Safiya Jabeen Ghori-Ahmad

Safiya Ghori-Ahmad still gets the question, usually right after she tells someone that she's from Little Rock.

"No, where are you really from?"

So she elaborates, with the smile that often spreads across her face: "I was born and raised in Little Rock. I'm an American. But also, my parents are from India and I'm also a Muslim."

Ghori-Ahmad loves cheese dip and curry, Beyonce and Bollywood and Buddha. As a lawyer and self-described policy nerd, she has put her education and passion to work from Pakistan to Panama, serving her country and state, business clients and anyone whose civil rights she fears are in danger of being violated.

"First of all, she's stupidly smart," says former Gov. Mike Beebe, who works with her at the Roberts Law Firm in Little Rock. "And she is big-hearted, and she has huge connections."

"She has kind of a unique perspective, but probably her biggest strength is she's just incredibly personable, how warm she is," says Ghori-Ahmad's best friend, journalist Ambreen Ali, who met Ghori-Ahmad at a Washington fundraiser. "I think that comes across as a real strength for her."

ALL THAT ENERGY

Ghori-Ahmad, 36, talks to her three sisters just about every day. They know her best, and they don't mind admitting they weren't sure where all that energy would take her.

"Even as a kid, she was always a doer, getting into trouble, doing things she shouldn't be doing like cutting electrical cords with a scissor," says Dr. Sara Tariq, assistant dean of undergraduate clinical education at University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences and the oldest sister. "She questioned everything."

Their father, Hashim Ghori, a native of southern India, came to the United States in 1967 to study for his doctorate in avian pathology at Alabama's Auburn University. Although Safiya's mother, Najma, joined him a year later, the two planned to return home until deciding their future lay here. They moved to Arkansas in 1979. Ghori worked for the state's Livestock and Poultry Commission for 30 years.

Ghori-Ahmad jokes about the impression her father's thick accent must have made on the state's poultry farmers early on. Now 76, he currently consults with poultry companies.

"He loves this country and absolutely believes in the American dream," Ghori-Ahmad says.

When her parents arrived in Little Rock, they went through the telephone book looking for Indian-sounding names and called them up. They found about a half-dozen. Ghori helped establish the Islamic Center of Little Rock, which now has hundreds of members and is one of three mosques in the state capital.

Safiya Ghori-Ahmad is the third of four siblings, all female. Her parents, she says, were "stereotypical Asian parents involved in their children's education all the time."

"They said here in this country, you have the opportunity and freedom to be anybody you want to be and do anything you want to do. I love that optimism about them."

In addition to Tariq, Ghori-Ahmad's other sisters are Saba Ghori, who works for Women for Women International, a nonprofit based in Washington; and Shereen Ghori, a social worker at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore.

THE PULL OF POLITICS

As Muslims in India, Ghori-Ahmad's parents had been a religious minority, albeit one with 172 million members in that populous nation. Arriving in Alabama during the civil rights era, Hashim Ghori was once told to use a restroom designated for blacks. Tariq says those kind of experiences "helped shape his world view of things" -- and that of his daughters.

"My parents," Ghori-Ahmad says, "are just the backbone of everything."

Ghori-Ahmad says she first felt the pull of politics in 1996. Still too young to vote, she held signs outside a polling place for President Bill Clinton's successful re-election effort and celebrated the win in downtown Little Rock that night. As a senior at Central High, activities marking the 40th anniversary of its integration further fired her interest (the 60th anniversary will be observed in September). After her freshman year at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, she served as an intern for then-U.S. Sen. Blanche Lincoln.

"At 18, I was in the Senate working for the youngest woman ever to serve in that body," she says. "I felt the power of that."

Lincoln, she says, made a point of trying to help the young people who worked for her, even inviting them to eat in the Senate dining room. Ghori-Ahmad fell in love with the nation's capital. "I said 'I'm going to arm myself with everything I need to be back in this space.'"

She earned a degree in political science and Middle East studies at UA, then went on to earn her law degree there, in 2006. One summer during college, she studied in Morocco; in addition to Urdu/Hindi, closely related languages spoken in India, Ghori-Ahmad speaks basic modern Arabic. Another summer, she taught English in India. "That was a profound moment for me because I saw abject poverty."

She remembers walking into the UA student union and seeing coverage of the 9/11 terrorist attacks unfold onscreen. Along with horror, she remembers fearing that if the terrorists turned out to be Muslims, "will I become a target?"

They did, of course, but Ghori-Ahmad never felt stigmatized, at least not personally.

"People were wonderful, that's what I love to share. Little Rock and Fayetteville were kind of like these bubbles of tolerance and inclusion."

WORKING IN A

POST-9/11 WORLD

But Ghori-Ahmad did believe the Muslim American community as a whole was under attack. She went straight from law school to working as director of government relations for the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) in Washington, which advocates for the rights and integration of Muslims in America.

In that role, Ghori-Ahmad advised members of Congress, the State Department, Department of Justice and other federal agencies on matters concerning Muslims in this country, the Middle East and South Asia and wrote policy papers for MPAC on issues ranging from elections and women's rights abroad to counterterrorism and radicalization in the post-9/11 United States. She also worked with organizations such as the Center for Constitutional Rights to see that Muslim detainees were accorded their legal rights.

"I really wanted to dispel stereotypes about Muslim Americans and combat the negative legislation and policies that came out of the PATRIOT Act," she says, referring to 2001 legislation that included several controversial provisions aimed at stopping terrorism.

Active in then Sen. Barack Obama's first run for president, Ghori-Ahmad moved into government in 2009, first for a short stint at the U.S. Commission of International Religious Freedom, which monitors religious freedom violations around the world, and then to the State Department, as a foreign affairs officer. At that agency, she started out advising the assistant secretary of state in the bureau of democracy, human rights and labor on issues related to Afghanistan and Pakistan. She later helped advise then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her successor, John Kerry, on those same two troubled countries. Among other duties, she supervised a team working on counterterrorism and political issues in Pakistan, making several trips to the region.

"Back in 2010, that was the administration's big focus. It was a great time to be in service of the government," Ghori-Ahmad says.

At age 30, Ghori-Ahmad carried a top secret security clearance and was sometimes in the room when Clinton and other top officials hammered out policy. She might have been sitting in one of the chairs along the wall rather than at the big table, but Clinton often sought out the opinion of junior aides, she says. One treasured keepsake of that period is a photograph of the two together after a briefing, when Clinton referenced their shared Arkansas background. "She looked at me and said 'this is a full circle moment for me,'" Ghori-Ahmad says.

After four years at the State Department, Ghori-Ahmad applied and was accepted as a fellow by the Brookings Institute, perhaps the best-known of all Washington think tanks. She served on the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, then chaired by Sen. Bob Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat. She spent a year advising Menendez on South and Central Asia, including helping prepare him for a meeting with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

"I lived, breathed and ate South Asian politics" during that period, she says.

However, she soon had another mouth to feed. Ghori-Ahmad and her husband, Ali Ahmad, had started a family together and the demands of parenthood helped pull her back to Arkansas.

A FOREIGN ADVISER

WITH CLOUT

She and Ali Ahmad met through friends and married in 2008, in what Ghori-Ahmad calls "a big old Indian wedding" in Arkansas. Ahmad, who had been working as a lawyer in private practice, says the two spent their first date together talking about their families. Ahmad, who'd grown up in Michigan, immediately noticed that Safiya Ghori, while ambitious, was different from many of the other up-and-comers in Washington. "There's an art in D.C. to pretending you don't know a person when everybody knows you know that person," he says. "I didn't see her do that to anybody."

In 2011, Ghori-Ahmad traveled to Afghanistan and Pakistan while three months pregnant with her first child, Faiz, who's now 5. The U.S. group landed right in the middle of a parliamentary crisis in Afghanistan. In the summer of 2015, the couple decided to move to Arkansas -- "back to where the pace of life is a little more normal," in Safiya's words. The couple's second son, Reza, who's almost 2, was born later that year.

There was one more reason for the move: Ghori-Ahmad wanted to volunteer for Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign, something she couldn't do while working in government.

She served as a member of that organization's finance committee, raising money and canvassing for votes in Iowa, and also traveled with the Arkansas delegate to the Democratic National Convention in 2016. Clinton's loss "was a hard blow for her," says her husband, who now works for the U.S. attorney's office in Little Rock.

"It also led to a determination that you can't give up," Ahmad says. "The things that made her interested in politics, those are still viable, good goals. I don't know if she would have been as passionate about it if she didn't have two small kids."

Since returning, Ghori-Ahmad has worked at the Roberts Law Firm as a vice president for global business development and government relations. She is an adviser to private clients and foreign governments seeking to expand trade across borders. She has represented corporate clients from India and Taiwan to Germany and Panama. She traveled to Havana to meet with Cuban officials about business development. A state-owned food producer in Vietnam has been a key client; among other things, she helped get its cashews into the aisles of Whole Foods stores.

She still travels to Washington or abroad at least once a month, something she says would not be possible without her parents' and husband's support.

Locally, she's a state committee member of the Democratic Party of Arkansas and serves on the boards of American Civil Liberties Union of Arkansas, City Year Arkansas and Harmony Health Clinic of Arkansas.

"She became so deeply involved in Arkansas, it's almost like she never left," her sister, Dr. Tariq, says. "Basically, she owned it."

Her friend Ambreen Ali visited Ghori-Ahmad in Arkansas and says it was "kind of cute to see her Southern drawl come back. She has like a Southern belle side to her that's been fun for me to see now."

Ahmad predicts his wife will eventually finish her career in Washington. Ghori-Ahmad doesn't rule that out but notes that her family loves Arkansas and the "great, diverse neighborhood" they live in. Her husband, in an effort to get to know the state, has taken to planning lunch outings in places like London, Ark. They try to raise their children in the same way they were raised -- embracing their religious and cultural background and treasuring their citizenship in the United States.

"We don't want them to feel that they are outsiders or not Americans in any way."

High Profile on 07/02/2017