When Anila Ali spoke at the massive March for Israel gathering on the National Mall last November, an event held in the wake of Hamas’ October 7 slaughter of Israelis, she could be pretty sure that she’d make additional enemies.
But Anila Ali, a Pakistani American and founder and CEO of the American Muslim & Multifaith Women’s Empowerment Council (AMMWEC), knew she had to be there. “I am here,” Ali said, as she surveyed the sea of people on the National Mall, “to affirm to my Abrahamic brothers and sisters that you are not alone.” Condemning Hamas’ massacre, Ali concluded stirringly with the words, “Am Yisrael Chai,” which means, “The people of Israel live.”
“Now, a lot of Muslim women who stood with me after I spoke at the March for Israel rally,” Ali told IWF, “were harassed and told by their local mosques that unless they resigned from my organization, they were not going to be allowed into mosque. A lot of our mosques stayed quiet on the violence, abuse, and rape of Israeli women by Hamas. When I questioned these imams, they asked why I had spoken out. I said, because these men, these Hamas men, took swords and cut the breasts of women, and they said the holiest words in Islam, Allahu Akbar. I asked them, ‘Do you think that’s right?’ ”
Anila is a retired California school teacher and member of a distinguished Pakistani family, who founded AMMWEC in 2009 to help Muslim women “build a bright future together with Americans of all backgrounds.” AMMWEC is intensely pro-American and addresses both the immigrant experience and international affairs. The group’s mission statement says that “as Americans by choice, our work is a tribute to our great country and our heritage.” Ali describes herself as a centrist Democrat. Perhaps one way to think about Ali is as an alternative to the radical Linda Sarsour. Sarsour, the darling of the American Left, was one of the founders of the pussy-hatted Women’s March. According to Ali, Sarsour once stood in her way and tried to prevent her from speaking at an event.
“This is the freest place in the world for Muslims,” she says. “I don’t want to live in a Muslim country because I would not be as free as I am in America.”
“American Muslim & Multifaith Women’s Empowerment Council is an organization that we founded,” Ali explains, “when we realized that women, we Muslim women, had a unique privilege as Americans to build peace in the world, to promote religious freedom, and to empower Muslim women in America to build bridges with the interfaith community, and to also work with the government in promoting better ties, doing our civic duty. We realized that a lot of Muslim-majority, male-dominated organizations had been excluding us, and sometimes silencing us, and we did not subscribe to their views. So, we decided we needed to have our own platform. And to create this platform, we were going to work with all the communities, because in the end that is why we came to America, to work with everybody else, and build a better world.
“Our tent is open,” Ali continues. “A lot of organizations will say we’re not going to work with the Republicans, we’re not going to work with the Democrats, or we won’t work with the conservatives. We speak to everybody, and we say that that is why we came here because we are in a democracy, we are in a civilized world, and that means we cannot stop talking to each other. We faced a lot of Islamophobia after 9/11, and we realized our neighbors didn’t know us. So, we were going to build an organization that was always going to stand for the truth, stand for women, it didn’t matter who they were, and stand for America. And so that’s what I mean when I say that our tent is wide open for all Americans.”
The organization also helps Muslim immigrants adjust to life in the United States. One of the big issues is domestic violence. “We started with a focus on domestic violence in America in Muslim homes and this will remain central,” Ali told IWF. “That’s very close to our heart. There are a lot of misconceptions about Muslim women. Muslim women are said to be timid and weak, but we counter those stereotypes, and we say ‘No, we are going to empower Muslim women. We are not weak. We are empowered because of the fact that we are Americans.’ And our religion also gives us rights and we feel Muslim men have taken those rights away from us. So, we challenge them, we challenge the patriarchy, we challenge those misconceptions, and we are building a modern Muslim women’s diaspora.
“We work with organizations in Muslim-majority countries to promote religious freedom and to counter the gender-based violence that is happening. And I myself am the chair for gender-based violence in Pakistan. We believe that honor killings are not Islamic, because Islam gives us the right to choose our spouse. Also, what we are facing in America is an unprecedented rise in domestic violence because of the fear of ostracization and shame. There is slavery—the literal slavery of Muslim women.
Perhaps one way to think about Ali is as an alternative to the radical Linda Sarsour, darling of the American Left, and one of the founders of the pussy-hatted Women’s March.
“A lot of Muslim women come with their husbands to America and they come on a green card,” Ali said. “This is not a huge problem, but it is one of the issues we’re dealing with in very backward communities in New York, where there are men who will prevent their wives from renewing their green cards because, if they do, they will be empowered. They’ll say, ‘We have our own green card and we can go out and do what we want.’ A lot of that happens in the Muslim community. There are cases of domestic violence in the Afghan community. It’s very high. In the Uyghur community, it is high. Pakistani Bangladeshi community is high. There is harassment, intimidation, and silencing of Muslim women.”
AMMWEC promotes police helplines and other domestic violence resources. The organization launched a leadership training program and, after the 2015 terror attacks in Pakistan and France, it created a Facebook initiative that encouraged American Muslims to oppose such violence. AMMWEC sponsors conferences and briefings for Congress. In 2022, Ali was the center of controversy in Pakistan after she led a delegation (including Pakistani members) to Jerusalem for an interfaith experience. The delegation met with Israeli President Isaac Herzog. Pakistan is so adamant about people not traveling to Israel that its passport includes a notice that it applies to any state except Israel.
Anila Ali grew up in a prominent Pakistani family. Her grandmother was Secretary of the Muslim League and wrote several books on Islam and the rights of women. Her father was Qutubuddin Aziz—a diplomat, prominent author, journalist, and leading figure of the Pakistani Movement, which furthered the creation of Pakistan from Muslim-majority areas in 1947. Aziz served stints as a diplomat in London, where Anila lived for ten years. “I was doing my O levels and A levels and there I had the opportunity to meet so many people of different religions. My father was an intellectual and he encouraged me to ask questions,” Anila recalled.
Anila returned to Pakistan, earning a B.A. from St. Joseph’s Convent and a master’s degree from the University of Karachi, where she studied international relations and English literature. She also lived in Saudi Arabia, where she taught in an exclusive school. “While I was in Saudi Arabia,” she recalled, “I picked up the Quran and I read it with understanding. I learned Arabic and I said, ‘Oh, I know what God is saying.’ And then my whole life changed because I said, God gave us rights and equality, and if you understand the Quran, you have to understand that Christians and the Jews might have said an eye at one time, and perhaps it was okay then. It is not in today’s context, and God has given us the intelligence and the authority as intelligent people of faith to come up with better solutions for today to make our lives better, and we’re not doing that. That term is called ijtihad. Muslim clerics don’t want to talk about it.”
Ijtihad is an Arabic word, Anila explains, that means “effort” or “striving.” In Islamic law, it refers to the process of using independent reasoning and understanding of the Quran to make legal decisions.
“The last couple of days in Washington D.C., after seeing the destruction of everything, the burning of American flags, American flags being replaced by Palestinian flags, I felt like I’m living in Gaza,” says Anila.
Ali came to the United States with her American husband in 1996 and taught in public schools in California. While teaching in California, Anila cofounded CalPak, a nonprofit dedicated to helping at-risk girls in Pakistan get an education. CalPak sponsors schools in rural areas and helps girls obtain online education certificates from California institutions of higher education. Ali took to California and America immediately. “This is the freest place in the world for Muslims,” she says. “I don’t want to live in a Muslim country because I would not be as free as I am in America. I was always very fond of England and I had thought I would settle in England, but England had become already such a hotbed of Islamic extremism that I didn’t like it. I had seen it in the seventies, I’d seen it growing in the eighties, and I came to America instead. I loved California, because nobody cared who I was. Nobody called me a Paki. But now I feel a lot of Islamic extremism has been imported from the U.K.”
It was a few days after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to Congress and the associated anti-Israel protests at Union Station when Ali spoke to IWF. She was extremely distressed about this development. “This is very dangerous for America,” Ali said, “and I don’t know when we are going to wake up and smell that coffee. The last couple of days in Washington D.C., after seeing the destruction of everything, the burning of American flags, American flags being replaced by Palestinian flags, I felt like I was living in Gaza. This is Gaza, and they have destroyed and defaced all of D.C. That’s not the America that I want to live in. So, I want to change it. And I will fight for America till I die.”