten. In 1989, he proposed and she accepted. After getting consent from her parents, as is required by the Bahá’í faith, they became engaged. But Layli, who was then only a senior in high school, wasn’t ready to get married quite yet. He’d have to wait another year, she told him. There were two big things she wanted to do after graduating from high school, one being to live on a college campus for one semester, the other being to visit Africa. Layli wasn’t sure why, but she’d always wanted to visit Africa. Roshan suggested that she visit his older sister, Sherry, a dentist who lived with her husband in The Gambia, a tiny West African country even smaller than Togo.
Layli spent three weeks there, traveling part of the time from village to village with two Gambian coordinators of a Bahá’í agricultural development project, helping to plant banana trees. She adapted easily to the foreign ways of this impoverished country. She learned not to mind the heat. She learned how to pee in the bush at night. She learned to say ‘Thank you’ instead of ‘No, I couldn’t possibly’ when a family welcomed her into their home, this white stranger, and offered her the only egg or piece of fruit they had to eat. The generosity she encountered everywhere, in a country where people had nothing, overwhelmed her. People weren’t like that in America, and Americans had so much! But Layli didn’t romanticize village life. She wasn’t a tourist passing through in an air-conditioned van for a quick glimpse through sealed windows at how the ‘natives’ lived. She was living and working there. She saw the poverty, she saw the hunger. She saw how women were often abused and exploited in a typically patriarchal African culture. She saw firsthand, as I did as a child, the kind of jealousy and animosity women begin feeling toward each other when forced to share a household and husband. She saw a lot of things that pained her. But they didn’t make her love the country or the people any less.
During that summer, she also heard about female circumcision. Some of the women in the market were talking about it, but they didn’t discuss the anatomical details. Whatever it was, and Layli understood enough to know it was some kind of genital cutting, they talked about it so matter-of-factly that she accepted it matter-of-factly. The celebration surrounding the ritual seemed to be the main thing. The women became very animated when they talked about the parties and the gifts, so she was happy for them.
Layli cried when it came time to return home. She didn’t want to leave The Gambia. Even though the country was poor and people had none of the material comforts Americans take for granted, they had a different kind of wealth – a warmth, a lovingness, a generosity of spirit she’d never experienced before.
Allah is wise and merciful. I thank Him for that great gift, for bringing Layli to my world and preparing her heart in that way. One day, six years in the future, she would meet a young woman from Togo who would tell her she’d never wanted to leave Togo, would never have come to the United States if she hadn’t feared for her life. Layli would remember how she herself had wept when she’d left The Gambia, and she would know this girl was telling the truth.
In January 1990, Layli started her classes at Agnes Scott College in Atlanta and six months later married Roshan. They lived in Atlanta, where he was beginning his residency at Emory University Medical School. Layli asked him about this practice, of circumcising girls that she’d heard a little about during her visit to The Gambia. Roshan had never heard of it but told her that if he saw any medical writings on the practice, he’d bring them home. Then one day he saw an article on female genital mutilation, or FGM, as the practice is often called in America, and realized this must be what Layli had asked him about.
‘Look at this article!’ he exclaimed, handing it to Layli when he got home that night.
She doesn’t remember who wrote that first paper she read on the subject, but she does remember the descriptions and diagrams of the different types of procedures: cutting off the clitoris; cutting off the clitoris and labia minora; cutting off the clitoris, labia minora, and some portion of the labia majora and stitching the lips together, leaving a small opening near the anus for the passage of urine and blood. She read that FGM is commonly performed under the most unsanitary conditions, with no anesthesia or antiseptics. The cutting is often done with knives, razor blades, and pieces of broken glass. Oh my God! Layli thought.
Roshan kept passing her articles as he came across them. They both were appalled by what they were learning. He saw the practice as a public health problem: FGM poses serious medical risks, which include death, bleeding, pain, shock, psychological trauma, infection, disfigurement, scarring, loss of sexual sensation, all kinds of subsequent health complications. Layli saw it as a human rights violation. In the twenty-eight countries of sub-Saharan Africa where it is most commonly practiced, it is usually performed on girls sixteen or younger, often much younger, sometimes even in infancy.
‘This is wrong,’ she said. ‘Wrong.’
I was fourteen, just starting boarding school, when Layli was reading these articles. I thought FGM was wrong too. Wrong for me, that is. What other people did was their business as long as it didn’t affect me. Layli had a whole different attitude. She was thinking about others and learning to walk her spiritual path with practical feet. Throughout college, she kept up with her Bahá’í activities, interned at the Jimmy Carter Center again, and worked as a volunteer for the Martin Luther King, Jr Center for Nonviolent Social Change. She had decided to pursue a career in international relations, and began to realize that having a law degree might be useful. But Layli had always harbored a deep distrust of lawyers, who too often seemed to her to cause conflict and discord rather than trying to ameliorate them. Weren’t they part of the problem, not the solution? Not always, Roshan kept reminding her. They can protect people. They can help people. They can defend and fight for human rights. They can use their training and the respect a law degree commands to work for justice.
It was Roshan who finally talked Layli into applying to law school, but she decided she would apply only to schools that offered joint degree programs so she could study for a master’s in international relations at the same time. Roshan was about to begin a medical fellowship at Georgetown University School of Medicine, in Washington, D.C., so Layli applied to American University, which is also in D.C. Even after she was accepted by American’s Washington College of Law and the School of International Service in the summer of 1993, Layli was still debating whether or not she should study law. Maybe I’ll just forget about law school and just pursue the master’s, she thought.
I passed the summer of 1993 in Kpalimé, in the house that was no longer my home. My father was dead, my mother had been evicted, my aunt had moved into my mother’s bedroom. I was counting the days until I could return to school.
Two weeks before her classes were to begin, Layli was still vacillating about law school, still saying she didn’t want to go.
‘Just give it a try,’ Roshan said. ‘Go to a few classes. Take your first test. See how you do. You can always quit if you don’t like it.’
‘Well, OK,’ she said. As I was going back to boarding school for what would turn out to be my last semester there, Layli was going to her first law school classes. She liked them. She did well. She was hooked. By the end of her first year, she had been appointed to the law school’s Journal of Gender and the Law, an academic distinction granted after a writing competition. Everyone selected must write an original journal article. The articles are reviewed by the students and the best ones get published in the journal. Layli spent the summer of 1994 interning at the United Nations Information Centre in Washington, D.C., and pondering what subject to write about. Roshan was still passing her the medical literature on FGM, and everything she learned about the practice appalled her. Girls were being mutilated, thousands of them, every day. And why? To keep them pure, supposedly, to reduce their sexual feelings and desire, to keep them under men’s control, to please men. It was wrong. Someone needed to sound an alarm about what was being done to these girls and infants. Hmmm. Maybe she’d write about that.
That was the same summer my aunt told me I wouldn’t be returning to school. That was the summer she told me I was going to marry Ibrahim Ishaq and be cut.
In her second year of law school Layli took a course in criminal law. The students had to write a paper, on a subject of their own choosing. She knew exactly what she wanted to write about. She’d been thinking about FGM all summer. There should be laws against it. Were there? She’d do a paper on whether any countries defined FGM as a crime. She went to work reading everything she could find about the legal status of FGM around the world, but there wasn’t a lot written on the subject at the time, fewer than seventy papers. She read them all. She learned that Britain and Sweden had outlawed the practice, France was then considering passing a law, and a number of African countries had laws against it, some dating back to colonial times, most passed more recently. The majority of countries, however, had not banned it; and most of those that had, seemed to be putting no effort into enforcing their laws.
While Layli was working on her paper on FGM, my aunt was telling me how much calmer I’d be and how much I’d come to love my husband after I was cut. She married me off on Monday, October 17, and the following night I escaped on a plane to Germany, where I would spend the next two months. On the same December day I gave Charlie $600 for a passport that would take me to America, Layli wrote a note to herself on her calendar: ‘Work hard on female circumcision.’ Her criminal law paper was due that week. She turned it in on Friday, December 16, the last day of classes. The next day, I boarded a plane to Newark.
And Karen? As I was flying across the ocean and Layli was enjoying her first day of semester break, Karen Musalo, a well-known refugee-advocate lawyer, was considering whether to come teach at American University the next fall. Karen had been working on behalf of refugees since 1983, and was highly respected as a scholar and teacher in the field of refugee law. The job she’d been offered was a one-year appointment as director of American University’s International Human Rights Clinic. One of the best law clinics in the country, it offers students a chance to get hands-on experience by working on real refugee cases. Professor Richard Wilson, the full-time director, was taking a sabbatical, and needed someone with exactly the kinds of expertise Karen possessed to fill the job. However, it would mean moving clear across the country, and Karen wasn’t sure she wanted to do that.
‘You’re coming, right?’ Rick Wilson asked her.
‘I don’t know, Rick. I haven’t decided.’
Layli hadn’t been sure she wanted to go to American either. But Allah had wanted her there, so there she was. He wanted Karen there too. She’d come. She didn’t know it yet, but she would.
Karen was almost as young as Layli had been when she started down the life path that would eventually converge with mine. She, too, had an early awareness of the suffering and injustice of the world. She opposed the Vietnam War, and at age fifteen, when her brother was drafted to serve, she fully supported his decision to be a conscientious objector. Later she began to read various writings on nonviolence and social change, being profoundly touched by the autobiography of Mohandas Gandhi. After graduation from Brooklyn College, where she had been involved in antiwar activities, she moved to the West Coast, where she worked as an editor and journalist for a small community newspaper, focusing on environmental and animal rights issues. In 1978 she began law school with the idea of specializing in environmental law. After graduating from the University of California School of Law, Boalt Hall, in Berkeley, she took a one-year fellowship in environmental law with the Massachusetts Public Interest Research Group, a Ralph Nader organization in Boston. But Karen didn’t like living on the East Coast, and when the fellowship ended she returned to California.
While she was getting settled back in on the West Coast, Karen began to do free legal work for worthy causes – pro bono work. That’s how she got into refugee law. At that time, the early 1980s, there were tens of thousands of refugees fleeing the political violence and civil wars in Central America. Many of them arrived in California with little more than the shirts on their backs. One of the legal organizations that came into existence to represent them in their pleas for asylum was the San Francisco Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights. The Lawyers’ Committee interviewed newly-arriving asylum seekers, evaluated their cases, and attempted to provide representation for indigent clients with worthy claims. One day the Committee contacted Karen about the case of a young Salvadoran refugee who had been detained in the Oakland jail. The Salvadoran death squads had killed his nephew, his cousin, and two of his brothers, and then came looking for him. He’d eluded them by hiding in a closet and later fleeing to America. The government wanted to send him back. Could she help him? Karen didn’t speak Spanish. She’d never taken a course in immigration or refugee law. How could she help him? But how could she say no?
It was an incredibly difficult case, but Karen hung in there. She never gave up, and in the end, her client was granted asylum. This first asylum case changed Karen’s life. She had found what she wanted to do. From then on, in different capacities, as both a lawyer in the trenches and a faculty member at various law schools, Karen would focus all her energies on refugee and human rights issues. She also became an activist in an area of asylum and refugee law that was just beginning to attract serious attention in the 1980s: how to recognize and respond to the many kinds of persecution that are specific to women and girls, including rape, sexual slavery, forced abortion and sterilization, domestic violence, female genital mutilation – the list goes on. She joined the growing movement to get crimes against women recognized as human rights abuses and as valid grounds for seeking asylum, even if the crimes didn’t appear to be politically motivated – or weren’t considered ‘political.’ For example, for many years rape was not considered a ‘political’ act. But as a member of a human rights delegation that went to the former Yugoslavia in 1993 and that published a report on the Serbs’ widespread policy of the rape of Muslim women, Karen helped to prove that rape can indeed be a political act. The report made a powerful case for recognizing rape as a war crime, and giving protection to women refugees fleeing such crimes. Canada would become the first country to issue formal guidelines recognizing certain gender-specific forms of persecution as grounds for asylum. That happened in 1993, the same year my father died, my mother was evicted, and my life fell apart.
By the time I first met Karen, she was uniquely qualified to handle my case. Not only was she a seasoned, savvy, sophisticated lawyer who had been arguing asylum cases for years, she was a crusader in the battle to get the law to acknowledge that women suffer differently from men, and that their sufferings constitute persecution. I see the hand of Allah at work both in the specific events that led to her coming to American University, and in the forging of a lawyer whose areas of expertise so completely matched my needs. Karen wouldn’t put it that way. She doesn’t talk about God the way I do. She talks about ‘being put in a position where you have an opportunity to do some good.’ But either way, there is no question that by December 1994 we were on converging paths. Mine took me across an ocean. Karen’s was going to take her across a continent.