Muslims in Action
Breaking Barriers Young Muslim American women adapt to leading national organizations. By Samana Siddiqui
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n 2004, Hadia Mubarak made Muslim American history when she was elected the first female president of the Muslim Students Association National (MSA) — the first woman to lead the body since its founding in 1963. Today, Mubarak is a doctoral student in Islamic Studies at Georgetown University. Her research interests include the development of classical Quranic exegesis; Islamic family law; Islamic reform and gender issues in Islam. She received her master’s degree in contemporary Arab studies with a concentration in women and gender from Georgetown University. In this interview with Islamic Horizons, she shares how her election was a culmination of the sacrifices of women who built MSA/ISNA, and its legacy for Muslim women. Islamic Horizons: You were the first female president of the MSA. How did it happen? Hadia MubaraK: My involvement with MSA National first began in the fall of 2003 when I moved to Washington, D.C. I had just
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left Florida State University, where I had served on the local MSA board for three years. Dr. Altaf Husain, the former MSA National president, had heard about our MSA chapter’s political activism, specifically our success in mobilizing the student community against a bill in the Florida legislature that discriminated against students from certain Muslim countries. In that fall of 2003, he invited me to become the vice-chair of MSA National’s Political Action Task Force (PATF). I agreed and during that academic year, PATF helped MSA National become more politically involved. We created a voters’ information guide for the 2004 presidential elections, encouraged MSA chapters to set up voter registration booths, helped unify the Muslim American vote by working with AMT (American Muslim Taskforce), and put out statements on important political issues that affected Muslim students. By the end of that academic year (spring 2004), I was quite surprised to learn that the outgoing board had selected me as their nominee for president. The nomination of the outgoing board serves as equal to the nomination of any affiliated MSA chapter. As far as I recall, the position was not contested and therefore, as a historic coincidence, I was elected as the first female president of MSA National. Islamic Horizons November/December 2013