LIAR. CHEAT. MANIPULATOR. ABUSER. THESE are just some of the accusations that have been leveled at Sharla Musabih, the American-born founder of the City of Hope, the first shelter for abused women in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and a unique initiative in the traditionally conservative confines of the Gulf region.
Such allegations have been commonplace since Musabih established the Dubai-based organization in 2001, but after seven years of shining a spotlight on the darker side of the city’s rich and glamorous exterior and helping countless women escape abusive homes, today she finds herself forced into self-imposed exile, she says, by a “campaign of injustice.”
“This is really hard for my [Emeriti] husband, and I don’t know how much longer he can cope,” says mother-of-six Musabih, speaking to The Jerusalem Report from her childhood home of Bainbridge Island, Washington state, where she has resided for the last six months.
Musabih (née Oakley) who met her husband, Hassan, at a Seattle community college, where he was studying for a degree in economics, moved to the Emirates some 24 years ago. Swapping her life on West coast America, where she grew up in the rural surroundings of Eagle Harbor in the 1970s, for the cultural obscurities of the UAE – then a remote backwater and yet to become the oil-rich powerhouse that it is today – Musabih soon settled down, eventually finding work in a kindergarten, gaining Emeriti citizenship and converting to Islam.
Neither, however, were enough to save her from the indignity of being arrested at Dubai International Airport in June this year as she was about to leave for the comparative safety of the United States. It was, says Musabih, a trumped up charge – lodged by the angry abusive husband of a woman she had helped – that would be just one in a long line of spurious allegations. It was also the final straw.
“A husband had launched a kidnapping charge against me because I took his wife and daughter into the shelter,” says Musabih, whose present period in the States is the longest such stay in her country of birth for over two decades. “I managed to get the charges dropped and then I caught the next available flight out that night.
But during the summer, case after case has been filed against me – ridiculous baseless cases… if I go back now, I’m sure to be arrested again. But I’m so scared for my husband – I’m really scared that they’ll target him… and I’m worried for my children, too.”
Musabih’s campaigns for human rights – most notably, those of abused women – began long before the formation of the City of Hope in 2001. Indeed, her first introduction to domestic abuse in the UAE came some ten years earlier, when an American-born co-worker at the kindergarten confessed to Musabih that her Yemeni husband had been beating her with a television cable.
“I just lost it,” recalled Musabih, in an article in the Bainbridge Island Review in July. “I said, ‘No, no, no, this isn’t happening, you are not going home, you are not going home tonight.’”
Soon, Musabih’s co-worker was followed by other women, and before long the Musabih family residence was doubling as a refuge, which it did for no less than 10 years. For Musabih’s family, sharing their home with women in need, and having extra mouths to feed, became the norm – as did dealing with the wrath of angry husbands. Over the next decade, and as she opened her door to more and more women looking to escape violent homes, the girl from America’s Pacific coast quickly found herself on the frontline of the UAE’s response to domestic violence.
Two years ago, when I interviewed her in Dubai, Musabih ascribed much of the problem to the consequences of rapid immigration. “The development of the UAE is really amazing,” she said. “But what I saw happening was the development of a lot of social problems, which, as a result of the sudden influx of over 100 different nationalities, were being overlooked.”
The social and political structures of the UAE – a country now host to nearly 3.5 million expatriates in a population of some 4.2 million – took time to adapt to this change in population dynamic, itself comprising a rich mix of Europeans, North Americans and Asians, including those from surrounding Arab states. As the police and other social agencies felt the strain of this influx, so too did the local inhabitants.
“The local population instantly lost their heritage and identity,” said Musabih. “And it was very hard for them to deal with everything that came with the bigger population and the rise and use of bigger and better technology.”
Violence against women was just one consequence of the UAE’s rapidly growing population – joining other social ills, such as prostitution – and though it is difficult to gauge the prevalence of domestic violence before this influx, Musabih maintains that such abuse is no more widespread in Arab culture than Western culture.
By 2001, Musabih had secured premises in which to house the women. And with that, the City of Hope was born. With a fully functional, though sparsely equipped, shelter – funded by both private and corporate donations – Musabih and her team of volunteers stepped up their campaign, taking in not only battered wives and housemaids abused by their employers, but also those who were the victims of human trafficking.
At one point, as many as 70 women sought refuge at the shelter – a figure many times its capacity. But what it lacked in expensive and state of the art amenities akin to some of Dubai’s other charities, it more than made up for in discretion and dedication, allowing women – many joined by their children – to safely escape the violence that had driven them to the City of Hope in the first place. Once in her care, Musabih would pursue their cases with vigor and, if necessary, buy plane tickets, often with her own money, to allow the women to return to their home countries.
Musabih’s assertive and direct style in dealing with such matters earned her respect and revulsion in equal measure. Receiving the UAE International Women’s Day award in March 2007 gave Musabih some much-craved recognition, but despite gaining Emeriti citizenship, converting to Islam and adopting the hijab, she was still seen by some as a loudmouth American whose boisterous ways were inappropriate in an Arab male-dominated society. She incurred the wrath of prominent Muslim clerics, many of whom accused Musabih of going against Emeriti traditions and deliberately turning wives against their husbands.
However, rather than backing off from confrontation, Musabih positively embraced it, marching into police stations if she felt they were not protecting women in danger. “Abuse victims were often sent back home after the police asked the husband to sign a statement promising not to harm his wife again,” she says.
Musabih’s work took on an extra dimension when, in 2003, she spearheaded efforts to ban the use of child jockeys in the popular sport of camel racing in the UAE. Bolstering her status as one of the most prominent human rights campaigners in the Middle East, Musabih uncovered the harsh realities of the sport – not least the spinal injuries and septic saddle sores which afflicted many of the young jockeys – and identified children, some as young as 4, who had been brought into the country illegally. She was instrumental in securing a change in the law, which banned the practice in 2005, leading to the introduction of robot-jockeys. And though she heaped praise on the UAE for its swift response to her appeals for judicial reform, she was castigated by some influential Emeritis who believed that her highly public approach to the matter, which led to a number of high-profile newspaper and television reports, was unbecoming.
Musabih’s current travails began to take shape last year when she was approached by state officials about plans for a new government-run shelter. Following months of meetings where she finally endorsed a merger between the City of Hope and the state-run refuge – on the condition that her center be allowed to continue for as long as it took to prepare the new shelter – a delighted Musabih believed that she was about to become a part of something ground-breaking, fittingly rewarded for all her years of dedication and hard work and protected against harm by the highest authority in the land.
“In March 2007,” says Musabih, “I was called into the Executive Office of [UAE Prime Minister] Sheikh Mohammad [Bin Rashid Al Maktoum] where I was told, ‘Sharla, your dreams have come true. We respect and admire your work, and we’d like you to be a part of social development in Dubai and join a new initiative for the protection of women and children.’
“At first they wanted me to close the City of Hope, but when I declined, they asked me what my requirements would be… so we agreed that my shelter could carry on until the new foundation was ready and I told them that I wanted to be in charge of the human rights standards and not on the board of directors…”
Shortly before the launch of the new foundation in the summer of 2007, it became apparent that the government’s approach to the initiative was markedly different to that of Musabih’s. Not only did she discover that she had been made a board member – an unwanted position which rendered her powerless – but she claims not to have been consulted over the appointments of Chairman Ahmad bin Obaid Al-Mansoori and executive director Afra Rashed Al-Basti – two people previously unknown to her and whom she subsequently contended lacked the necessary experience to run the shelter. Though claiming a lack of transparency and anxious about the fate of the women in her care, Musabih says she was reassured by Al-Mansoori and, in October, some 35 women were transported from the City of Hope to the newly established Dubai Foundation for Women and Children (DFWAC), which, by most accounts, resembles a low-security prison – a frightening sight, says Musabih, that she had repeatedly requested be toned down before its unveiling. Shortly after the move, Musabih claims, Executive Director Al-Basti told the women at the foundation that Sharla was “under investigation,” and dismissed their cases of having been abused as “an insult to the UAE.” As the relationship between the two parties deteriorated – with Musabih believing that it had been the wish of the chairman and executive director to force her out all along – she accused the DFWAC of being more interested in sending the women back home with the minimum fuss than attending to their individual cases. And when one of the women who was relocated to the government-run shelter attempted suicide in December, Musabih accused its staff of negligence. Following a heated exchange, Al-Basti sued her for slander.
The City of Hope, far from disappearing, and despite financial difficulties, continued to operate and, notwithstanding the presence of the DFWAC, kept its doors open to new women. Not one to shirk her responsibilities or crumble in the face of adversity, Musabih set up a City of Hope repatriation center in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, in an effort to reunite abused Ethiopian women, many of whom had traveled to the UAE to become house maids, with their families. The City of Hope also qualified for assistance with the U.S. State Department’s Middle East Partnership Initiative in January 2008.
But a spate of allegations against her began to surface in the local press, and though she had become used to defending herself against angry husbands and others who viewed her with suspicion, these charges took on a more menacing air. Musabih now found herself having to fend off stories that alleged she had sold babies and taken money from foreign journalists. As the months wore on, and under the weight of these defamations, Musabih’s shelter began to suffer.
“When these stories began to appear, all of my funding stopped, and my volunteers freaked out, with most of them abandoning me,” says Musabih, whose co-workers were mostly ex-pats. “And I haven’t been able to pay for anything because everybody that guaranteed payment is gone.”
The women at the DFWAC, many of whom are vulnerable and emotionally fragile, appear to have been the sources for the slanderous stories, but Musabih is adamant that both Al-Mansoori and Al- Basti are to blame, smearing her out of petty jealousy and a wish to silence her. “I believe Ahmad Al-Mansoori and Afra Al-Basti are [behind this],” she says. “It’s probably petty – they don’t want me to have any coverage, they don’t want Sheikh Mohammad to recognize me instead of them – it’s so pathetic.”
Musabih is keen to stress her loyalty to Sheikh Mohammad, who, she insists, has nothing to do with the dispute. She is, nevertheless, deeply troubled about what the bitter dispute is doing to the reputation of the UAE. “I have had nothing but respect from the top and I just hate to think what this is doing to the country,” says Musabih. “I’m only working on behalf of my commitment to clear up the misconceptions about Arabs and Islam, and purely trying to be of service and help, as a loyal UAE national who loves her country and would like to give back to society.”
In response to Musabih’s statements, DFWAC spokeswoman Susan Sholkami told The Report that “the foundation is in no way, shape or form connected to the allegations raised by Musabih... The foundation’s mandate is to protect women and children who have been victims of physical, sexual, and emotional abuse. It offers these victims shelter as well as assists them using a holistic approach to sort out their legal, financial, social and family issues. Its key objective is to enable them to reintegrate in society either in the UAE – in cooperation with the local authorities – or in their home countries. The foundation’s role is to work with the relevant entities to ensure their safety in either case.”
While still functioning in her absence – even if barely so – the City of Hope is, says Musabih, nearing its end. Though thousands of miles away, she has not given up hope of returning to the UAE in the near future – if, as she hopes, Sheikh Mohammad or someone else with equal standing intervenes on her behalf – and she is currently working on a new venture, which she is eager to implement.
“We are going to re-launch under a new name, with the City of Hope becoming United Hope,” says Musabih. “Our new vision is to concentrate on awareness, education and training. Our goal would no longer be to shelter women, but to document their cases and research the outcomes… we’re about accountability, and making sure that these women get what they need.”