Yasmin Busran-Lao
Wednesday, 06 January 2010 09:34 | Author: Michael Vargas | 
IN 2005 YASMIN BUSRAN-LAO was granted the Benigno S. Aquino Jr. Fellowship for Professional Development Award given by the American embassy and the Benigno S. Aquino Foundation. The award came as a surprise to the woman who had repeatedly spurned similar nominations by conveniently forgetting to submit her credentials.
“I never expected to be publicly recognized for what I do,” she says. “Fighting for the rights of Muslim women and other marginalized groups is something personal for me. I get enough satisfaction helping people gain a certain control over their lives.”What is not surprising is how this Psychology graduate of Far Eastern University came upon her advocacy. Yasmin recalls how, as an 11-year-old probinsyana, she had to contend with seatmates who would suddenly edge away when she was introduced before the class.“Muslims were seen as devils, complete with tails and horns,” she recalls of the prejudice and stigma she had to put up with when her family moved to Manila in 1972. Like thousands of other families, they had to flee war-torn Marawi where private armies like the Ilagas and Barracudas had established a reign of terror. Her father, too, had just been appointed as the first Muslim judge in the Court of Appeals, and had to stay in Manila.
The experience, Yasmin says, made her conscious at an early age of the “impact of bigotry and discrimination on human relationships, especially on dignity and communal harmony.” It also made her a thorn in her mother's side. She recounts: “It was at the Quiapo mosque where I met these women who were abandoned by their Iranian husbands. This was during the time of Khomeini in Iran. The women were disowned by their families and kicked out of their homes, so I decided to bring them with me. I was running some sort of a woman's crisis center at home, and my mother could only shake her head.”Soon, she was joining other activists when they visited Muslims in death row. “I just wanted to know what was happening,” says Yasmin. It was an unusual show of spunk for one who was only in her third year high school then.Such dissonance ushered her into an existentialist phase at 16, when she studied the Qur'an, Buddhism and other religions to find where some oppressive practices were coming from. “They were not in the Qur'an, so why are Muslims embracing them?” she asked.
The questions led her to establish the Al-Mujadilah Development Foundation (AMDF) in 1997, shortly after she attended the 1995 Beijing Conference on Women as a representative of the feminist group PILIPINA. “In Beijing, I was able to interact with Muslim women from other countries,” recounts Yasmin. “I realized that much of the Islamic teachings we adhered to, particularly those pertaining to women, are not really what is in the Qur'an, but rather cultural interpretations of Islam.”
What followed was intensive research on the situation of Muslim women-from their domestic roles to reproductive health and poverty, from politics to the impact of armed conflict. “This we did in response to allegations that gender issues are Western issues that have no resonance in Muslim Moro communities,” says Yasmin.
