Asra Q. Nomani is a former reporter for the Wall Street Journal and the author of the critically-acclaimed Standing alone: An American Woman’s Struggle for the Soul of Islam, a book dedicated to reclaiming women’s rights in Islam. Asra asserts, “Islam needs to go back to its progressive seventh century roots if it is to move forward into the twenty first century.” In Standing Alone, she wrote an Islamic Bill of Rights for women in mosques which include the right of women to be imams or prayer leaders and stand in the front rows of mosques shoulder with men.
Asra also wrote an Islamic Bill of Rights for women in the bedroom which include the right of women to choose their own partners irrespective of religion and to be free from criminalization or punishment for consensual adult sexual decisions. Asra has written for the Washington Post, The New York Times, Slate and Time magazine on Islam. She covered the war in Afghanistan for Salon and her work has appeared in such magazines as Cosmo, Sports Illustrated for Women, Runner’s World and People. She is also the author of Tantrika: Traveling the Road of Divine Love about finding reconciliation with her identity as an American Muslim woman.
In 2005, she was a visiting scholar at the Center for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University and in 2006 she was a Poynter fellow at Yale University and the recipient of a 2006 Reporting Fellowship with the South Asian Journalists Association.
Born in Mumbai, into a conservative but modern Muslim family, Asra came to the United States at the age of four. She currently lives in Morgantown, West Virginia with her son Shilbi. It is there she has become a writer-activist dedicated to reclaiming women’s rights and principles of tolerance in the Muslim world. She challenged rules at her mosque in Morgantown that required women enter through a back door and pray in a secluded balcony. She is presently on trial at her mosque to be banished. Asra is the founder and creator of the Muslim Women’s Freedom Tour. On March 1, 2005, she posted on the doors of her mosque in Morgantown “99 Precepts for Opening Hearts, Minds and Doors in the Muslim World.” She was the lead organizer of the woman-led Muslim prayer in New York City on March 18, 2005. She is a volunteer at the Rape and Domestic Violence Shelter in Morgantown, WV and she is committed to seeing hearts, minds and doors open in the Muslim world as a part of a wider vision for world peace.
She has said, “the gender jihad is part of a peace jihad, a struggle for peace in the Muslim world as part of a wider vision for world.” In late 2006, with three other Muslim mothers, she became a founder of Muslims for Peace, a new organization dedicated to holding a Muslim march for peace in 2007 and standing up for peace and tolerance.
Dahlia Eissa is the executive director of the Arab American Justice Project. She is an attorney who came to the United States from Australia in 1998 to complete a master of laws at Harvard University. There she concentrated her studies on women’s rights in Islamic law. Upon graduation, she worked as a fellow at Human Rights Watch focusing on the status of women in the Arab world. She then joined the Women’s Environment and Development Organization where she was responsible for women in government projects in the global south and advocated for measures to increase the participation of women in decision-making processes at the United Nations. Dahlia currently handles immigration, hate crimes and discrimination cases.
Aslihan Eker is an associate producer, production coordinator and scriptwriter for sixteen episodes of the documentary ” title=”Behind Walls: Women in Muslim Countries”>Behind Walls: Women in Muslim Countries. The documentary is comprised of interviews with over 200 women from various countries and has been accepted to film festival screenings around the world. Aslihan is currently working on the book of the film which will include all texts of the interviews and travel journals of herself and producer Ayse Bohurler. She actively participated in a group called Cultural Debates which was founded by a group of women to establish understanding and dialogue between Europe and Turkey during the process of Turkey’s accession to the European Union. The group organized several conferences in European cities to talk about topics such as honor killings and violence against women as well as women’s participation in politics. Aslihan has previously worked as a director for various live political talk shows in channel in Turkey. She holds her Bachelors of Arts in Radio, TV and Cinema from the Istanbul University and her Masters from the London College of Music and Media in film.
Arfa Khan was the valedictorian of her graduating class at medical school in Kashmir. She migrated to the United States with her husband, Faroque Khan. She is currently a professor of radiology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and Chief of Thoracic Radiology at Long Island Jewish Medical Center. Arfa is an active member of the Islamic Medical Association of North America where she chairs the membership committee. She is also a member of the Islamic Society of North America and a founding member of the Islamic Center of Long Island (ICLI) in Westbury, New York where she has served on the executive committee as treasurer from 1984 to 1985, vice president from 1993 to 1995 and the chair of the fundraising committee from 1988 to 2006. Arfa was also a founding member of the award-winning program American Muslims and Jews in Dialogue (AMJID). Presently, she serves on the board of the ICLI.
Photo Attributed by
Aisha Holland’s passion and enthusiasm for calligraphy began during a visit to Istanbul as a teenager. Finding the study of Arabic calligraphic forms difficult here in the US, she discovered the NY Society of Scribes and undertook an education in Latin lettering. Her path eventually let her to master scribe Mohamed Zakariya. Holland received an Icazet, or calligraphic certification in Arabic script in 2013. As a freelance lettering artist in Latin and Arabic scripts, her work includes all aspects of involvement with the art, including exhibiting, teaching, doing commercial and commission work. Clients include the Smithsonian Institute, The NY Public Library, Clinton Global Initiative, NY Society of Scribes, Long Island University, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the US Department of State.
Rima Khoreibi is the author of The Adventures of Iman, a children’s book series based on a superhero who is a teenage Muslim girl. The books are meant to teach children about Islam in a fun and positive way. It empowers women based on the teachings of the Quran. Each book in the series has the same heroine, Iman and each story deals with a social issue and how Iman uses the Quran to solve it. A large portion of the proceeds from her first book were donated to the Red Crescent and sent out to Islamic countries such as Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, the Palestinian Territories, Morocco and Syria. It has also been translated into Braille. Rima has been featured in The New York Times, Viva (Dubai), Viva (Jordan), The Buzz (Dubai) , Gulf News (Dubai) and on BBC Radio.
In 1998, Rima founded I.R.I.S. (Issues for Real-life for the Interest of Students), a non-profit organization to create awareness about social and health issues. Born in Sidon, Lebanon, Rima lived the first ten years of her life in Saudi Arabia. At the age of eleven, Rima and her family moved to Toronto, Canada where she attended York University and majored in cultural anthropology. At the age of 24, Rima met and married her Jordanian husband, Ziad and moved to Amman for 5 years. In 2001, Rima, Zaid and their two sons moved from Amman to Dubai. In Dubai, Rima is busy being a mother, writer and dedicated advocate for women’s rights in Islam.
In 1979 Kamin Mohammadi’s life changed forever – hers, and the lives of all her family and countrymen. As the last shah fell and the country was gripped by revolution, nine-year-old Kamin and her sister, mother and father fled Iran, leaving behind their large, close-knit family. Bewildered by the seismic changes in her homeland, she turned her back on the past and spent her teenage years trying to fit in with British attitudes to family, food and freedom.
Nearly 20 years later Kamin was finally drawn back to Iran. There she discovered the story of her family, a sprawling clan that sprang from humble roots to bloom during the affluent, Biba-clad 1960s, only to be shaken by the horrors of the Revolution, the Iran-Iraq War and the heartbreak of exile, and toughened by the struggle for democracy that continues today.
This moving and passionate memoir is a love letter both to Kamin’s extraordinary family and to Iran itself, an ancient country which has survived so much modern tumult but where joy and resilience will always triumph over despair.
Kamin Mohammadi was born in Iran in 1969 and exiled to the UK in 1979. She is an experienced journalist, travel writer and broadcaster who has written for the British and international press including The Times, the Financial Times, Harpers Bazaar, Marie Claire and the Guardian as well as co-authoring The Lonely Planet Guide to Iran. She has recently been nominated for a National Magazine Award by the American Society of Magazine Editors. She is currently living between London and Italy.
Tayebeh “Leila” Asadi is a project manager at the Aid Facilitator Insititute. The Institute aims to empower women and other vulnerable groups through the establishment of community-based organizations and the application of the microcredit approach.
Leila has worked in the fields of gender analysis, empowerment of women through microcredits and reproductive health. She has worked at Hoghoghe-Zanan, a women’s rights magazine and NGOs such as ODVV-HAMI, House of Culture, and Sustainable Development. HAMI Association, a member of the Reproductive Health Network, is an organization that has trained 100 health volunteers who are now training Afghan refugee women about family planning, health care and reproductive health. She has also worked with the Center for Women’s Participation at the Presidential Office.
Leila has addressed issues such as women’s trafficking and demanding change in statutes discriminating against women in the penal and civil codes in her work. She has been involved in efforts to change the discriminatory laws and regulations using international treaties with bodies such as Beijing Action Plan and CEDAW contradictions with the Islamic regulations on women in Iran. She focuses on raising awareness of women’s rights through training women at the grassroots level.
Leila holds a Masters in International Law from Mofid University in Iran.
Photo Attributed to
https://www.radcliffe.harvard.edu/people/tayebeh-leila-asadi
