Two women, frustrated by the repetitive and cliche-ridden coverage of Ramzan year after year, have created an innovative concept called ‘Muslim History Month.’ Their initiative aims to move beyond the standard media portrayals of the holy month to showcase the rich diversity and depth of Muslim heritage, contributions, and cultural significance.
Hosted on the website of a non-profit initiative called Zariya, the project celebrates people who have made a mark in history and little known personalities whose stories made a difference. Zariya brings to the fore issues of two of the most marginalised communities – Dalits and Muslims.
Founders Mariya Salim and Ashwini KP are both achievers in their own fields of work and had experienced various kinds of discrimination on account of their religion, caste and gender. While Mariya is an expert on sexual and gender-based violence, Ashwini, Special Rapporteur with the United Nations, works on racism and related intolerance, and is the first Indian or Dalit woman to hold that position. It was their time together at Amnesty International that brought them close. The caste discrimination that Ashwini faced and the Islamophobia that Mariya went through – an experience she has written about before – made them trust each other at a most difficult period in their lives.
Zariya was launched in 2020. They launched the first edition of Muslim History Month a year later, with writers from different countries and varied communities putting together stories of caste, culture, and cuisine in Islam. The second edition happened during the Ramzan of 2025, when the focus rested on the histories of Muslim women from across the globe.
“In the years in between we were struck by the effects of COVID-19,” Mariya said, explaining the gap.
When the campaign was relaunched this year, Mariya looked back at her own experience as a Muslim woman, who has been writing about community issues for a long time but continued to face discrimination on account of her gender. “Even on a subject like Triple Talaq [affecting Muslim women], a male writer with a Hindu name was chosen over me, a Muslim woman. Ashwini too has faced caste based discrimination on several occasions. The idea of launching Zariya came from the need to write our own stories. We should take back the microphone [that was taken away from us] because we are capable of speaking to the world through our voices. It was getting a bit too much, to hear words like ‘voice of the voiceless’. We are not voiceless, the microphone was taken from us,” says Mariya.
Seventeen stories of remarkable Muslim women who are no longer alive are now part of the second edition of Muslim History Month. Mariya and Ashwini did not limit the authorship to Muslims or women, but invited writeups from around the globe, and played the role of curators. Coincidentally, many of the stories came from Muslim women, but there were also unlikely and yet deeply committed contributors. “Makarios Lahzy for one, a Coptic Christian from Egypt – he goes in depth and gets a poet’s perspective on Egyptian women. He did days of research to write this piece for no money,” Mariya says.
Read: Celebrating Egyptian Women Through The Eyes of Poet Abdel Rahman El-Abnudi
"In both the East and the West, there are successful men and women from various races, genders, and religions. Indeed, success or brilliance is one of the most important tools for asserting the cultural presence of a particular group. But my main goal was to highlight the human beauty that cultural difference reveals. We deserve life—not necessarily because we are successful or dominant—but simply because we are children of life,” Makarios tells us his reasons for choosing to write about a character in a poem.
He says, “Fatma, in El-Abnoudy’s poem, is a woman with no education, no wealth, and no exceptional talents. Yet she is flesh and blood—deeply real, utterly unique, and profoundly human. This is the side of the Egyptian woman that I wanted to share. And the message carried by the article is the beauty of difference and the embrace of diversity."
Mariya and Ashwini did not insist that only members of the community write the stories, because they were both there as the first editors, to make sure they tell the stories the way they hoped. Even with her years of working with and writing about Muslim women, she was surprised to hear about one who became a chaplain (Dr Lila Fahlman), another who got the title of a nawab (Faizunnesa Choudhurani). “It was wonderful to hear that the researcher [Noorjahan Kannanjeri] who wrote about the first Muslim journalist and newspaper editor Haleema Beevi has written a book about her,” says Mariya.
Noorjahan says that Haleema was little celebrated and that history was unjust to her. “The double marginalisation she faced from the mainstream world and the literary sphere is quite evident. Personally I am impressed by her interpretation of Muslim women according to the Quran and Hadith. I feel she is the forerunner of islamic feminism,” says Noorjahan.
Mariya asserts that the average Muslim woman who did her own share of work too needs to be celebrated. Rupkatha Bhowmick, a business journalist in West Asia, reached out to Zariya to write about Naseem Alauddin, a woman known for her shami kabab recipes, loved to teach little children and pass on values of love and generosity. It is one of the most heartening stories on Zariya.
Read: Naseem Alauddin : Of Shami kabab recipes and stories left behind
Writings came from Serbia and Sweden, Indonesia and Palestine, cities and villages of India, and just about anywhere they found inspiring, warm stories of Muslim women. Mariya and Ashwini were very clear about keeping it international, and that it had to be stories of people who were no longer alive. There were too many living heroes.
