Sharla Musabih, right, the founder of City of Hope, Dubai's first women's shelter, said goodbye to a departing resident last July. (Tamara Abdul Hadi for The New York Times)
By Robert F. Worth
IHT, March 23, 2008
Link to Part 1
She founded the United Arab Emirates' first women's shelter here and she became a familiar figure at police stations, relentlessly hounding officers to be tougher on abusive husbands.
She has also earned many enemies. Emiratis do not often take kindly to rights advocates drawing attention to the dark side of their fast-growing city-state on the Gulf, better known for its gleaming office towers and artificial islands.
Still, no one was quite prepared for the stories that started appearing in Dubai newspapers this month. Suddenly, unnamed female victims were coming forward to say that "Mama Sharla" herself had abused them, forced them to work as servants and sold their stories to foreign journalists for thousands of dollars, pocketing the proceeds.
She even sold one woman's baby, the articles said, hinting at criminal investigations.
To Musabih and her supporters, the accusations, which appear to be baseless, are the latest chapter in a long campaign of threats and defamation that began with angry husbands and has grown to include prominent clerics, and even the directors of a new government-financed women's shelter, who, she says, would like to silence her.
The ferocity of the dispute is unusual for Dubai, and underscores a major challenge facing this proudly apolitical business capital. The city's few rights advocates have always been quietly shunted aside.
But as the conservative Muslim ethos of Dubai's native Arab minority rubs against the varied perspectives of a much larger foreign population, debates about how to approach taboo subjects like domestic violence and the city's prevalent prostitution are getting louder.
Musabih, 47, a boisterous American transplant who was born and raised on Bainbridge Island, Washington, argues that confrontation is essential in fighting the patriarchal Arab traditions that allow men to beat their wives with impunity. She and her supporters also say the Emirates have not acknowledged the severity of their problem with human trafficking, the brutal business in which foreign women are lured here with promises of jobs and then forced into prostitution or servitude. Last year the U.S. State Department placed the Emirates and 31 other countries on a watch list for failing to effectively combat the illegal trade.
"When a woman has three broken bones in her back, and the police don't take it seriously, yes, I get angry," Musabih said.
Others say Musabih's aggressive approach - which includes appeals to foreign news media as well as tough, face-to-face lobbying - is inappropriate in the Arab world, and has needlessly fueled the backlash she now faces.
That assertiveness may also have made it easier to dismiss her as an outsider. Although she has lived here for 24 years, converted to Islam, is an Emirati citizen, wears a veil and has raised six children here with her Emirati husband, Musabih is still unmistakably American, from her moralistic zeal to her habit of calling the women in her shelter "darlin'."
"I have told her sometimes I think she is wrong, she goes too far," said Lieutenant General Dahi al-Khalfan, the chief of the Dubai Police, who has supported Musabih in the past but now tends to criticize her work as divisive. "There is a case between husband and wife; let the court decide! Leave it."
Musabih dates her work as an advocate from 1991, when she started tracking domestic violence cases and offering women shelter in her home in Dubai. In 2001, she rented a two-story house in the Jumeira district and opened a shelter for abused women and their children, naming it City of Hope.
On a recent afternoon, children's toys littered the floors in the shelter's sunlit living room, and several women snacked in the kitchen, while others sprawled on couches watching television upstairs.
Although Musabih has had some dedicated assistants over the years, it is basically a one-woman show; she deals with everything from belligerent former husbands to buying plane tickets, sometimes with her own money, for foreign women to return to their home countries.
"I've repatriated 400 victims in the past six months," said Musabih, a fast-talking, energetic figure who presides over the shelter like an overworked mother.
Establishing the shelter was unusual enough in the Arab world, where going outside the family to resolve domestic conflicts has little basis in law or custom. Musabih's personal advocacy made her work even more startling. She would counsel women to leave their husbands if they were being beaten, and help represent them in courts or foreign consulates.
Link to Part 2
She would also march into police stations and yell at officers if she felt they were not protecting women in danger. In the Arab world it is virtually unheard of for a woman to behave this way toward a man, and the officers sometimes felt they had been publicly humiliated.
Some women who have spent time in the shelter say this tough approach is necessary. The police in Dubai "won't do anything to protect you while you're legally married," said one former resident of the shelter, who declined to give her name because she still fears repercussions, from her husband and from others who oppose Musabih.
After her husband beat her repeatedly, the woman said, she appealed to the police, who made her husband sign a promise that he would not do it again. He violated the pledge repeatedly, she said, but the police did nothing, even after he broke into another house where she was seeking refuge and raped her.
"The police told me, 'We can't do anything, he's your husband,' " she said.
But Musabih's approach clearly shocked and angered many, and not just the husbands whose wives found shelter.
A prominent cleric, Ahmed al-Kobeissi, recently gave interviews to Dubai newspapers in which he said Musabih's work "goes against the traditions of Emirati people" because she "instigates wives against their husbands." Kobeissi also voiced indignation at Musabih's suggestion that Emirati men are among the clients of Dubai's many prostitutes.
Musabih's work took on a higher public profile when she joined a crusade against the practice of using children, some as young as 4, as camel jockeys, once common in the Gulf. Her advocacy led to a number of television and newspaper reports about the horrific abuses practiced on young jockeys, and appears to have helped lead to a ban on the practice in the Emirates in 2005.
Musabih is full of praise for the Emirati government's response on this issue. But her highly public approach to the problem is said to have angered some influential Emiratis.
