Muslim Narrative Change Cohort
Pillars Fund’s Muslim Narrative Change (MNC) fellows are using their unique experiences and expertise to develop a roadmap for telling authentic Muslim stories that lead to positive change.
In January 2020, we assembled a diverse group of brilliant Muslim artists, academics, and thinkers to form our Muslim Narrative Change (MNC) Cohort in collaboration with the Pop Culture Collaborative and Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art. Our MNC fellows are using their unique experiences and expertise to develop a roadmap for telling authentic Muslim stories that lead to positive change. Our January gathering brought together fellows from across the country to meet and develop a foundation for their narrative change work. Every month throughout 2020, our cohort met virtually to study, discuss, and ultimately produce a path toward a society where Muslim voices are valued. Their findings will guide our storytelling work in the years to come, helping us identify areas of need and develop smart, effective strategies for change.
To honor the MNC Fellows’ contributions to Pillars, we’ve assembled a collection of essays and meditations that gave our fellows the freedom to explore their own curiosities and imaginations. The result: Khayál: A Multimedia Collection by Muslim Creatives, a collection co-authored by the brilliant minds of the MNC.
Meet the Muslim Narrative Change Cohort
Zaheer Ali
Executive Director, Hutchins Institute for Social Justice
Zaheer Ali
Executive Director, Hutchins Institute for Social Justice
Zaheer Ali is the inaugural executive director of the Hutchins Institute for Social Justice at The Lawrenceville School, a secondary education initiative advancing social justice teaching and practice through scholarship, programming, and experiential learning. In addition, he is an executive producer of “American Muslims: A History Revealed,” a National Endowment for the Humanities-funded series of digital short films exploring important episodes of American Muslim history; and is the creator and curator of the Prince Syllabus, which explores the life and work of musical artist Prince as a catalyst for social change. He brings to his work more than two decades of experience leading nationally recognized and award-winning public history and cultural heritage initiatives, including Columbia University’s Malcolm X Project and the Center for Brooklyn History’s Muslims in Brooklyn. He serves on the national council of the Oral History Association, is a Pillars Fund Muslim Narrative Change Fellow, and is a 2020 recipient of the Open Society Foundation’s Soros Equality Fellowship for his work on leveraging the power of storytelling and listening for social change.
Su’ad Abdul Khabeer
Founding Director, Sapelo Square
Su’ad Abdul Khabeer
Founding Director, Sapelo Square
Su’ad Abdul Khabeer is a scholar-artist-activist. In her most recent work, she examines the intersections of official history and the untold stories of Black women and Black Muslims through the lens of her mother’s life. Umi means mother in Arabic, so she named the series of digital exhibitions Umi’s Archive. The project sees everyday Black women as people who know things we all need to know.
Trained as an anthropologist, Su’ad’s first book, Muslim Cool: Race, Religion and Hip Hop in the United States (NYU Press 2016), is a critically acclaimed ethnography on Islam and hip hop that examines how intersecting ideas of Muslimness and Blackness challenge and reproduce the meanings of race in the US. Su’ad’s written work on Islam and hip hop is accompanied by her performance ethnography, Sampled: Beats of Muslim Life. Sampled is a one-woman solo performance designed to present and represent her research and findings to diverse audiences as part of her commitment to public scholarship.
In line with this commitment Su’ad leads Sapelo Square, the first website dedicated to the comprehensive documentation and analysis of the Black US American Muslim experience. She has also written for The Root, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, Ebony Magazine, the Huffington Post, Religious Dispatches and Trans/Missions, and has appeared on Al Jazeera English. Additionally, Su’ad is a Senior Project Advisor for the US Public Television award-winning documentary, New Muslim Cool and her poetry was featured in the anthology Living Islam Out Loud: American Muslim Women Speak. In 2018, Su’ad was profiled as one of 25 influential American Muslims by CNN and received the Soros Equality Fellowship in 2019.
Su’ad is currently an associate professor of American Culture and Arab and Muslim American Studies at the University of Michigan. She received her PhD in cultural anthropology from Princeton University and is a graduate from the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and completed the Islamic Studies diploma program of the Institute at Abu Nour University (Damascus).
Maytha Alhassen
Religion and Public Life Fellow in Media and Entertainment, Harvard University
Maytha Alhassen
Religion and Public Life Fellow in Media and Entertainment, Harvard University
Dr. Maytha Alhassen, a 2021-2022 Harvard Religion + Public Life Fellow in Media + Entertainment, primarily sees her labor as that of a freedom doula and an engaged wit/h/ness reviving the traditions of the feral femme. She is a historian, TV writer + producer, journalist, arts-based social justice organizer, and mending practitioner.
As a journalist, she worked as an on-air host for Al Jazeera English and The Young Turks, also field reporting and opining for such outlets as CNN, Huffington Post, Mic, Boston Review, LA Review of Books, and the Baffler. In 2017, Alhassen was awarded a TED residency that culminated in the TED talk “A Poem for Syria: Beyond a Geography of Violence” about her ancestral relationship to Syria and work with displaced communities in the region.
As a scholar, Alhassen holds a Ph.D. in American studies and Ethnicity from the University of Southern California, M.A. in Socio-cultural Anthropology from Columbia University, and a B.A in Political Science and Arabic and Islamic studies from the University of California, Los Angeles. Alhassen co-edited a volume on narratives from the 2011 Arab uprisings Demanding Dignity: Young Voices from the Front Lines of the Arab Revolutions (White Cloud Press, 2012) and authored the report Haqq and Hollywood: Illuminating 100 Years of Muslim Tropes and How to Transform Them (Pop Culture Collaborative, 2018) as a Pop Culture Collaborative Senior Fellow. She has also authored numerous academic articles.
As a mender and cultural worker, Alhassen has facilitated healing workshops infused with art, trauma-informed yoga, meditation, and reiki to displaced people in Greece, Turkey, along the US-Mexico border, U.S. prisons, and in fugitive spaces. Alhassen has also helped launch multiple social justice organizations including Muslim Anti-Racism Collaborative, the Social Justice Institute at Occidental College, Believers Bail Out (a Muslim abolition group), and in the wake of George Floyd’s brutal murder, the Arabs for Black Lives collective.
Currently, Alhassen produces and writes for Golden Globe and Peabody-winning Hulu series Ramy (Co-Executive Producer) and serves as an Executive Producer for the upcoming docuseries American Muslims: A History Revealed. She is a Pop Culture Collaborative Pluralist Visionaries Fellow, advises on social impact campaigns, does educational and entertainment consulting, and offers healing workshops, all while trying to find time to write some books and show treatments (and will be rolling out a new web series, Key Terms, tied to her educational program Office Hours).
Asad Ali Jafri
Co-Founder, SpaceShift Collective
Asad Ali Jafri
Co-Founder, SpaceShift Collective
Asad Ali Jafri is a cultural producer, community organizer and interdisciplinary artist. Using a grassroots approach and global perspective, Asad connects artists and communities across imagined boundaries to create meaningful engagements and experiences. Asad has over two decades of experience honing an intentional and holistic practice that allows him to take on the role of artist and administrator, curator and producer, educator and organizer, mentor and strategist.
Omar Offendum
Rapper & Spoken Word Artist
Omar Offendum
Rapper & Spoken Word Artist
Omar Offendum is a Syrian-American rapper / spoken word artist. Known for his unique blend of Hip-Hop & Arabic poetry, he’s been featured on prominent world news outlets, lectured at a number of prestigious academic institutions, collaborated with major museums & cultural organizations, and helped raise millions of dollars for various humanitarian relief groups. Offendum was recently named a Kennedy Center Citizen Artist Fellow, an Arab America Foundation “40 Under 40” award recipient, and a member of both the Pillars Fund cohort for Muslim Narrative Change & the RaceForward Butterfly Lab cohort for Immigrant Narrative Strategy. He currently resides in the great state of New York with his wife & two little children, while daydreaming about the jasmine tree-lined streets of Damascus.
Hussein Rashid
Founder, islamicate
Hussein Rashid
Founder, islamicate
Hussein Rashid is an academic whose research interests focus on Muslims and US popular culture. He also works as a consultant focusing on religious literacy. His last major project was with the Children’s Museum of Manhattan exhibit America to Zanzibar: Muslim Cultures Near and Far. He was an executive producer on the award-winning New York Times short animated documentary The Secret History of Muslims in the US. He is an executive producer for a multi-hour, multi-format documentary on Muslims in the US. He also currently serves as the Assistant Dean of Religion and Public Life at Harvard Divinity School.
Hussein has written dozens of articles on religion and culture and co-edited a half-dozen volumes on various aspects of Muslim cultures. Hussein also writes op-eds on Muslim life in the US, and long-form pieces on Shi’i theology.
He is on the advisory board of various nonprofits and foundations. He is on the board of I Am Your Protector, which uses public art as a means of building interfaith community, and Anikaya, a modern dance company that does interpretations of Persian and Urdu Sufi poetry.
You can find his work here.