Sheila Musaji is on the Missouri US Attorneys’ Hate Crimes Task Force. She is a member of Women in Black, and Women of Faith in Saint Louis ,and has been actively involved in Interfaith Dialogue for 20 years. She is the Director of the Islamic Speakers Bureau of St. Louis. She is on the Board of Interfaith Partnership of Saint Louis, and a Counselor for the Center for Economic and Social Justice.
She was the founder and editor of The American Muslim, a quarterly journal which was in print from 1989 to 1994 and is now a monthly email publication. Sheila was also a former Vice President of the Pattonville Education Foundation (Pattonville School District) and a member of the Lambert Airport Rotary Club and the Northwest Communities Chamber of Commerce. She was one of two American delegates to the 2nd International Muslim Women’s Conference in Khartoum, Sudan in 1992. She was a participant in the 2006 Diversity Dialogue Conference Sharing Ideas, Building Bridges: A Dutch-U.S. Muslim Dialogue in the Netherlands.
She was also a former member of the Board of Advisors of the Islamic Resource Institute, member of the Lombard-Villa Park Clergyman’s Association, Board of the Islamic Information Center, and Coordinator of Da’wah Committee of the Islamic Center of Villa Park, Illinois 1986 to 1989. She was the first Muslim Baccalaureate speaker at Amherst College, Massachusetts in 1992. In addition, she was the Coordinator for the 1993 First North American Muslim Pow Wow in Abiquiu, New Mexico, and a participant in the Parliament for the World’s Religions in Chicago in 1993. She is the author of numerous articles about Islam in America and speaks often at churches, schools, service organizations and synagogues about Islam.
Sanaa Nadim is the Muslim chaplain at the State University of New York, Stony Brook. Her main work is to organize discussion groups and make presentations on Islamic issues to the campus and various interfaith communities. She has an extensive knowledge on the status of women, children, and the elderly in Islam and made presentations at various national and international conferences including the International Unity Conference in Washington, DC, the International Women’s Conference, New York, Universal Spirituality-ISC Canada, and the Faith and Spiritual Worship, London. She has also been invited to speak at many university campuses. Sanaa has a bachelor’s of business administration from CUNY Bernard Baruch College.
Samina Ali was born in Hyderabad, India and raised both there and in the United States. Her debut novel, Madras on Rainy Days, chronicles a young Muslim American woman’s journey to freedom. It was awarded the Prix du Premier Roman Etranger 2005 (Best First Novel in Translation of the Year) by France and was chosen as the finalist for both the PEN/Hemingway Award in Fiction as well as the California Book Reviewers Award. Poets&Writers named Madras one of the Top 5 Best Debut Novels of the Year.
The novel has been translated into many different languages and released around the world. Samina has been invited to lecture on the book extensively, from University of California, Berkeley to Harvard and Yale. She is the recipient of the Rona Jaffe Foundation and Barbara Deming Memorial awards for fiction. Most recently, essays of hers have been included in The May Queen and Living Islam Out Loud anthologies. She has also written for Self and Child, The New York Times and The San Francisco Chronicle. She resides in California with her son.
Sameera Fazili graduated from Yale Law School in 2006 and is currently a fellow at Shorebank, a community development bank focused on issues of economic equity in the United States and abroad. At Yale, she was the student chair of the Middle East Legal Studies Seminar and also served on the board of the Critical Islamic Reflections conference.
Before law school, Sameera worked at Karamah: Muslim Women Lawyers for Human Rights. While with Karamah, she testified before the US Congress on the religious freedom of Muslims in Western Europe. Her experience in international human rights and development includes work at the World Health Organization and United Nations High Commission for Refugees. Her work has taken her to such places as Palestine, Kashmir, and Pakistan. Sameera graduated magna cum laude from Harvard in 2000 with a BA in social studies, and was the recipient of Harvard’s Women’s Leadership Award.
Salma Arastu was born in Rajasthan, India. She graduated with an MFA in painting from Maharaja Sayajirao University in Baroda, India. For the last thirty years, she has been exhibiting her paintings in India, Iran, Kuwait and the United States. Hindu by birth and Muslim by marriage, her work expounds on the unity of an all-encompassing God, common in all religions. Her personal triumphs have been defined and shaped by the simple principle of faith in The Divine as the compelling force that has guided her life and work. She seeks Universal in her art.
Salma has received recognition both regionally and nationally, winning numerous awards. Her lyrical and spiritual paintings, based on memories of her childhood, her love of people, and her deep faith, is inspiring, warm and beautiful. In addition to her prolific painting, she is also creating lyrical metal sculptures and exploring digital media to narrate experiences. Salma has also written several published works of free-verse poetry and short stories in her native Hindi. She continues to write and provides eloquent prose to accompany her paintings for gallery showings.
Shortly after arriving in the US, she became an entrepreneur with the creation of Your True Greetings, a successful greeting card company that uses her paintings and calligraphy to serve the needs of Muslim communities in the US, Canada, Japan and the United Kingdom.
Reshmi Siddique is a psychiatric research scientist who has published extensively in the medical and public health fields. Educated at Oxford University and the London School of Economics, she resides in New Jersey with her husband and two children. She is the author of How to Turn Anger Into Love, which explores how anger can be used to heal and build self-esteem, power, and spiritual fulfillment.
Patricia Dunn holds a master of fine arts degree in writing from Sarah Lawrence College where she also teaches creative writing. Her fiction has appeared in Global City Review, where she acted as editor for the international issue. Her non-fiction and creative non-fiction has appeared in Womensenews.org, Muslimwakeup.com, The Christian Science Monitor, the Village Voice, the Nation, and LA Weekly, among other publications. She was also the past managing editor of Muslimwakeup.com. She is also the author of Rebels by Accident, a coming-of-age about a young Muslim girl set in Cairo.
Naz Ahmed Georgas is the Executive Director of the Cordoba House. She is a graduate of Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) with a Masters in the field of International Affairs in Economic and Political Development. Her main career has revolved around the United Nations. At the UN, Naz Georgas worked for various UN-affiliated NGOs, including the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), United Nations Office of Project Services (UNOPS), the World Council of Churches (WCC), and the National Council for Women. For the past 17 years Naz Ahmed Georgas has been an active member of the Muslim Community in New York, and has worked and researched extensively in the field of Islam and Islamic Spirituality. She has studied and worked under the guidance of various professors and prominent community leaders. Most of her main perspective has been shaped from the direction and guidance of Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf. Currently, she lives in New York with her husband David and three children.
