Across Massachusetts, Muslims are chairing town meetings, treating patients, teaching teenagers, leading prayers and welcoming neighbors to their tables. Here are 10 people, from Worcester to Wakefield and Groton to Dorchester, whose work is making life better for Muslims and non-Muslims alike. It's far from a complete list, which is exactly why we want your nominations.
Tahirah Amatul-Wadud — Executive Director, CAIR-Massachusetts, Springfield
Tahirah Amatul-Wadud has spent years defending Muslims' civil rights. A Springfield-based attorney with more than 16 years of experience in corporate, family and civil rights law, she leads the Massachusetts chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-MA) from its office in Chicopee. She drew national attention in 2016 as principal attorney for residents of Islamberg, N.Y., who had been targeted by a man planning a violent attack, and in 2018 she won 30 percent of the vote in a run for Congress. This summer, CAIR-MA publicly stood with Newton's Muslim community against an anti-Muslim campaign. She describes herself as an African American Muslim woman and is a married mother of seven.
Mehreen Butt — Chair, Wakefield Town Council, Wakefield
In 2017, Wakefield voters made Mehreen Butt the first American Muslim woman elected to a municipal board in Massachusetts. Today she chairs the town's governing body, presiding over the practical work of local government, from affordable housing applications to police and library budgets. A public policy attorney with a background in health care and social justice, Butt has pushed for local bans on plastic bags, plastic straws and styrofoam, championed funding for a community garden and a rail trail, and helped secure a full-time social worker position and funding for Narcan. She is a member of the New England Muslim Bar Association and was named a Top Woman of Law by Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly in 2021.
Maya Jamaleddine — City Councilor and Restaurant Owner, Melrose
When Maya Jamaleddine was sworn in to the Melrose City Council in March 2020, the room gave her a standing ovation. She had become the city's first Muslim elected official and, as Patch reported, the first elected official in Massachusetts to wear a hijab. Last November, voters re-elected her to a fourth term as an at-large councilor. This summer she added a new title: owner of Shawbak Lebanese Kitchen & Bakery, which the Boston Globe called the city's first Lebanese, Middle Eastern or halal restaurant. Her husband and children pitch in. "Food was one of the common things that connected me to a lot of people," she told the Globe.
Dr. Saleem Khanani — Physician and Interfaith Leader, Worcester
Dr. Saleem Khanani is a hematologist and oncologist whose work has included caring for cancer patients at St. Vincent Cancer and Wellness Center in Worcester and at Heywood Healthcare in Gardner. He also chairs the board of trustees of the Islamic Society of Greater Worcester and leads its interfaith relations. That role has taken him to Mount Wachusett Community College, where he helped lead a 2015 forum on Islam that drew more than 130 people, and to the College of the Holy Cross, where he read from the Quran at a 2019 multifaith prayer alongside Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish and Christian participants. It is quiet, steady bridge-building that helps neighbors know one another.
Dr. Altaf Saadi — Neurologist and Health Equity Researcher, Chelsea
An associate professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School, Dr. Altaf Saadi sees patients at Mass General neurology clinics in Chelsea and Waltham and is associate director of the MGH Asylum Clinic, which provides medical and psychological evaluations for asylum seekers and torture survivors. Her lab studies how trauma, detention and other forces affect the brain health of immigrants and refugees, work recognized with the 2023 Bernard Lown Award for Social Responsibility. The daughter of Iraqi and Iranian immigrants, she has written about facing bigotry as a Muslim doctor in a headscarf. Her work, she told Harvard Catalyst, is "about the experiences and voices of communities that are too often relegated to the periphery in academia, healthcare, and other spaces."
Dr. Mohamed Abdullahi — Co-founder, Community Caring Clinic, Roxbury
Dr. Mohamed Abdullahi saw families around him struggling with mental illness, and with the stigma attached to it, and decided to act. Born in Somalia, he moved with his family to Qatar after the civil war and later to the United States, where he earned a Doctor of Pharmacy from the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy. In 2019 he and fellow pharmacist Abdifattah Ahmed opened the Community Caring Clinic, a nonprofit behavioral health clinic serving low-income, immigrant and refugee families, with offices today in Roxbury and Springfield. A former principal of the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center's weekend schools, he also teaches Quran and Arabic. "Our main focus is to cure with spirituality and remove stigma," he told AboutIslam.
Imam Taalib Mahdee — Resident Imam, Masjid Al-Qur'an, Dorchester
Just off Blue Hill Avenue, Masjid Al-Qur'an has served Dorchester since 1957. Founded by Boston's African American Muslim community, it now welcomes worshippers from all over the city. Its resident imam, Taalib Mahdee, embraced Islam in 1978 and has served the masjid since 1992. Under his leadership it has partnered with another mosque on a food pantry and with ICNA Relief to open Amal, a shelter for homeless women, next door. He teaches a class on Islamic fundamentals, and in September he was featured as New England sectional convener in the Beyond IWDM50 podcast series. "I try to encourage people to see this religion for themselves, not through the minds of others," he told the Dorchester Post.
Dr. Celene Ibrahim — Teacher and Scholar, Groton
At Groton School, founded in 1884 by an Episcopal priest, Dr. Celene Ibrahim helps teach ninth graders a yearlong survey of the world's spiritual traditions, from ancient and Indigenous lifeways to living faiths. She joined the religious studies and philosophy faculty in 2019 and, by her own account, is very likely the school's first Muslim-identifying faculty member and certainly its first formal Muslim chaplain. She is the author of the award-winning Women and Gender in the Qur'an (Oxford University Press), a former Muslim chaplain at Tufts University, and the first Harvard Master of Divinity graduate to specialize in Muslim religious leadership. She has written that she "internalized long ago that to be an educator is to be a lifelong learner."
Boyah J. Farah — Writer and School Founder, Massachusetts
Boyah J. Farah arrived in the Boston suburbs as a teenager, after fleeing Somalia's civil war and a refugee camp in Kenya. He turned that journey into America Made Me a Black Man, a 2022 memoir about discovering what race means in his adopted country, and he won Salon's best essay of 2017. He also gives back to the place he left: he founded the Abaadi Center in Garowe, Somalia, which teaches English, math and science to students ages 13 to 24. Farah, who describes himself as "Black, Somali-American, and Muslim," spoke with the Boston Globe during Ramadan this year: "The best time to remember God is when you have pressure like this, when you're afraid for your life."
Fatema Ahmad — Executive Director, Muslim Justice League, Boston
Fatema Ahmad left a job as a biomedical engineer in Wisconsin to find work "more aligned with my values." In January 2020 she became executive director of the Muslim Justice League, a Boston organization founded by four Muslim women to resist rights violations against Muslim Americans in the "War on Terror." Ahmad, who has described herself as "a Muslim who was impacted by" surveillance, now leads the group's fight against it, from "countering violent extremism" programs to license plate cameras. This August she helped organize a march of more than 50 protesters to Flock Safety's Seaport office. "MJL is not just about justice for and only Muslims; it's actually about justice by Muslims, for everyone," she told The Scope.
Who should we feature next?
These 10 are only a small sample. We know there are many more Muslims across the Commonwealth coaching youth teams, running small businesses, volunteering at food pantries and serving on local boards, often with no spotlight at all. (For a longer look at one local leader, see our full profile of Cambridge Vice Mayor Burhan Azeem.)
Know someone whose work deserves recognition? Send us their name, their town and a few lines about why their work matters at masshalaldirectory@gmail.com. We'd love to hear from you.