A Look Back: How Muslim Lawyers Weathered the Pandemic

BEFORE THE MUSLIM BAN, Sara Ali had a thriving solo practice as an immigration lawyer. She represented clients primarily from Iran and other Muslim-majority countries. But President Trump’s travel ban soon dried up her clientele.

In response, Sara (whose last name has been changed for privacy) transitioned into another area of law. She began handling real-estate leases and vendor contracts as an in-house lawyer for a company that owned hotels, office buildings, and other commercial real estate. But in January of 2020, unforeseen circumstances disrupted that area of law, too.

As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, organizations started to cancel their contracts with hotels while smaller businesses reneged on rental payments to their commercial building owners. Hotels and other hospitality businesses paused their operations. Sara’s employer was soon facing bankruptcy.

Sara’s personal life changed, too, as her two young girls stayed home for remote school. Although she’d intentionally raised her kids without computers, iPads, and other screens, Sara suddenly found herself having to teach her girls how to use them for school. That meant being available to help them throughout the day.

These upheavals haven’t stopped Sara from making a difference, though. She still has older immigration cases that pop up occasionally. She assists pro bono clients on immigration and domestic violence matters. She has increased her board work and civic engagement with organizations that address issues such as Black Lives Matter, intrafaith unity, BDS, and Muslim mental health.

Sara says she strives to follow the example of Prophet Musa’s mother, who tucked the baby prophet into a basket and set it to float down the river, trusting that God would take care of him (may peace be upon him and his mother).

“I’m fully trusting in God – releasing myself from expectations of what I should be doing and being on a river I know is guided by the hand of God.”

Like Sara, lawyers across America faced unprecedented challenges as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. Muslim American attorneys found some unique responses to these, as well as some unexpected silver linings.

Shehnaz Khan’s physical office, unlike Sara’s, remained open throughout the crisis because people needed access to the courts. The Santa Clara County Family Law Facilitator’s Office, in which Shehnaz is a staff attorney, implemented a rotating work schedule, part-time in the office and part-time at home. The court suspended some hearings, but emergency services continued to function.

“Courts and the legal profession are slow to change and adopt technology,” Shehnaz says ruefully, “but the pandemic put us into hyperdrive.”

The court greatly expanded remote services, including email, live chat, and even virtual court hearings. The court also developed a new procedure for how to submit evidence.

“Of course, we had challenges,” she says, such as budget cuts, furloughs, and closure of the internship program. But overall, many of the outcomes were beneficial: especially for low-income litigants, for whom taking a day off work to come to court and stand in long lines meant losing a day’s pay, virtual hearings were much easier. And they could more quickly and easily request assistance because of the expanded email and chat services.

Staff attorneys, as well, welcomed the chance to work partly from home. Reduced traffic and extra time at home with families palpably relieved stress and tension in the office.

As long as the courts and attorneys are sufficiently available to the public, Shehnaz thinks, the court will likely keep this structure for the future.

“This is a good thing,” she said, “because it really benefits low-income litigants.”

In the private law sector, Riaz Karamali, a corporate and securities partner at Pillsbury and – full disclosure – my husband, faced professional challenges, as well. Riaz works primarily with emerging companies, though he does some big merger deals as well. But when COVID arrived, many of his smaller clients were hit hard. For about three months, rather than managing venture financings, Riaz switched to helping clients navigate the complicated rules for qualifying for PPP loans.

In addition, Pillsbury, a 700-lawyer firm, implemented a significant pay cut (later reversed) for partners across the board at the beginning of the pandemic in an ultimately successful effort to avoid laying off any employees. Riaz, usually at the beck and call of his clients 24/7, found himself brainstorming ways to keep his clients happy without the lunches and in-person meetings to which they were accustomed. Still, he loved working from home, which allowed him to eat healthy lunches, exercise whenever he wished, and forego his commute.

Riaz faced personal challenges, too, such as having to squash himself into my study at home, where he spent the day loudly negotiating on the telephone three feet away from where I was trying to work. He also had to deal with his in-laws – my parents – unexpectedly moving in with us when they both declined dramatically with Parkinson’s and Lewy body dementia, respectively, creating utter chaos and the kind of stress that requires but is not cured by copious meditation.

The pandemic complicated everything: resources for seniors shut down, in-home care agencies closed, and I struggled to keep a physically fit dementia patient confined to the house when she couldn’t understand the reason for it.

I myself chafed against professional obstacles, as well as personal ones. I’m a former corporate lawyer, now a full-time author and speaker on Islam and Muslims, but my newest book was released during the pandemic, which closed bookstores, suffocated travel, and disrupted the book industry’s chains of distribution. My book tour was canceled. Virtual events didn’t sell books.

COVID and the election sucked all the media attention and, for the first time in recent memory, Muslims and “Muslim terrorism” and “shariah law” virtually vanished from the public discourse. A book on shariah, which normally would have addressed an inevitable election-year Islamophobic platform, became ostensibly irrelevant.

But, like Sara and Shehnaz, Riaz and I remained grateful for the silver linings. We spent more time with our children. His legal practice thrived. We never lost the roof over our heads and we always had enough to eat and pay the bills, unlike so many less fortunate.

I frequently marvel at how we all underestimate our ability to change; yet we do it more easily than we expect. I hope the pandemic has at least shown us how flexible and adaptable human beings can be, how effective we can be when we work together, and how we can strive to reach our potential even in the face of considerable challenges.

– Sumbul Ali-Karamali, JD LLM (Islamic Law) is the author of Demystifying Shariah: What It Is, How It Works, and Why It’s Not Taking Over Our Country. You can visit her at www.muslimnextdoor.com.

Any opinions expressed in articles published by The Muslim Legal Journal represent only the views of each writer. Such opinions are not meant to represent the views of the writer's employer or the National Association of Muslim Lawyers (NAML).