She slips her sandals off, stretches out a faded green prayer
rug, and begins.
Though her days at UCLA are numbered, graduating student Sheela
Shneezai still finds time to steal away from her busy schedule to
kneel beside an ivy-laden wall behind Kerckhoff and give thanks for
being taken from a land of violent upheaval to the quiet corners of
Westwood.
Before enrolling at UCLA, Shneezai said she saw her fair share
of political turmoil, from the Soviet takeover of her native
Afghanistan ““ a shift that deteriorated into civil war
““ to the oppressive refugee camps of Pakistan to the rash of
racism in the United States after the attacks of Sept. 11,
2001.
The fifth-year biochemistry and Arabic student sees some of
today’s most controversial issues in a different way than
most UCLA students.
In the months after Sept. 11, racial tensions flared as the
nation’s Middle Eastern population experienced a wave of hate
crimes.
“I remember a white lady in her SUV with a bunch of other
people in the car, and they’re honking on us. And
they’re like, “˜You Muslims, you terrorists.’ I
mean, all the dirty words too. I can’t even say those words
““ every bad thing you can imagine,” Shneezai said.
Her experiences were not uncommon.
“After Sept. 11 there have been a lot of cases of
discrimination. Because they wear the head covering, Muslim women
have been called names by random passers-by on the streets,”
said Rahmatullah Akbar, the incoming president of the Muslim
Students Association.
Reports of hate crimes against Muslim Americans spread all the
way to Afghanistan, prompting her uncle to ask her to remove her
hijab, or head scarf, but she refused, confident in her
community’s capacity for tolerance.
Though she did experience incidents of racism after Sept. 11,
Shneezai was quick to answer when asked about the discrimination
she experienced on campus.
“Nothing,” she said, laughing.
When Shneezai was a baby living in Afghanistan, her father, a
former diplomat for the Royal Government of Afghanistan, was taken
by men she said were part of the communist forces purging the
nation of those affiliated with the resistance.
Her father’s disappearance left Shneezai’s mother at
the helm of a household of six children in the middle of a
male-dominated society.
“In Afghanistan, it’s not that easy for a woman to
be strong,” said Shneezai, who has no memory of her
father.
As clashes between Soviet soldiers and the native Mujahideen
forces intensified, Shneezai’s family followed millions of
refugees pouring over the border into Pakistan in the mid-1980s
when she was 10.
Though Shneezai concedes the Taliban forces that eventually took
hold of her homeland were initially responsible for brutal assaults
against women, she said that the reports were exaggerated by the
Western media.
In some ways the Taliban benefitted women, as they provided
security in exchange for some freedoms, she said.
Though Richard Dekmejian, a Middle East expert and political
science professor at USC, said the Taliban regime was ruthless
toward women, he agreed with Shneezai.
“Now that there’s much greater freedom for women,
there’s also been greater lawlessness, in the sense that the
totalitarian regime of the Taliban isn’t there. The present
regime doesn’t have the means to control the whole country,
so those that want to take advantage of women can,” Dekmejian
said regarding the state of Afghanistan following the American-led
dismantling of Taliban forces.
As a woman in Pakistan, Shneezai was not allowed to attend class
unescorted, so she educated herself with the help of take-home
material from a local refugee high school and an unlikely aid
““ she remembers watching censored episodes of “Full
House” and “Matlock” on Pakistani TV.
It was more than a decade before Shneezai and her family were
granted visas for the United States in 2000.
After graduation, Shneezai, now in her mid-20s, plans to attend
pharmacy school at USC and work to help her war-torn country.
“I’m not studying here for myself only. I’m
studying here to make things better for society and humanity as a
whole,” she said.