Our Mission

MASGD is a Black/Indigenous Global Majority,Trans, and Muslim led organization that supports, empowers and connects LGBPQ+ and 2STGNCI+ Muslims and those racialized or perceived as Muslim. We challenge root causes of oppression, including misogyny, racism, capitalism and xenophobia.

We define Muslimness in terms of the harmful white, western and predominantly Christian gaze that dehumanizes Muslims and, importantly, those perceived to be Muslim. MASGD provides cultural, art and peer support programming that cultivates joy, belonging and Utopia in ways that are specifically designed for the most marginalized of marginalized people.

*We acknowledge that the term LGBTQ+ uses a particular cultural frame for understanding sexual and gender diversity. Many Muslims use other terms and cultural frames for understanding gender and sexuality, and language keeps evolving. Our intention is to be inclusive.
  


Our History

MASGD was created by a working group of queer Muslim leaders in 2011, and was officially launched in January 2013 at an LGBTQ+ conference in Atlanta, GA. Since 2011, our organization has convened more than 700 LGBTQ+* Muslims and their partners for an annual weekend of faith-based reflection, kinship and community building. In 2014, MASGD became the organizational home of the annual Queer Muslim Retreat. 
 In 2016, MASGD convened a conversation between LGBTQ+ Muslims and straight Muslim allies in the wake of the Orlando attack; it also orchestrated media and advocacy work to resist Islamophobic narratives following the massacre. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, our programming has shifted online including Tajwid classes, open mic nights and numerous Ramadan events.

In 2022 MASGD had a major shift from Steering Committee leadership to hiring it’s first employees! The current team has been building for the past two years as well as the intentions and directions of the org.

Current MASGD Team


Mx Yaffa (no prounouns)
Executive Director

Safae (they/them)
Director of Programs & Operations

Previous Steering Committee


 
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Aaliya

(She/Her)
Aaliya likes polka dots, lemongrass and the number 22.  She is a morning person. She makes her home on unceded Lenape land, Brooklyn, NY.

Ana

(She/Her)
Ana is a Sudani training specialist and educator based out of Texas. She is passionate and committed to cultivating nourishing and healing spaces that can feel like coming home.
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Eman Abdelhadi

(She/Her/They/Them)
Eman is an activist, artist and academic based in Chicago. Her superpowers include melting in the sun, hosting giant dinner parties, and speed reading. 
 
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Gabriel Arkles

(He/His)
Gabriel lives in Brooklyn with his partner and three cats. Trans rights lawyer by day (and sometimes night), he is also into exploring feminist Sufi Islam, reading sci fi and fantasy, playing table-top games, and writing about social justice.

Malek Ansari

(They/Them)
Malek is a political operative, third generation organizer, and proud social worker based in Chicago. Malek is a first generation American with roots in India. As a gender queer non binary person they are passionate about trans liberation. In their free time (what's that?!) Malek embroiders, is an avid writer, and plant dad to 23 plants and counting. 
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Mirna Haidar

(They/She) 
Mirna is a Criminal Defense Juris Doctor with the Legal Aid society who identifies as a Queer muslim mama immigrant person. Mirna worked and organized around LGBTQ and migrant workers rights for more than 10 years. They have been serving on the MASGD steering committee since 2016. Mirna loves to have conversations around imagining a world with no incarceration, no borders, and healthy accountability forums. 
 
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Raad

 (They/She) 
Raad is a queer, nonbinary, woman(ish), immigrant of color living in NYC. They write, and organize around Islamophobia, race, and gender. They're currently into: crosswords, slowly reading urdu short stories, and getting to inbox zero. They're failing miserably at the latter. 

Terna

 (She/Her)
Terna is an liberian/nigerian queer woman raised in the u.s. She is committed to facilitating liberation through helping people connect more deeply to themselves—spirit, body & mind—as a therapist, energy & spirit worker.. She is co-creator of "Coming Out Muslim: Radical Acts of Love." She is an avid learner and amazed by this whole Creation situation :) 
 

LOVE LETTERS

from the MASGD Steering Committee

Queer and trans Muslim community has meant a lot to me over the years. It is through this community that I first met other trans people, and began to imagine I might be trans myself. It is through listening to other queer and trans Muslims’ experiences and ideas that I at one point chose to turn away from Islam, and it is through them that I found a path back, which also feels like a path to my own heart. In MASGD, I hope to practice my love for our communities through service, and help us create connections that allow us all to be safer, stronger, and more supported and supportive. We are perfectly imperfect, and I love us with all our messiness and vulnerability and pain and creativity and joy. I love you even if I don’t know you, because I know that you are a beautiful creation, and so very worthy of love. You are not alone.

— Gabriel

To my Darling, dearest, beloved ummah. As a young person realizing I was both queer and non-binary I felt desperately lonely. For so long, I disavowed myself my identities thinking I was the only QT Muslim that existed and it simply just wasn’t possible for me to be real. All young Malek needed was a whisper, a rumor, a dream that I was, in fact, not alone. The hope of that possibility kept me going and the moment I found Queer Muslim community my world burst open with joy, with sorrow, and infinite possibilities. If you ever find yourself alone in a room, or with a chorus of voices that tells you your presence is anything other than a divine blessing, look up at the moon. Look up at the moon and remember that somewhere beneath it, in this gorgeous universe, there’s a whole family waiting to love you, to hold you, and to honor you- as you are.

— Malek


Beloved, 
 As your fellow Muslim, I affirm the preciousness of your existence. I affirm your inherent, ongoing & incorruptible wholeness. I am here to love and uplift you, and to remind you of that wholeness. The world certainly has its illusions, and anything that suggests fragmentation as the direction of truth is a grand illusion. 
 As part of MASGD, I am committed to creating and supporting spaces of connection, joy, pleasure & delight; spaces that can be present to your pains & sorrows; spaces where you can trust your heart & your gut; spaces where remembering is possible & where you can be true to the essence of Allah that is within you. 
 I love you. Now & always. 

— Terna

I don’t know how to describe it …

But I sure do feel it in every inch of my being …

Your love… keeps me alive …

Not just merely alive …

You see, breathing in some O2 and exhaling some CO2 doesn’t feel the same without you …

Oh how to describe your love?

I feel it … I breath it … and I cherish it . . .

This love filled with joy, accountability, and growth …

Nothing ever felt like all of you before …

— Mirna


“my people I follow you like constellations
we hear the glass smashing the street
& the nights opening their dark
our names this country’s wood
for the fire my people my people
the long years we’ve survived the long
years yet to come I see you map
my sky the light your lantern long
ahead & I follow I follow”

From “If They Should Come For Us” by Fatimah Asghar 

— selected by Raad

"You at the edges and shores, in the rooms of quiet, in the rooms of shouting, in the airport terminal, at the bus depot saying “No!” and each of us looking out from the gorgeous unlikelihood of our lives at all, finding ourselves here, witnesses to each other’s tenderness, which, this moment, is fury, is rage, which, this moment, is another way of saying: You are who I love"  

From “You Are Who I Love” by Aracelis Girmay

— selected by Aaliya


Dearest Community - it was only in your loving arms that I found I could be all the parts of myself. Thank you for holding space for me; it’s an honor to try and do the same for you through this work. 

— Eman

“Come, come, whoever you are. Wanderer, worshiper, lover of leaving. It doesn't matter. 
Ours is not a caravan of despair. come, even if you have broken your vows a thousand times. Come, yet again , come , come.”
Jelaluddin Rumi

— selected by Ana