Skip to main content
Muslim Voices Indiana University

A Pinecone and a Pixel: Learning Islam at Al-Fatih Academy to Build Emotional Resilience in a Wired World by Sher Afgan Tareen

Posted on by IU Muslim Voices

Student at Al Fatih Academy | Source: Facebook

During the fall of 2019, I traveled to Reston, VA, a suburb of Washington D.C., to conduct fieldwork at Al-Fatih Academy, a predominantly women-run Islamic K–8 school. Afeefa Syeed, the principal, welcomed me and introduced the school’s mission. I listened carefully for what made it “religious.” But the integrated curriculum she described diverged from my assumptions. Rather than appending Islamic Studies to the core subjects, it invited students to discover Islam in the interconnection between them. To drive her point home, Afeefa shared the news of a student at another Islamic school who committed suicide after exposure to harmful content on social media and added “At Al-Fatih, we measure student learning by how well they develop emotional cognition to use technology mindfully.”

(more…)

“This Wasn’t Just Research. It Was Worship.” How a Spiritual Crisis, a PAR Project, and Sisterhood Reclaimed STEM for Muslim Women [Part II] by Dr. Vivian Zohery

Posted on by IU Muslim Voices

This wasn’t just research. It was worship.
 It was a love letter to Muslim women who’ve felt invisible in the lab, unseen in the classroom, and unheard in academia.
It was a seed. And In Shaa Allah, it will continue to grow.

PART II [Part I]

When the Researcher is Also the Researched

Image Source: Pinterest

What drew me to Participatory Action Research (PAR) was its liberatory nature. In PAR, the empirical methodological approach has “people directly affected by a problem under investigation engage as co-researchers in the research process, which includes [an] intervention” and was developed to “challenge positivist research that used deficit approaches to marginalized people” (Rodríguez & Brown, 2009). In other words, PAR aims to empower the researched to be the researcher; research is not done on people, it’s done with them, for them, and often by them (Rodríguez & Brown, 2009). Instead of extracting stories, we were co-creating meaning.

(more…)

“This Wasn’t Just Research. It Was Worship.” How a Spiritual Crisis, a PAR Project, and Sisterhood Reclaimed STEM for Muslim Women [Part I] by Dr. Vivian Zohery

Posted on by IU Muslim Voices

This wasn’t just research. It was worship.

 It was a love letter to Muslim women who’ve felt invisible in the lab, unseen in the classroom, and unheard in academia.
It was a seed. And In Shaa Allah, it will continue to grow.

PART I [Part II]

Dr. Zohery (on the left) with fellow female Muslim researchers in STEM [Image Source: education.umd.edu] 
When I began interviewing young Muslim women in STEM, I didn’t expect to hear echoes of my own story. But over and over again, I did. These weren’t just interviews. They were revelations. They were me, mirrored.

There wasn’t one particular story that jolted me—it was more like a chorus of familiar words: representation, isolation, not belonging. Later on in the project some of the sisters shared that they joined the project because of sheer curiosity: “What does it even mean to be a Muslim woman in STEM?” I remember that question lingering with me. It sent me spiraling back to the moment I told my mother that I wanted to be a civil engineer, and she gently but firmly told me: “That’s not a place for a woman in this country. But if we were still in Egypt, it’s possible”

(more…)

Sesame Paste, Wild Plants, and Resistance: Kurdish Vegetarian Dishes from Iraqi Kurdistan [Part II] by Dr. Jihan Mohammed

Posted on by IU Muslim Voices

Episode Two: Gil û Gîya[i] [Greens and Herbs]

Wild Gundelia (Source: Shafaq News)

In the second episode, I reiterate that traditional Kurdish cuisine is vegan-and vegetarian-friendly. Historically, meat was scarce, so Iraqi Kurds relied on plant-based foods more than they do today. However, with the industrialization and globalization of meat production, the cuisine has shifted to become more meat-based. Below, I explore the cultural significance of wild edible plants in the Kurdish culture, focusing on how they are preserved, prepared, and cooked.

(more…)

Sesame Paste, Wild Plants, and Resistance: Kurdish Vegetarian Dishes from Iraqi Kurdistan [Part I] by Dr. Jihan Mohammed

Posted on by IU Muslim Voices

Berwari Bala, Chemseyida village, close to the Turkish borders

In many cultures and religions, both the consumption and rejection of meat convey specific social identities and affiliations. In Islam, for example, Muslims are instructed to consume what is lawful (halal), wholesome, pure, nutritious, and safe. They are also commanded to avoid anything considered impure or harmful. Accordingly, Muslim Kurds refrain from consuming non-halal or impure foods. Given that Kurdish cuisine features its own distinct dishes, the consumption of traditional halal meat-based dishes is a signifier of the Muslim Kurdish identity. As such, abstaining from meat entirely—and particularly from traditional meat-based dishes—marks a departure from normative cultural and religious expectations. This departure signals the formation of a distinct identity. More importantly, embracing labels such as “vegetarian” or “vegan” introduces tensions between overlapping identities, value systems, and communal loyalties. To identify as both a Muslim Kurd and a vegetarian (or vegan) is to implicitly challenge ancestral dietary practices and their associated moral, spiritual, and cultural frameworks—raising questions about one’s religious devotion and the perceived authenticity of one’s Kurdish and Muslim identity. For many Kurdish omnivores, adopting a vegetarian or vegan diet feels like giving up culturally significant dishes—reflecting a deeper concern about what is lost when traditional meat-based recipes are altered.

(more…)

My Muslim Grandmothers, Their Tattoos, Their Individuality by Derya Doğan

Posted on by IU Muslim Voices

Image Source: Thebajer.com

I never met my maternal grandmother, an Arab woman from northern Mesopotamia (a.k.a. southeast Anatolia), as she passed away years before I was born. There are only very few black and white photos of her, and some of them are from a distance, so it is hard to make out her face. I do remember my paternal Kurdish grandmother, though – not only the traditional clothing she wore until her last breath, but also the beautiful dark green and dark blue shapes on her face and hands which our family rumor has it that my maternal grandmother also had. Those shapes were what has been known as deq, or xal among Kurds. They were meant to beautify my grandmothers, protect them from evil, and tell their unique stories in life; yet, in the colonial perspective, all of these meanings were diminished and replaced by inaccurate exoticized interpretations which deny my Muslim female ancestors their individuality.

(more…)

Massachusetts and Muscat: America and the 19th century Western Indian Ocean by Jakob Myers

Posted on by IU Muslim Voices

“The Empire of Oman around the middle of the 19th century:” Source: Wikimedia Commons

The first thing Richard Waters did when he arrived in Zanzibar was try (and fail) to convert the Sultan to Christianity. A few weeks later, one of his business partners, who thought he was unjustly demanding payment, sent a group of mercenaries to attack his house. After that rocky start, Waters, as the US’s consul in the city from 1836 to 1846, enjoyed a close personal friendship with Zanzibar’s dignitaries and secured for himself a fair share of the highly profitable trade his home city of Salem, MA carried on with East Africa. In this period, the United States was one of the most important trading partners of the Sultanate of Oman and Zanzibar, which then occupied much of the Arabian Peninsula and coastal East Africa. As the story of Waters implies, the operation of the East African commercial system required quotidian collaboration across faith traditions– American ships would often be financed by Gujarati Hindu merchants at a Muslim ruler’s court. The often-forgotten early period of American commercial and political engagement with the western Indian Ocean, I will suggest, both foreshadowed certain aspects of America’s present engagement with the Islamic World and offers insight into both past political and present scholarly debates about nineteenth-century systems of unfree labor.

(more…)

Muharram in the Alevi-Bektashi Tradition* by Dr. İlgar Baharlu

Posted on by IU Muslim Voices

*This material contains descriptions of historical events that may be distressing to some readers.

A depiction of the Battle of Karbala [Image Source: alevihaberagi.com]
The events of Karbala are some of the most significant matters in Islam. Fifty years after the passing of Prophet Muhammad, his most beloved grandson, Hussain, was massacred. He was decapitated, his head raised on a spear, and his body abandoned in the desert. His family was taken hostage to Damascus before the caliph, Yazid in a humiliating way. The year 61 in the Hijri calendar (680 AD), when this incident took place, marks a turning point in Islamic history.

(more…)

Queer and Muslim – Bridging The Chasm by Dania Khan

Posted on by IU Muslim Voices

“LGBT Muslims” by lewishamdreamer licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.

Ali works in investment banking. Ayesha only prays on Eid. Faisal drinks a glass of wine when he’s at his friend’s house. Samiya has a wife. Ali, Ayesha, and Faisal are all doing things that would go against the widely accepted beliefs of Muslim society. They may face scrutiny, but it’ll be largely with the understanding that people are allowed to decide where they’re comfortable drawing the line. They are seen as people, with autonomy, with their own perspectives. Samiya does not get this privilege. Samiya is consistently told, in violent ways as well as in cases of genuine concern, that she needs to get a divorce immediately and marry a man.

(more…)

Steeped Traditions: The Cultural and Religious History of Tea in the Islamic World by Paige Benner

Posted on by IU Muslim Voices

“Two Men Laden With Tea, Sichuan Sheng China, 30 JUL [1908]” [Wikimedia Commons]
For those who know me in my real life know I am a tea fanatic. Black, green, red, herbal, hot or iced, with or without milk, I am obsessed. However, through all my brews of teas around the world, I never took time to recognize the culture of the tea I was enjoying, especially tea from Muslim cultures around the world.  

Although popular all over the world, tea originated in China, specifically in the southwest region by Emperor Shen Nung.[1] However, in the 9th and 10th centuries, tea reached the Islamic world likely by Silk Road trade routes that connected China to Central Asia, Persia, and the Middle East where it is mingled with other herbs in the region. An example of this route is the “Old Tea Horse Trade Road” which is a 2,500-mile-long mountain trail stretching from Tibet to as far as the Red Sea. [2]Traders have been photographed with over 150 pounds of tea on their back and walked 150 miles along these paths.

(more…)

Skip to toolbar