Dear Muslim Advocates Friends and Family — As-Salaam-Alaikum,
Thanks to your support, 2022 was a pivotal year for Muslim Advocates. With our partners and allies, we continued to produce high-stakes legal work with national reach and impact. After an exhaustive national search, we also welcomed our next Executive Director, Omar Farah. Our team’s enthusiastic persistence and Omar’s arrival helped deepen Muslim Advocates’ commitment to an uncompromising approach that works for the full, diverse spectrum of American Muslim communities.
One of the highlights of the prior year was the opportunity to connect with many of you at a virtual town hall in December featuring Omar and our board chair, Saema Somalya. Their discussion affirmed that Muslim Advocates is committed to collaboration and partnership, leveraging our common voices and collective action for lasting change. Our work will remain grounded in impact litigation that reflects the demands of social movements, legislative advocacy that carries the voices of our communities to policymakers and demands accountability, public education that helps build power among the most vulnerable of us, and narrative-shifting communications that resists the limiting, oppressive frames that are applied to Muslim identities. Because inclusivity is a lived practice, not just a value, our work will also target the intersections where the experiences of American Muslims are connected to the experiences of other historically targeted communities.
We are proud of the way the new year has begun for Muslim Advocates. Just last week, we filed an amicus brief with Muslim Justice League – another brave and highly-effective Muslim-led organization – on behalf of Mr. Rodriguez, an incarcerated Muslim man denied ghusl and the ability to preserve his modesty by officials at Georgia Diagnostic and Classification State Prison where conditions are notoriously inhumane and punitive. His lawyers at the Southern Center for Human Rights, fierce advocates who seek dignity and justice for people affected by the criminal legal system in the deep south, asked us to file this brief in support of their petition for certiorari. The Southern Center’s petition seeks Supreme Court review of a court decision that makes foundational constitutional protections almost completely inaccessible in prisons. Our brief explains how Muslim people in prisons have been leaders in protecting rights - especially rights to religious liberty - for all incarcerated people. We also trace the power of faith in prisons; our brief argues that religious practice can help people survive incarceration, including by creating resilience through religious community and that undercutting religious practice in prison is unjustifiably punitive.
We are also looking forward to the arrival of Ramadan. As it approaches, Muslim Advocates is expanding its work in support of people seeking religious accommodations for Ramadan and Eid. Before and during Ramadan, Muslim Advocates will offer online Know Your Rights training and materials that will focus on the challenges Muslim communities face seeking accommodations from schools, the workplace and prisons during the holy month. We will also host weekly hotline sessions for people to seek advice directly from one of our staff attorneys. If you have a question, get in touch!
As we start 2023, Muslim Advocates is at an inflection point and we are grateful for your continued commitment to the mission that we all share. We look forward to staying connected to you all as we work for a more just and free society for us all.
In Solidarity,
The Muslim Advocates Team
