Meet the Ladies of Love InshAllah

Meet Love InshAllah’s 25 inspirational and courageous contributors!

The Editors

Editors Ayesha Mattu and Nura Maznavi’s first book, Love, InshAllah: The Secret Love Lives of American Muslim Women, was featured globally by media including The New York Times, NPR, BBC, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Times of India, Dawn Pakistan and The Jakarta Post. They are currently working on Love InshAllah‘s companion anthology Salaam, Love: American Muslim Men on Love, Sex & Intimacy (Beacon Press, February 2014).

Ayesha Mattu (left) is a writer and international development consultant who has worked in the field of women’s human rights since 1998.  Ayesha’s writing has appeared in CNN.com, The International Museum of Women, and The Huffington Post. She was selected a ‘Muslim Leader of Tomorrow’ by the UN Alliance of Civilizations & ASMA Society and has served on the boards of IDEX, the Women’s Funding Network, and World Pulse. Ayesha is an alumna of Voices of Our Nations writers’ workshop and a member of the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto. She is currently researching a non-fiction book about three generations of Pakistani Sufi women.

Nura Maznavi (right) is a civil rights attorney, writer, and Fulbright Scholar. She has worked with migrant workers in Sri Lanka, on behalf of prisoners in California, and with a national legal advocacy organization leading a program to end racial and religious profiling. Nura is working on a screenplay and several short stories. She lives in Chicago.

The Contributors

Tanzila “Taz” Ahmed is a writer, community organizer and policy researcher based in Southern California. She founded South Asian American Voting Youth (SAAVY), and is a contributing blogger at Sepia Mutiny.com where she writes about pop, music, politics, and anything tied to a Desi identity. Her writing has been featured on The Nation, Left Turn Magazine, Angry Asian Man, MTV Iggy, Taqwacore Webzine, Wiretap Magazine, Alternet, PopandPolitics and has been published in the books Mirror on America and Storming the Polls. She also has two self-published chapbooks of poetry, Secret Confessions and Diamond in the Rough. She is currently working on a memoir about her journey on finding purpose, love, poetry and familial revolutionary history.

Huda Al-Marashi is an Iraqi-American at work on a memoir about the impact of her dual-identity on her marriage. Excerpts from this memoir are forthcoming in the anthologies Becoming and In Her Place. Her poem, TV Terror, is a part of a touring exhibit commemorating the Mutanabbi Street Bombing in Baghdad. She holds a B.A. from Santa Clara University and a M.Ed. from Framingham State College. She is a 2012 Creative Workforce Fellow, and she lives in Ohio with her husband and three children.

Insiya Ansari (pen name) is a writer who was raised in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Molly Elian Carlson converted to Islam in 2005 and then converted to marriage in 2007 to the man of her dreams, literally. She was born in Minnesota, but has lived in many places including Cairo. She, her husband, and the Egyptian street cat she took in, moved back to Minnesota in 2009 and live there currently. She loves to read and to write, and hopes to one day publish that novel that has been sitting in the back of her head for years.

Patricia MG Dunn received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College where she currently teaches creative writing. She was managing editor of Muslim Wakeup!, America’s most popular Muslim online magazine from 2003–2008. Her fiction has appeared in Global City Review, Salon.com, Women’s eNews, The Christian Science Monitor, The Village Voice, The Nation, and L.A. Weekly, among other publications. Her work is anthologized in Stories of Illness and Healing: Women Write Their Bodies, Kent State University Press.

Nour Gamal (pen name) is a global nomad raised across the eastern US and the Arabian Gulf. After failing to realize the Egyptian-American dream of becoming an engineer or a doctor, she earned a BA in Middle Eastern Studies and an LLM in Human Rights Law instead. She is employed as a part-time freelance translator and a full-time bleeding heart and lives with her farangi husband and their four adorable computers in the UK. (Comic portrait by Jonathan Hill.)

Lena Hassan (pen name) has been happily married to her husband for sixteen years thanks to God and the veil of cyberspace. They have three children, and currently live in Damascus, Syria, though the Internet allows her to keep a perpetual foot in her home country of America. Lena has worked as a software engineer, served as an administrative volunteer for an Islamic school in the US, homeschooled her children, and edited an online literary journal. She is an aspiring fiction writer and recently published her first short story in a national magazine.

Yasmine M. Khan was born in Berkeley, CA, and has lived all over Northern California and in Barazai, Pakistan. She is a writer and photographer whose favorite things include gelato, highfives, and practicing terrible cartwheels with Lemon. She dreams not-so-secretly of traveling the world, learning how to swim, and making the perfect homemade strawberry shortcake. Her professional background lies in cultural competency training and fund development for nonprofit organizations and institutions of higher education. Yasmine studied Human Development at the University of California at Davis, and Educational Leadership at Mills College. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Nijla Baseema Mu’min is a writer, filmmaker, and photographer from the San Francisco Bay Area. She is a 2007 graduate of UC Berkeley, and also attended Howard University’s MFA Film Program. She was the recipient of the 2009 Paul Robeson Award for Best Feature Screenplay. At UC Berkeley, she served as a Student Teacher in June Jordan’s Poetry for the People Program. Her writing has appeared in the Berkeley Poetry Review, Poets For Living Waters, the Diverse Voices Quarterly, Kweli Journal and Mythium: Journal of Contemporary Literature, and the Girlchild Press Anthology, Woman’s Work: The Short Stories. She is an MFA student in Writing and Film Directing at the California Institute of the Arts.

Zahra Noorbakhsh is a writer, actor and stand-up comedian, whose one-woman shows All Atheists Are Muslim and Hijab and Hammerpants have appeared at the New York International Fringe Theater Festival, San Francisco Theater Festival, and Solo Performance Workshop Festival, with widespread critical acclaim. She is a graduate of the UC Berkeley in Theatre & Performance Studies. Though she began as a stand-up comic, her love of storytelling drew her into the world of theater and ultimately the art of short story writing.

Chinyere Obimba is in her final year at Harvard Medical school, applying for residency in Family Medicine. She hopes to work with underserved populations, practice obstetrics and participate in intervention planning for health promotion programs. Among her role models she counts her parents, Enyichukwu and Khalilah, who continue to show her what love and marriage is all about. She considers her younger brother Chukwuemeka, who has autism, to be one of her life’s inspirations. When she’s not being a medical student, she enjoys dancing samba, listening to and singing Brazilian music and writing. She also aspires someday to be a wife, mother, and a proud owner of a talking bird.

Ify Okoye (pen name Tolu Adiba) is a second-generation Nigerian-American convert to Islam. She is also a nurse, blogger and activist living in the Washington D.C. area. Ify enjoys reading, traveling, and blogging at Ify Okoye and has been featured by CNN, The New York Times, The Baltimore Sun, USA Today, and The Daily Beast for her activism.

Aisha Saeed was born and raised in South Florida. She is a teacher, attorney, and writer. She recently completed her first two novels. In her free time, Aisha enjoys traveling, reading, and blogging at Aisha Iqbal. She lives in Atlanta with her husband and son.

Deonna Kelli Sayed is a coffee drinking, ghost hunting American Muslim of global proportions. She has lived and traveled throughout the Muslim world, and her work has appeared in lifestyle magazines such as Women This Month Bahrain and FACT Bahrain. In 2006, Deonna helped establish Elham, the premier grassroots creative arts group in the Persian Gulf. She is currently the editor of Ghostvillage.com and the author of Paranormal Obsession: America’s Fascination with Ghosts & Hauntings, Spooks & Spirits, which is a cultural studies discussion regarding the role of paranormal reality TV in a post 9/11 American society. Deonna’s writing examines the intersections of identity and culture. Visit her website http://www.deonnakellisayed.com

Suzanne Syeda Shah is a Muslim poet, writer, and human rights activist. She was born in Saudi Arabia to Bengali parents and immigrated with her family to Los Angeles, California when she was four years old. After completing her Bachelor’s Degree in Islam & Modernity at UC Berkeley, her passion for community service and the need to improve the healthcare system has now led her to pursue a career in medicine. She currently resides in California with her husband, Mika’il.

Najva Sol is an Iranian-American writer, photographer, and multimedia artist. She received her BA in Creative Writing from The New School in NYC. Najva is co-founder of Lowbrow Society for the Arts, where she curates fabulous art extravaganzas. Her writing has been published in Look Look Magazine, AM New York, Bitch, and more. Her photos & performances have been featured in the National Queer Arts Festival (2010 + 2011), numerous galleries, Commonwealth Club, and The Nuyorican. Lowbrow Society has appeared in Nerve.com, New York Press, San Francisco Bay Guardian, and Time Out New York. When not making art, she is active in various non-profits that deal with some combination of art presenting, queer empowerment, and social justice.