“How a Salon Is Empowering Acid Attack Survivors in Pakistan”

Masarrat Misbah, a beautician in Lahore, Pakistan, started the Depilex Smile Again Foundation in 2003 after a woman who came to her salon unveiled herself as an acid attack survivor.

“Imagine a woman literally without a face — someone with no eyes, nose, lips, ears, and hair,” Misbah said. 

Misbah’s objective through the donation-funded nonprofit is to provide vocational training in order to economically empower the acid attack survivors and pay for their reconstructive surgery. Many of the women have dozens of surgeries after being attacked.

Misbah and other beauticians have trained 423 victims in salon work, a full-time program that lasts about four weeks.

“We can only teach them how to do nails, hair, and a little makeup because a lot of them are [partially] blinded from the acid attacks and their eye movement doesn’t allow [them] to work on intricate details,” Misbah said. 

Noreen Jabbar, 32, whose ex-husband threw acid at her in 2014 after she divorced him, told Refinery29 she wants to open her own salon after her training is complete. Jabbar has three daughters and struggles to pay her rent.

Farah Sajjad, 35, said she “had no hope to live” after her sister-in-law attacked her with acid last year. Sajjad’s husband lived abroad and sent money to his entire family; Sajjad said that when he asked her to meet him abroad, his sister feared that he would stop supporting the rest of the family and attacked Sajjad in revenge.

“I am learning salon work to support my family,” she said.

Sabira Sultana, also a survivor, said, “The solution to end this heinous crime is strict implementation of law and strict sentences."

Activists and lawmakers have been working on this for years now. The Acid Control and Acid Crime Prevention Act, passed in 2011, recommended a punishment of up to 14 years in prison and a fine of up to 1 million rupees for perpetrators. 

Local newspaper, The Express Tribune, quoted Valerie Khan Yusufzai, chair of the Pakistan branch of Acid Survivors, as saying the conviction rate rose from 6% before the bill was passed to 18% in 2012. Understandably, many survivors and activists felt this act alone was not enough to prevent acid crimes. 

Enter the Acid and Burn Crime Bill, first proposed in 2012, which was essentially a follow-up to the act, a push to further strengthen penalties for acid attacks. A stronger iteration of the bill has since been reintroduced, and is still pending while activists and lawmakers negotiate on several clauses.

"I Thought I Didn't Have Another Chance Towards Happiness"

It was the day Sarwari Bibi had awaited for more than two decades. Surrounded by friends and family, the 45-year-old Pakistani salon worker dressed in brightly colored clothing and sat patiently as women flitted around her, helping sweep up her hair and apply her makeup. 

But Bibi was no ordinary bride: In 1992, her first husband, then unemployed, told her she was expected to pay the household expenses. When Bibi couldn’t come up with the money, her husband tried to kill her by throwing kerosene at her and lighting her on fire. 

Before her wedding last month to Arshad Ali, Bibi had suffered decades of loneliness and discrimination as a result of her scars, and underwent seven major surgeries. Her life changed when she connected with the Depilex Smile Again Foundation, a group dedicated to victims of domestic violence, and then met Ali. "I thought I didn’t have another chance towards happiness," she told Refinery29.

Sadly, Bibi is far from alone: Hundreds of women and children each year become victims of acid attacks in Pakistan, according to the Asia Foundation. The majority are carried out by husbands against their own wives and children, usually over domestic disagreements. And the horrific attacks — which disfigure but rarely kill — don’t just take place in rural areas, but also in major cities. 

On her wedding day, Bibi’s friends and colleagues, many of them also victims of acid and kerosene attacks, were there to celebrate one woman's triumph. That process began in 2008, when she registered with Depilex Smile Again, the staff of which helped with her medical care. Bibi also took one of the foundation's beauty courses, and now works as a beautician at the Depilex salon, earning enough to support herself. 

Ahead, Bibi shares her wedding portraits and her stunning story of love and hope after abuse.

  'We have the same heart': Madison Muslims unite against negative perceptions of Islam

On the morning of June 13, Maysoun Chablout and her husband decided it was best to stay inside.

It was the day after a mass shooting at a nightclub in Orlando and Chablout, a Muslim woman who wears a hijab, feared she would be blamed for the horrific violence if she appeared in public.

“It felt like 9/11 for us Muslims where you couldn’t go outside for three weeks,” said Chablout, who was born in Syria and has lived in Madison for three years. She teaches Arabic studies at Madinah Community Center.

Although Muslims residing in the United States have publicly condemned such attacks as contrary to the teachings of Islam, those same U.S. residents, many of them American citizens, still fear hostile environments that can result when shooters are identified as Muslims. Anti-Muslim sentiment is suspected by some to be the motive behind the recent shooting death of an Imam and his assistant in Queens, New York, though that has not been confirmed.

Local Muslims interviewed say they want people to know that Islam is not confined to a society or geographic location. There are 1.6 billion Muslims residing across the globe.

Madison Muslims have migrated from different parts of the world, belong to a wide variety of ethnic groups and are a tightly knit community. They estimate that there are approximately 10,000 Muslims in the Madison area, many of whom attend the area's three mosques, located downtown and on the east and west sides. All of the mosques are former churches. People gather at each of the mosques for Friday afternoon prayers, called Jummah.

While many in Madison’s Muslim population said they don’t experience the same kind of hostility that their Muslim counterparts face in other parts of the country, they point to the media as a primary source of rhetoric that roots Islamophobia among non-Muslims.

“Media is playing a critical role towards portraying Islam in a negative way and sadly it is the prime source of information for the masses,” said Sohail Siraj, owner of Best Brains Learning Center, an academic tutoring business in Madison.

Still, Muslims interviewed say they have found a supportive community here.

“It is important for the whole nation and the city of Madison to know that churches and other organizations reached out to us after all the anti-Islam rhetoric in the media about Muslims to show support,” said Gibril Jarjue, president of the Islamic Center of East Madison. “There is solidarity between Muslims and other faiths in Madison.”

Jarjue said the churches signed a letter in support of the Madison Muslim community.

“I hope other organizations in other cities learn from this kind of unity because we have families and kids here,” Jarjue said. “They are growing and they are Americans.”

On a recent Friday, the Imam leading prayers at the Islamic Center of East Madison quoted from the Quran, the main religious text of Islam, and preached about living in harmony with neighbors despite the challenges of the current political climate.

It is a common theme in the mosque. During the sermon preceding the prayers, Imam Alhagie Jallow, an Islamic scholar, said terrorist attacks carried out across the globe by those who identify as Muslim are not acts of Islam.

“Islam should not be judged as a religion based on one person’s action,” said Jallow, who presides over the Islamic Center of East Madison. “If a terrorist has an Islamic name, the entire world blames the rest of the Muslims and it is painful.”

Islam condemns the killing of human beings, he said. Jallow quoted a verse from the Quran which is translated as: “If a person saves one soul, the reward is for saving the whole world. And if you kill one soul, the consequences and punishment for that is as if you killed the whole world.”

Nizam Nizammuddin, an immigrant from India who has lived in Madison for 45 years, condemned mass shootings such as those in Orlando and San Bernardino, California, calling them barbaric.

“If their interpretation of Islam triggers a derailed thought process, that is their individual problem and misunderstanding of the religion. It does not mean that Islam allows such actions,” Nizammuddin said. “There is no room for such kind of violence.”

Violent acts that the media link with individuals who happen to be Muslim cause shock and grief as well as frustration for local Muslims.

“I was in shock and frustrated at the (Orlando) shooter at the same time for carrying such an attack when Muslims are already portrayed so negatively,” said Akmal Hamid, a University of Wisconsin-Madison student originally from Malaysia.

When she first heard about the mass shooting in Florida, Najeeha Khan, another student at UW-Madison originally from Pakistan, hoped that the perpetrator was not a Muslim.

“Because we have seen it in the past where the media links the attack to Islamic values and we can suffer the consequences and deal with negative comments although we didn’t ask for it,” Khan said.

Khan wears a hijab and prepared herself for negative remarks and more stares than usual after the attack. The traditional headscarf makes it impossible for Muslim women to blend in.

“It is unnerving when people just blatantly keep staring at you in public if you’re wearing a hijab,” said another UW-Madison student, Afra Alam, who was born in Waukesha and is of Bangladeshi descent. “People have such crazy hairstyles, but that’s more acceptable in public than me wearing a scarf over my head.”

The media’s tendency to link Islamic values and terrorism, even indirectly, seems to happen for several reasons, some said.

UW-Madison student Hamid believes that by making that connection, journalists think their stories will be more interesting and more people will read them.

“That is the media’s goal, and people who already antagonize Islam — including politicians — hit the jackpot,” Hamid said.

Kathleen Bartzen Culver, director of the Center for Journalism Ethics at the UW-Madison, said that when there is a presidential candidate like Donald Trump who establishes narratives against a particular race or religion, it can be hard for journalists to correct that tone.

With breaking news, Culver said, the media needs to slow down.

“They should not immediately make the top question: ‘Is this terrorism? Is this terrorism? Is this terrorism?’ They need to step back and look at the situation as a whole.”

Competitiveness, Culver said, “can lead to some pretty flawed decision-making.”

UW-Madison student Alam feels that the media portrays Muslims in a bad light in order to attract a larger audience.

“The dangerous rhetoric of Islamophobia sparks even more hatred towards Muslims,” she said.

Culver said a lack of diversity in newsrooms also hurts coverage.

“We don’t have people practicing a rich variety of faiths among newsrooms. The average newsrooms are white males from middle to upper class and we see a lot more men than women,” she said.

She said the media should be out talking to people in their community and building trust so that they understand situations like Chablout’s, who did not feel safe leaving her house.

“Those are the things we need to pay attention to as news media and also responsibly report on communities,” she said.

Nihal Ahmad, a professor at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, said the term “fundamentalist Christian” is never used in the media when a Christian commits a crime.

“The media should not call these terrorists Muslim extremists because they are not Muslim in the first place because they are not following Islam,” Ahmad said.

Imam Jallow thinks the solution is to educate journalists about Islam.

“The media needs to separate what is Islam and what an individual is doing,” Jallow said. “We are Americans and we obey the same law as every other U.S. citizen.”

Focusing on religion neglects real issues behind the crimes, some said.

“If a person has a Muslim name and brown skin color they are automatically called terrorist, unlike many other instances where the shooter gets away by having a mental disability,” said Haddijatou Tunkara, a young Madison Muslim.

Media critics are concerned, Culver said, that once the label of terrorism is applied to Islam, it transforms coverage and people lose sight of the situation and its relationship to other social issues like mental illness.

When Tunkara learned about the Orlando shooting from a Buzzfeed notification on her phone, she was devastated.

“The first thing the media mentioned was that he is a Muslim and not the fact that he might have a mental disability,” Tunkara said.

Tunkara is an advocate for gun control and said that is the issue to focus on: “It shouldn’t be that easy for someone to get a gun and carry out such a heinous attack.”

Culver agreed that the role of guns can be overlooked.

“If you look at cases not just like Orlando or San Bernardino, in fact all cases involving mass killings, we have never really come to terms with as a society to accept the toll of guns in this country,” she said.

The recent attacks have prompted local Muslims to hold interfaith events to inform people about Islam.

Bin Dada, a consultant at the Wisconsin Department of Transportation, said Muslims should have been reaching out to the community since 9/11.

“We shouldn’t wait for these attacks to happen in order to realize that we need to be more involved in the community,” he said.

Local efforts mirror larger initiatives around the country, such as those by the American Friends Service Committee in Washington, D.C. AFSC collaborates with Muslim, Christian and Jewish faith-based organizations to confront and eliminate Islamophobia.

“Muslim Americans are put in a corner where they are either accused of being terrorists or seen as objects that will be used as insinuating terrorism,” said Raed Jarrar, government relations manager in AFSC’s office of public policy and advocacy.

“We try to fight against legislation that will increase discrimination against Muslim Americans,” he said. “Changing the prevailing narrative about Islam and Muslims in the U.S. is very important — about Islam being a foreign religion that is associated with negative values is one of the issues that many organizations are trying to push for. Islam is not a foreign religion to the United States.

“There is no narrative out there that says Muslims Americans are equal to Americans. We should not be holding them to another bar to prove their American-ness and prove they deserve to be in this country.”

Best Brains Learning Center’s Siraj agrees.

“We need to show people we are the same human beings as you are, we have the same heart as you do, and we have the same feelings as you do,” he said.

“With crops gone and possessions lost, the flood affected communities of Sindh need our immediate attention”

In order to get back on their feet, these communities need more and sincere support in the coming months and perhaps even years.

I have covered many stories of suffering and hardship, but what I witnessed during a recent assignment for the World Food Programme in rural Sindh has left me heartbroken. 

On September 13, near the city of Badin, we entered one of Pakistan's worst flood-affected areas. For several kilometres and pretty much as far as the eye could see, there were temporary camps for the flood-affected dispossessed communities by the side of a main road in the area, with families living in hastily erected shelters and holding on to whatever few possessions they had left. 

The conditions that we saw them living in, one could say that getting by in itself is a struggle for these communities. Some people would walk long distances in search of fresh water, whereas others would drink from the dirty water lapping up by the roadside. Many farmers had lost their cattle in the floods. Those whose livestock survived were doing all that they possibly could to keep the animals alive. Some of them had also built makeshift shelters for their animals and would share whatever little clean water they could spare with them. After all, these animals are the only source of income that these communities can rely on for now.

These communities are living in abject conditions that can pose severe health risks to all members. During the assignment, we saw children playing in the dirty floodwater, and women washing clothes and bathing their kids using the same. This is the case as there are not enough viable options and whatever clean water there is, is having to be rationed. 

In the scorching heat of this region, insects can also be common and the prevalence of water means flies and mosquitos are everywhere, adding to the risk of disease for those who already have to live under the open skies and in conditions that have put their health at risk.

For the province, the monsoon is an annual event, but with climate change, the floods tied to it are getting worse. In the most recent flooding just weeks prior, scores of villages were destroyed and thousands were left homeless. 

For some towns and villages, such as the ones in Mirpurkhas district, we had to travel by motorboats to reach the area. Villagers there told us that they hadn't seen any outsiders ever since the floods devastated their homes and that all their crops were now gone and possessions lost; no more houses, and nothing to eat. All I could say to them at that time was ‘I’m sorry’. 

If they are left alone to fend for themselves, these communities may not able to make it. Their mud houses and fragile livelihoods as subsistence farmers cannot withstand this onslaught. 

What has happened here can and must be tackled with urgency. The World Food Programme has provided them with food rations — flour, pulses, cooking oil, and nutritious edibles for children to prevent malnutrition from setting in. But for these communities, in order to get back on their feet, they need more and sincere support in the coming months and perhaps even years.

The WFP has been distributing food to the affectees. At one such distribution site in Umerkot, we met families that had gathered to receive their pre-packaged food ration as the villagers are all affected by the recent floods and are in desperate need of help. And then one villager asked ‘what will happen when this runs out? And how can we rebuild our homes?’

And this is not the story of this man alone. All along the main road of the city of Badin are kilometres and kilometres of hastily erected shelters, with dispossessed families seeking refuge, not knowing when they may be able to have a proper dwelling for themselves to move into.

The devastation is equally visible in an urban slum that we visited in the city of Karachi. Amidst damaged houses and roads, children were running around barefoot; mothers with babies in their arms were navigating carefully, so they do not trip through the puddles mixed with floodwater and sewage. 

The effects of climate change are being increasingly felt in Sindh, and they are taking a particularly heavy toll on these communities of subsistence farmers, nomadic tribes, as well as on those living in urban slums; all the people we met during this assignment. 

If anything is to be learnt here, it is that climate change is a threat to our communities and the danger it poses is constantly on the rise. Therefore, not only is it time for us to sincerely acknowledge this problem but to start taking meaningful measures to address it.