Zainab Al-Suwaij fled Iraq in 1991, at age twenty. After a childhood witnessing critics of Saddam Hussein disappear, she became one of the only women to actively oppose the regime, and was shot when she fired at a soldier to protect a neighbor being threatened at gunpoint.
"I said if I can't be free and live like a normal human being, then I don't want to live."
Raised in Basra, where her grandfather was an influential Shia imam, she rejected his advice to avoid politics. "I was a troublemaker," she recalls. "In the fourth grade my teacher made the comment that Hitler was a great man because he put the Jews in a room and he burned them. I asked, ‘How can he be a great man if he does such a horrible thing?' She asked me to shut up."
After fleeing Iraq, Al-Suwaij eventually traveled to the United States and settled in Houston, where she met her husband, started a family, and attempted to live a normal life. She was teaching Arabic at Yale on 9/11, when her life again changed.
"I felt that the terror I left behind in Iraq was following me here and threatening my family, my people, and my country. I had to do something."
Al-Suwaij founded the American Islamic Congress, in Washington, D.C., and returned to Iraq for extended visits to work on women's issues, the reform of the Iraqi education system, and the refurbishment of schools.
"I wanted to have an organization established by American Muslims that would become the progressive and moderate voice for building tolerance and respect for human rights and social justice both here and everywhere else."
