SERVICE TO HUMANITY
You Are Welcome Here
Chicagoan Joohi Tahir and her team at Muhsen are dedicated to addressing the functional needs of Muslims with disabilities BY HABEEBA HUSAIN
A Muhsen volunteer helps a ISNA Convention attendee
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or nearly 10 years Joohi Tahir stayed far away from her local mosque. As the mother of three girls with one on the autism spectrum, she felt anything but welcome there. “We tell mothers with children with special needs, ‘You don’t belong here. Your kid is making too much noise. Go home,’” she says. “It happened to me.” When her daughter was young, Tahir decided to take her for the Friday prayer. As was the norm, her daughter began to vocalize a little bit. Tahir decided to walk out of the prayer hall to calm her down and play with her, when she saw a woman running behind them. “I thought she was going to help me calm her down,” Tahir says. “[Instead] she said, ‘Beta (daughter), it’s not fard for you to be here.’ That’s what I got told.”
This moment is all too familiar for functional-needs families, but Tahir wants to change that through Muhsen (https:// muhsen.org), an organization dedicated to foster awareness, accommodation and acceptance of such individuals in our sacred spaces. “It is a right of every Muslim to have a place in the house of God — end of story,” Tahir says. “As a society … we don’t even count these people as Muslims. We ignore the fact that these people have a right to be there. We park in their parking spaces because we are late for jumuah.” In 2012, when she and her husband went on hajj with Shaykh Omar Suleiman’s group, she informed him of her concerns. As the son of a mother who struggled with cancer and multiple strokes, he empathized with her stories and challenges immediately.
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“He listened very carefully and very patiently,” Tahir says, “[and] was very keen that we do something beyond awareness.” Upon their return, he emailed the couple that he wanted to meet with them on his visit to Chicago to figure out what could be done. Tahir prepared a presentation, listing everything that would help families like hers feel more cared for and accepted. At the 2014 annual ISNA Convention in Detroit, Shaykh Omar announced the launch of Muslims Understanding and Helping Special Education Needs (Muhsen). In Arabic, this word means “someone who helps others.” “Shaykh Omar is a visionary. He said this organization is going to grow like you won’t believe,” says Tahir. “Here I am — this mother whose child has been very alienated at the masjid — and I’m like, really? This is going to grow in the community? I hope it does, but I don’t know.” But the shaykh was right. This past September, Muhsen celebrated its fifth anniversary at the 56th ISNA convention — the event at which it was launched. Working with ISNA to provide services for all of these families, a week before the convention it had to close registration because its available capacity had already been reached. As of this writing, Muhsen has certified 42 Islamic centers nationwide as “friendly and accommodating.” At the end of November, it embarked on its third umrah trip for families that need an extra pair of hands to help out with their loved ones. “Having that individual walk up to me at umrah saying, ‘We never dreamt this was possible,’ — that for me is ‘mission accomplished’ for that family,” Tahir says. “That for me is the most favorite part of my job.” Clearly, there is a need in the community for Muhsen’s services, whether that be guiding mosques to install accessibility features like elevators and ramps, offering respite care or providing signing and closed-captioning at lectures, among other things.