WASHINGTON, D.C. — On a cool November morning in 2023, a Pakistani-American Muslim woman in traditional dress stepped onto a stage before 300,000 people gathered on the National Mall for the March for Israel. She opened her mouth and said: “My dear Abrahamic brothers and sisters — I stand with you.”

Those six words set in motion a chain of consequences that would reshape her life entirely. Family members disowned her. Thirty-two board members of her own organization resigned. And then the FBI knocked on her door — handing her a piece of paper she was told not to read aloud. It said the Iranian regime had issued a fatwa against her life.

Her name is Dr. Anila Ali, founder of the American Muslim Multifaith Women’s Empowerment Council (AMMWEC) — and in a remarkable, wide-ranging conversation on the podcast Here I Am with Shai Dai, she tells the full story of her decades-long fight to reclaim Islam from the extremists who hijacked it, and why she would walk back onto that stage without hesitation.

01 — From the Indus Valley to America: A Journey of Faith

Dr. Ali does not fit the West’s default image of a Muslim woman. She is Pakistani, not Arab — a distinction she considers fundamental. Eighty percent of the world’s 1.8 billion Muslims are not Arab, she points out, yet Arab-centric and Wahhabi-influenced interpretations of Islam have come to dominate the conversation in Western media and American mosques alike.

She comes from the Indus Valley civilization — a rich, pluralistic, Sufi-inflected Islamic culture where Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Christians, and Muslims lived together for centuries. Her grandmother was the first Muslim woman legislator in pre-partition India. Her father worked with Henry Kissinger and the Nixon administration to facilitate U.S.-China diplomacy. Both grandmothers were leaders of the Pakistan independence movement.

“For us, women’s leadership is not something new,” she says. “I come from a matriarchal family. That is our Islam.”

02 — How Islam Was Hijacked: Wahhabism and the Muslim Brotherhood

Dr. Ali’s theological analysis of how a peaceful, pluralistic world religion came to be associated with supremacism and violence is both accessible and precise. The culprit, she argues, is a confluence of two 20th-century ideological movements: Wahhabism, which spread from Saudi Arabia and declared friendship with non-Muslims impermissible, and the Muslim Brotherhood, founded by Hassan al-Banna in Egypt in 1928 with the goal of establishing a global Islamic caliphate.

The Brotherhood, she explains, picked up 12th and 13th century fringe Islamic supremacist writings that mainstream scholars had long condemned — and, fueled by decades of foreign funding and internet proliferation, spread them into mosques and Muslim student associations across the United States.

She notes that today’s Saudi Arabia — under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman — has moved dramatically away from Wahhabi ideology, and the UAE banned the Muslim Brotherhood in 2014. But the Brotherhood’s ideological infrastructure in America, built over fifty years, remains largely intact.

03 — CAIR, Extremism, and the Silencing of Muslim Women

Dr. Ali’s most pointed accusations are directed at the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which she characterizes as ideologically aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood and the primary vehicle through which extremist narratives have been inserted into American Muslim discourse.

Her account of the day after 9/11 is striking: she went to her local mosque and heard CAIR’s California leader, Hussam Ayloush, tell a frightened Muslim community that “they are coming for you” — stoking fear of the American government rather than offering civic engagement. She walked up to him and said: “I want my kids to work for the FBI, for the Department of Defense, to be soldiers for the U.S. military. Why are you teaching us this?”

04 — Standing Before 300,000: The March for Israel

In November 2023, weeks after the Hamas massacre of October 7th, Dr. Ali accepted an invitation to speak at the March for Israel on the National Mall in Washington — the largest pro-Israel rally in American history, attended by 300,000 people. As a visibly Muslim woman, the symbolism of the moment was not lost on her — or on anyone watching.

“I walked into that beautiful crowd and I said, ‘My dear Abrahamic brothers and sisters, I stand with you,'” she recounts. “And the Muslim world went crazy.”

She also traveled to Israel with her delegation — visiting kibbutzim, meeting IDF soldiers heading to the front, and witnessing firsthand the aftermath of October 7th. She stood with Rachel Goldberg-Polin, the mother of Hamas hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin, in a hug she describes as one of the most emotional moments of her life.

05 — The Price She Paid: Family, Fatwa, and FBI

The consequences were immediate and devastating. In the weeks following the March for Israel, thirty-two of the thirty-two members of her AMMWEC board resigned — women who had stood with her through 2014 and 2015, building interfaith coalitions, had now “lost their moral compass,” she says.

Her family disowned her. An uncle told her: “What you have done is a disgrace to the entire family, and no Pakistani Muslim will ever marry you.” Her adult children — afraid for their own safety — asked her to remove photos of her grandchildren from social media.

“Not for a moment was I scared for myself,” she says. “I was scared for everybody around me who had stood with me.” She notes that a journalist colleague, Arshad Sharif, who had reported from Gaza and then visited Israel, was killed by the Iranian regime in October 2022 — assassinated, she believes, for telling the truth.

06 — The Path Forward: Abrahamic Unity

Dr. Ali’s vision for the future is clear and consistent: an authentic, grassroots Abrahamic movement — uniting moderate Muslims, Jewish communities, and Christian allies around shared values of peace, transparency, and coexistence. Not performative solidarity, but battle-tested partnership.

She has built AMMWEC’s presence across Boston, New York, New Jersey, Houston, and California — training Muslim women and men to be “voices of moral clarity” in their communities. She continues to take delegations to university campuses, facing boycotts from CAIR-aligned Muslim Students Associations, yet finding students — LGBTQ, Black, Latino, and Muslim alike — hungry for honest education about the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Her final message: “Give the moderate Muslims a voice. Choose authentic partners — Muslim partners who passed the test of time. Let’s build the Abrahamic movement. Let’s build it for America, for Israel, for South Asia. That is the sacred accord. Let’s move it forward.”

Interview Highlights