We had a great roundup of Muslim Women Who Save Lives yesterday. We thought we would add some more changemakers to the list. We know the list goes on and on, but here are some additional suggestions by the altM Editors:
Dr. Chaudhry is known as the Doctor who fixes heart attacks for good. She is the Director of Cardiovascular Regenerative Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital.
“”My hope and my expectation,” says Chaudhry, “is that it’s worked in two small-animal models, and I really believe it’s going to work in humans. I can say we will save many lives; I can’t say yet how many.”
Her idea was laughed at, at first. In part because she was young and a woman, she says. But now the medical world is sitting up, taking notes.”
Read more.
Asma is the founder of Muslimat Al-Nisa, the only known shelter in the country that exclusively serves Muslim women. She graduated from Howard University and the Medical University of South Carolina. Asma worked as a nurse practitioner and midwife and moved to Atlanta where she started a clinic for people who were uninsured.
“People ask me why I continually do this. And I say that I’m afraid that on the Day of Judgment, God will say to me, “One of my servants came to you and you turned them away.” That was my motivation for doing this. Because you don’t know who it is that God has sent on your path to help. So if I had the ability to help someone, I will try to help them. That’s the legacy of my grandmother. She turned no one away.”
Read more.
Linda is a working woman, community activist, and mother of three and a whole lot more! A Palestinian-American activist from New York City, fights against surveillance of Muslims, discrimination and Islamophobia among many other civil rights issues- most recently working with African American Activists to fight “stop and frisk”, biased policing and mass incarceration.
““As I’ve grown older, I’ve seen how politics works, and I feel like I need to be part of a movement,” she said. “I feel I have more impact on the outside.””
Read more.
Dian is the founder and President of the GiveLight Foundation, an organization that gives hope to orphans in developing countries. The organization, which builds orphanages and provides food, clothing, and much more for children.
“The tsunami of 2004 changed my life forever and I believe it was my destiny that Allah swt has written for me. He designed my life for a better purpose and the path I had chosen turned from running global brands to running global homes for orphans.”
Read more.
Ameena is a community activist- a fighter for peace in the streets of Chicago. She is a violence interrupter with the Chicago organization CeaseFire, mediates disputes to prevent gang violence from escalating. Please watch her Black Girls Rock speech.
“When you’re looking at these guys and these girls and they’re on defense, they don’t want to fight, they don’t want to kill. That’s the given of what happens and then when I come in, someone after knowing where I’ve been, will use that as an out. ‘Well, you better be glad that Ameena told me to fall back because if it wasn’t for her that came in and stopped that, then I would have done what I needed to do to take care of my business.'”
Read more.
Dr. Wadud is an American scholar of Islam with a progressive focus on Qur’an exegesis.She is the professor of Islamic studies at Virginia Commonwealth University and author of Qur’an and Woman: Rereading the Sacred Text from a Woman’s Perspective.
“I personally began my research, in terms of Quranic studies, simply to determine whether or not the experiences of Muslim women in all parts of the world as I had traveled were in fact the experiences of Islam towards women. In other words, I looked for a source that would most closely point me to, what was the divine intention towards women? If the divine intention was backwardness, prohibitions, narrow confines and subservience, then that was truly Islam, and I personally [did] not want to have anything to do with it.
But if the true articulation was more than that, then Islam became something even more meaningful for me. So for me, the more I studied in the Quran, the more liberated I became, and the more affirmed I became as a Muslim.”
Read more.
Rabia is a wife, mother, attorney, President of the Safe Nation Collaborative, and the reason Serial and Undisclosed came into being. This superwoman was the one who first brought Adnan Syed and his story to the attention of Series’s Sarah Koenig.
“”People think I’m obnoxious. They think I’m aggressive,” said Chaudry, a lawyer and Greenbelt resident. “That goes against the grain of stereotypes of Muslim women.””
Read more.
These Muslim women, and many others, are shattering stereotypes and breaking down barriers.
Do you have any more suggestions? Please let us know.
