Mohja Kahf is associate professor of comparative literature in the Middle East and Islamic Studies Program at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, and author of Western Representations of the Muslim Woman and a book of poetry, Emails from Scheherazad. Her novel, The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf, is the coming-of-age story of a Muslim American woman. Her article, “Braiding the Stories: Women’s Eloquence in the Early Islamic Era” appears in Windows of Faith: Muslim Women’s Scholarship and Activism. She also has essays in Living Islam Out Loud, Arab American Feminisms and Shattering the Stereotypes: Muslim Women Speak Out.
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Muslim Women Description
Mino Akhtar
Mino Akhtar is an American Muslim of Pakistani descent, and has lived in United States for 35 years. She grew up in Middle East, Europe and Asia, and moved to the US when her father began working at the United Nations. She attended college in New York City. She has co-founded and worked with various groups to organize the American Muslim community of New Jersey and increase interaction with media, elected officials and other community and peace groups.
Mino has also been a public speaker on the subjects of Islam and Women, civil rights, and inclusive globalization at various Northern New Jersey and New York City events since 9/11. Mino is a board member of the Women’s Fund of New Jersey. She is educated in computer science and worked on Wall Street for 18 plus years in the area of advanced technology implementation for large financial services firms. She had her own management consulting firm for several years, before joining a large pharmaceutical company recently as director of organizational effectiveness.
Her personal interests include the promotion of human values in organizations, social responsibility in businesses, bridging different cultures and religions and building true democracy through participative dialogue and negotiation. She recently obtained a master’s degree in Human and Organizational Transformation from California Institute of Integral Studies (2005). Today, she lives in New Jersey with her husband. She has four children.
Leila Ahmed
Leila Ahmed, BA, MA, PhD, University of Cambridge, came to the Divinity School at Harvard University in 1999 as the first professor of women’s studies in religion and was appointed to the Victor S. Thomas chair in 2003. Prior to her appointment at HDS, she was professor of women’s studies and Near Eastern studies at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.
While at the University of Massachusetts, she was director of the women’s studies program from 1992 to 1995 and director of the Near Eastern studies program from 1991 to 1992. Her latest book, “A Border Passage,” has been widely acclaimed. Her other publications include the books, “Women and Gender in Islam: The Historical Roots of a Modern Debate” and “Edward William Lane: A Study of His Life and Work and of British Ideas of the Middle East in the Nineteenth Century,” as well as many articles, among them “Arab Culture and Writing Women’s Bodies” and “Between Two Worlds: The Formation of a Turn of the Century Egyptian Feminist.” Her current research and writing centers on Islam in America and issues of women and gender.
Laila Al-Marayati
Laila Al-Marayati is Chief of the Division of Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Gynecologic Sub-Specialties at LAC+USC. She also has expertise in caring for women who have undergone any form of female genital cutting (also known as Female Genital Mutilation), working in collaboration with local organizations like the Program for Torture Victims. Dr. Laila Al-Marayati is the spokesperson and past president of the Muslim Women’s League (MWL), a Los Angeles based organization dedicated to disseminating accurate informatin about Islam and women and Muslim women in society. Additionally, Al-Marayati headed the MWL’s efforts on behalf of rape survivors from Bosnia’s war in 1993.
Al-Marayati is the author of many articles and has participated in numerous conferences addressing Muslim women’s issues in multiple topics, including basic women’s rights in Islam, reproductive health and sexuality, violence against women, and stereotyping. She was a member of the official US Delegation to the UN Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995.
Besides, Laila Al-Marayati has joined numerous international religious freedom activities, serving as a Presidential appointee to the Commission on International Religious Freedom from 1999 to May 2001. Before that, she was a member of the State Department Advisory Committee on Religious Freedom Abroad. She has testified before Congress and as part of the US delegation to the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) Human Dimensions meeting in Poland regarding religious intolerance against Muslims in Europe. Dr. Laila Al-Marayati is a KinderUSA Chairperson, a charity that works to improve Palestinian children’s lives and other children in crisis through emergency relief.
Arzoo Osanloo
Arzoo Osanloo is an associate professor at the University of Washington. She teaches in the Law, Societies, and Justice Program and also holds adjunct appointments in the Law, Anthropology, Near Eastern Languages and Civilization, Women’s Studies and Comparative Religion departments. Before receiving her PhD in Cultural Anthropology from Stanford University in 2002, Arzoo was a practicing immigration and asylum attorney. Her experience working with refugees and asylum seekers compelled her to study the “fraught but often neglected relationship between ‘culture’ and ‘rights’.” She has written that understanding activist work from an academic perspective enabled her to better “advocate for the humanity and dignity of people in other societies.”1 As she explains, “I wanted to study anthropology to be a better human rights activist by focusing on the question of how we understand others’ so-called ‘cultural practices.’”2
Focusing primarily on the Middle East, Arzoo has both researched and taught courses in human rights, refugee rights, comparative religion and women’s rights in Muslim-majority societies. Much of her scholarly work focuses on how “cultural practices” shape our ways of knowing and understanding.3 Her first book, The Politics of Women’s Rights in Iran, was an ethnographic study of women’s rights discourse in Iran. In understanding women in the post-revolutionary era, the book seeks to move beyond “uninterrogated stereotypes of Muslim women” and instead attempts to show how Iranian women perceive and claim legal rights themselves.4 Currently, Arzoo is continuing research on human rights discourse in a new project on the Islamic mandate of forgiveness, compassion and mercy among pious Muslims.5
[1] “Arzoo Osanloo”, ArzooOsanloo.com.
[2] Sunan of Abu-Dawood: Paradise Is At the Feet of Mothers
[3] Al-Tirmidhi
[4] 2:233
[5] Amina Wadud. Islam Beyond Patriarchy Through Gender Inclusive Quranic Analysis
[6] Chandrakirana, Kamala. Women’s Place and Displacement in the Muslim Family: Realities from the Twenty First Century.
[7] ibid.
Zeenat Rahman
Zeenat Rahman is the Project Director of the Inclusive America Project at the Aspen Institute. Her expertise is on global youth issues, interfaith and diversity engagement. She is also a former diplomat. She was the director of public affairs at the Interfaith Youth Core in Chicago. She works to empower religious youth, especially young Muslims, and specializes in projects which build mutual respect for the cultural and religious pluralism among youth groups. In promoting civic engagement, she develops policy initiatives and international programs in partnership with national Muslim organizations.1 She was selected as a fellow for the American Muslim Civic Leadership Institute and is a member of the Transatlantic Network 2020, a program which aims to build multilateral networks by empowering promising young leaders from North America, and Europe.
Before joining the Interfaith Youth Core, Zeenat completed her master’s degree at the University of Chicago where she studied Muslim youth and Muslim religious institutions in America. As a student, Zeenat co-created a play about women who wear the hijab, the headscarf, and their daily lives within Muslim communities. Alluding to The Vagina Monologues, The Hijabi Monologues is a challenge to stereotypical notions of those who wear the headscarf and attempts to offer a more nuanced, personal narrative of Muslim women.2 Not only has the play received tremendous support from the American Muslim community, but it has also succeeded in dispelling the doubts and fears associated with the headscarf. One man who watched the play afterwards said that, “‘whenever I would see a Muslim woman covered, I would think she had a bomb under there…I just realized that after sitting and listening to these stories that you are regular people.”3
Based out of Chicago, Zeenat regularly contributes to the Chicago Tribune and has appeared on CNN and other media outlets. In fostering interfaith relationships, she emphasizes the need for respect, dialogue, and mutual accountability. In an op-ed article written for the Chicago Tribune, she says: “Real respect is not holding a double standard….interfaith engagement is not only up to rabbis, imams, and priests – we all have a responsibility to know one another.”4
[1] “Zeenat Rahman,” The Center for Religion and Civic Engagement.
[2] “’Hijabi Monologues’: the women under the head scarves,” The Los Angeles Times, March 6, 2009.
[3] “Hijabi Monologues” Dispels Stereotypes of Muslim Women,” America.gov, March 25, 2010.
[4] “Zeenat Rahman: What’s accomplished if everybody draws Mohammed?” The Chicago Tribune, May 20, 2010.
[5] ibid.
Inas Younis
Inas Younis is a freelance writer and mother of three. Mrs. Younis has contributed to an anthology about the lives of Muslim woman, titled Living Islam Out Loud, and is also a veteran writer for the Web’s largest Muslim E-zine, naseeb.com. She wrote a feature profiling the lives of American Muslim teens in the premiere issue of Muslim Girl Magazine. She has volunteered for a number of interfaith initiatives.
Homaira Mamoor
Homaira Mamoor is a graduate of St. Joseph’s College in Long Island, New York. She is a member of the Islamic Center of Long Island (ICLI), where she has served on the board of trustees for two years. She is an active member of ICLI’s Domestic Harmony Committee which deals with domestic violence within the Muslim community. She’s a member of a multi-faith forum, building bridges with other faiths in Long Island.
Homaira’s personal experiences as a woman and working with women from her native Afghanistan both there and in the United States inspire her to work for the rights of women uprooted from their homes. She is a board member of Women for Afghan Women (WAW), a collective of Afghan and non-Afghan women from the New York area committed to the human rights of Afghan women. Her essay, “Building Community Across Difference,” was published in Nothing Sacred: Women Respond to Religious Fundamentalism and Terror and in Women for Afghan Women: Shattering Myths and Claiming The Future. Homaira was the recipient of the St. Joseph’s College Esse Non Videri Award in recognition of her commitment to non-violence and human rights.
Homaira is married and the mother of three daughters. She lives in West Islip, Long Island, New York.