1988.
It was almost midnight. Muhammad Ali was 18 years old, working in a garment factory in Karachi, Pakistan, but tonight he would take on one of the city’s most wanted criminals. He had discovered this man, who had kidnapped a family and forced their 15-year-old daughter into marriage, was hiding out in the city’s slums. His hideaway just happened to be next door to a plot his friend owned. Muhammad Ali spent a few days doing recon and had decided tonight, at midnight, he would take matters into his own hands. He would rescue the family, moving them into hiding with the help of a friend. His plan was dangerous, but it worked. He snuck the family out of the house and got them to safety.
1995.
A new case landed on his desk. She was a victim of a gang rape. Muhammad Ali, now 25 and working for an organization tackling rape and sexual violence in Pakistan, was tasked with preparing this young woman and her family to go to trial. The plan was to convict the men who raped her, but the problem was two of them belonged to the mafia, a powerful and feared force in the city.
On the eve of the trial, Muhammad Ali paid the family a visit to walk them through the plan one last time. As he left, he hopped on the bus to head home. Except he never made it home that night. The bus stopped shortly after he boarded and two men got on, entering from the front and back. They grabbed Muhammad Ali, forced him off the bus, blindfolded him and threw him in the back of a van. They started questioning his connection to the family, interrogating him by burning him with cigarettes and cutting him with a knife. It was clear they were conspiring with the woman’s attackers, but Muhammad Ali played dumb. He knew his life was on the line.
The men held Muhammad Ali hostage for 12 hours but, by dawn, he had convinced them to release him. The woman kept quiet that day in court. Power had prevailed over truth. Muhammad Ali, no longer safe in Karachi, was sent to Dubai. He had no other choice than to leave his wife, who was expecting their first child, behind. They would spend five years apart, seeing each other only once a year.
2000.
The phone rang at 1:30 a.m. Muhammad Ali was back in Karachi, now the father of two boys. He had been appointed to work on a child protection project funded by UNICEF to address the issue of missing children, a terribly neglected problem in Pakistan. A six-year-old girl named Shumaila had disappeared the night before, and he was trying to help her parents find her. He picked up the phone; it was her father. Shumaila had been found. Muhammad Ali sighed with relief. “Congratulations,” he said. “No, don’t say congratulations,” the father said. “We found her dead.”
The brutal incident weighed heavily on Muhammad Ali. He started exploring the neighborhood where Shumaila had lived. Her home, where she had been abducted and where she had been found dead were all within walking distance of each other. It was a friendly, inclusive area where no one locked their doors. How could someone have abducted this girl, sexually assaulted her and strangled her with open doors and women working next door? It got Muhammad Ali thinking.
Acumen Fellow Muhammad Ali had never planned to go into social work, but these three profound moments, needless to say, changed the course of his life. When he rescued that family in 1988, he didn’t tell his parents or question his decision. It could have been naiveté, but all that mattered to Muhammad Ali was a family was being treated inhumanely and he felt compelled to help. When he was taken hostage in 1995, he stood his ground because he felt a responsibility to protect the rape victim and make sure justice was served. He wasn’t one to cower to corruption, even if it meant being separated from his own wife and family. And when he witnessed the heartbreak of Shumaila’s parents, he mourned with the family being a father himself but it was also an experience that would define the rest of his life.
“Shumaila’s death was a turning point for me,” Muhammad Ali said. “I realized the significance of a child for a parent and saw the pain these parents went through after losing their only child. Seeing that and seeing the failure of the system in place, I knew this was too important of an issue to not do anything about.”
In Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city, roughly 3,000 to 4,000 children go missing every year. In most cases, these children are picked up and sexually assaulted, sold off for false adoption or trafficking, handed over to the beggar mafia or, worse, murdered. Despite these alarming numbers, it remains a severely neglected issue in the city and the country as a whole. It wasn’t only police shrugging it off to tend to other matters, parents, especially those in low-income communities, failed to understand the importance of reporting. “Even 24 hours is too long to wait,” Muhammad Ali said. “It has to be the moment your child goes missing.”
In Muhammad Ali’s mind, Shumaila’s death could have been prevented, given the radius of the crime. He started to think about the dynamics of the city’s neighborhoods and how to leverage residents as watchdogs. If he could build a network of volunteers, he believed he could create essentially a wall within an hour that a child goes missing and stop a perpetrator before it was too late.
His first stop: Karachi’s many mosques. With hundreds of mosques spread across the city and five calls to prayer a day, Muhammad Ali knew he could get his message out to the masses. He then tapped into Karachi’s transgender community, who he felt could be his eyes and ears on the street. More than 17,000 transgender people live in Karachi but they are often treated as outcasts and therefore wind up on the street. “They felt they had been dealt a bad hand, so they saw this an opportunity to do good,” Muhammad Ali said.
He then scouted out Karachi’s neighborhoods, so he could understand the lay of the land and build out his networks. He determined key entryways to make sure they were carefully watched and enlisted chatty neighbors and street vendors who know everything and everyone as his main points of contact. He also partnered with print shops so, if a child did go missing, they would be responsible for creating fliers at a moment’s notice. “We made it easy on everyone,” Muhammad Ali said. “Our informants didn’t have to do anything except make a phone call.”
And then he got his first phone call. One of his watchdogs who operated a public call office had overheard a woman call her husband to tell him their son, Shehryar, had gone missing. When she hung up, he asked her what had happened, immediately called Muhammad Ali and, in a matter of 90 minutes, had printed 500 fliers with the seven year old’s face. In less than six hours, a roadside café owner spotted the boy with a man and called Muhammad Ali who then rang the police. When they arrested the man, they learned he had already assaulted Shehryar three times but, thanks to Muhammad Ali, never would again.
His methods had worked. It was all the proof he needed. In 2004, Muhammad Ali founded Roshni Helpline, an organization committed to missing and exploited children. The first of its kind not just in Pakistan but all of South Asia, Roshni has created the only helpline (1138) dedicated for reporting missing and exploited children cases. By leveraging the telephone and text messaging, Roshni recovers missing children while raising awareness for a critical, yet often ignored cause. Because of Roshni’s innovative and highly effective approach to tackling this problem, Muhammad Ali has been asked by government of Nepal and other organizations that have followed his lead to replicate system.
Today, Roshni’s vast network includes thousands of volunteers, 2,000 transgender people, advocacy groups, psychologists, law enforcement and media. Their efforts have helped to reunite more than 4,000 children with their families. Now 47, Muhammad Ali remains as dedicated to the cause as the day he got that fateful call about from Shumaila’s father.
“When I find a child and the parents come to me, that just keeps reviving my spirit and my commitment to this cause,” he said. “I am but a small social worker. My journey has just started.”
Roshni means “light” in Urdu, but by bringing attention to a neglected issue and supporting often overlooked communities, Muhammad Ali has become a light in the dark for so many people.
The Acumen Fellows program is a leadership development program that equips emerging social leaders around the world with the skills, knowledge and moral imagination to drive change in their communities.
Applications to become an Acumen Fellow are open from August 6 through September 9. Learn more here.
