“I am God, Allah, and I am the Merciful. I created the womb, rahm, and I have [given] it a name derived from My own name.” – Sunan al-Tirmidhi | 1907 |
Established in 2009, HEART was established by Nadiah Mohajir and Ayesha Akhtar to cultivate a community of belonging and compassion. Working to support individuals navigating common and complex reproductive and sexual health and violence experiences, HEART’s programming invites individuals to consider how their faith and cultural values inform their decisions.
Nadiah Mohajir, a Pakistani-American Muslim mother of three, experienced frustrations with being able to find workplaces that were supportive of her role as a parent as well. The organization’s creation and growth was a direct response to the organization’s founders not seeing themselves or their stories represented authentically in positions of leadership in either mainstream movements or in Muslim institutions. Soon after HEART’s founding, on the other side of the world, there were Muslim women grappling with these same challenges: Sahar Pirzada in Singapore,Navila Rashid in New York, and Sameera Qureshi in Calgary. They began to collaborate on building support systems and accessible educational materials across time zones on Skype. Before they knew it, they had the scrappy infrastructure of organizational hubs in each of our local communities.
What began as a hyper-local volunteer-run project has blossomed into a national movement with a team of over fifty board members, staff, trainers, and interns across the country. This community is grounded in compassion and a love for justice and equity. HEART is made up of God-conscious people who model what it means to believe survivors, to trust the most impacted to be the experts in their lived realities and have agency over their well-being, healing, and safety, and to take a structural approach to ending gendered violence and advancing reproductive justice.
By offering accurate Health Education, Advocacy, Research, and Training, HEART mobilizes people to become agents of change in their own communities. Our vision is ambitious: to build a world where all Muslims are safe and exercise self-determination over their reproductive lives in the communities they live, work, and pray. We are led by directly impacted people that represent the communities we serve: we are Muslims, survivors, caregivers, queer and trans, differently abled, people of color working at the intersection of Islam, reproductive justice, and anti-gendered violence advocacy. We are people who have longed for belonging in our communities, workplaces, and faith spaces.
Our journey over the years has been wild but blessed; we’ve rapidly grown over the last decade, we wrote and published a book, we’ve convened coalitions, and we’ve distributed hundreds of thousands of dollars of mutual aid. We’re proud to say we’ve led programming that has been the source of belonging for many Muslims and that we’ve built a workplace where people love to work and can bring their full selves. Fifteen years later, we can say, it takes HEART to grow:
A healthy relationship
A thriving workplace
An interdependent community
Safe and inclusive Muslim spaces
A practice for informed decision making
Understanding about oneself and one’s body
And so much more!
