Meet Muslim Sisterhood, The Art Collective Creating Spaces Of Radical Joy

This year’s International Women’s Day (8 March) follows a full year of worldwide lockdowns in response to Covid-19. For Muslims living in impacted areas, it will be a second Ramadan under tight restrictions. The religious obligations for group prayer, and the communal breaking of the fast in mosques and other spaces of communion, have been forgone to halt transmissions, honouring the religious obligation towards the preservation of life.

For photographers and artists Lamisa Khan, Zeinab Saleh and Sara Gulamali — founders of the art collective Muslim Sisterhood — the cultivation and representation of friendship, both offline and online, was a vocation preceding the pandemic. It’s an effort that has borne fruit in these times. Beginning as a photography project on Instagram, the highly stylised photoshoots became a vehicle to bring women and non-binary Muslims together, as Vancouver-based Gulamali recalls via Zoom. “We started connecting and meeting people with our Instagram acting as an archive of everyone we had met. We were really building [a community], unintentionally. They’d come as strangers and then leave as best friends. So we naturally formed all these relationships.”

“Everything was very DIY”, continues Saleh, who alongside Khan, lives in London. “It was a labour of love. For example, my auntie Faye worked as the on-set make-up artist and it was fun sharing a space with her. Shireen Kadhim, who'd been following us for a while, asked if we needed another makeup artist. The energy on set was wonderful.”

Celebrating beauty and authenticity

Using a mainly female team, photoshoots were designed to meet the needs of the fellow Muslim models, not only providing prayer spaces and halal food, but art direction and styling that reflected the concerns of the people being photographed. “The girls we work with aren’t necessarily models, they’re just people who trust us to celebrate them in a beautiful and authentic way that doesn’t compromise their values,” explains Khan. “It brings a sense of shared understanding when we work.”

The result was a number of arresting, sophisiticated portraits of young women and non-binary people that are striking if only for the sheer variety — young Muslims posed with eyes closed or staring down the camera lens, but always in dialogue with the viewer. They were invited to exhibit at London’s prestigious V&A Museum’s Friday Lates, a monthly evening programme for contemporary art and culture, and later worked with brands such as Glossier, Nike and Converse. The trio have succeeded in creating a new and authentic language in British visual culture that is historically more comfortable with images of Muslim women as news items rather than as the authors and subjects of visual art.

Muslim Sisterhood activities have since expanded to include workshops such as incense making, which has provided room for friendships to form but also for personal enlightenment to develop, too. “In my house, we’re always burning oud [agarwood incense], but I’ve never really learned where it’s from,” says Saleh. “[Jewellery designer] Noura Alserkal taught us how to make bakhoor, which is an incense that combines several components, such as amber, oils and musk powder. We learnt how agarwood is formed in nature — it’s a resin that is created from inside a tree. Everything that I’ve done through Muslim Sisterhood has been transformational and from a space of growth and love.”

Khan emphasises that the ethos of the collective has been driven by her fellow founder. “Alhamdulillah (‘praise be to God’), Zeinab has always really pushed this within Muslim Sisterhood — to not focus on the negative. We need spaces where we can have difficult conversations, but more importantly for our community, we need spaces where we are celebrating our identity and carving spaces of joy.”

Understanding the term ‘sisterhood’

This ethic of acknowledgement and mutual respect is beautifully demonstrated throughout the Muslim Sisterhood zine and, in particular, by the article on anti-Black racism by Fatima Dinee, which addresses the painful experiences of anti-Black racism within the Muslim community and the erasure of Black histories in Islam. The piece — and by extension, Muslim Sisterhood themselves, whether through their Instagram or via their zine and brand work — approaches friendship from a position of real understanding and a re-evaluation of what is needed and demanded for terms such as ‘friendship’ and ‘sisterhood’ to be made real.

They are also providing a valuable and safe space for discussion around issues affecting young Muslims. Muslim women’s participation in mosques is still a contentious issue in some Muslim communities, with many women feeling locked out. Gulamali provides a more nuanced understanding of the challenges faced: “Our mosques aren’t always open to talking about [issues such as] addiction, mental health, real-life problems that people in the community go through that are considered taboo. I know that's something that local mosques are working on, but until then, we are able to create [spaces] outside of that context, which uphold the values that are important to us, like a female space […] a non-judgmental space. I'd like to think that we have found a happy medium that works for us.”

Muslim Sisterhood’s creative ventures continue to expand as the three co-founders find new and innovative ways to connect with their audience. Following the successful visual essay collaboration with fashion brand Daily Paper for Ramadan 2020, this year the women plan on teaming up with a family-run factory in Pakistan to produce merchandise that will be available through their online store.

“2020 and 2021 have proved that celebrating joy is an act, a form of activism,” says Khan, “especially in a society that is trying to drag you down. We've nurtured the idea of creating a space for radical joy and celebration of our community, and I think that's a huge reason why we’ve been successful, Masha’Allah (what God wanted).

This article was originally published on Vogue.com.

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