MFAS Network

Our network includes the following members of the Rutgers community:

Atiya Aftab: Atiya Aftab, Esq. currently maintains her own practice providing representation to non-profit corporations. Atiya is also an Adjunct Professor at Rutgers University, Department of Political Science and Middle Eastern Studies Program and teaches “Islamic Law and Jurisprudence”. She is also the Chair of the Center for Islamic Life at Rutgers University, convener of the first full-time Muslim Chaplaincy on campus. She is a member of the Rutgers University Board of Overseers that governs the Rutgers University Foundation.

Atiya is the co-founder and chair emeritus of the Sisterhood of Salaam Shalom, an international women’s interfaith organization.

Sahar Aziz: Sahar Aziz is distinguished professor of law, Middle East Legal Studies Scholar, and Chancellor’s Social justice Scholar at Rutgers University Law School. Professor Aziz’s scholarship examines the intersection of national security, race, religion, and civil rights with a focus on the adverse impact of national security laws and policies on racial, religious, and ethnic minorities. She is the author of the book The Racial Muslim: When Racism Quashes Religious Freedom and the founding director of the Center for Security, Race and Rights.

Chaplain Kaiser Aslam: Kaiser Aslam is Rutgers University’s first fulltime on campus Muslim chaplain. Kaiser has studied various classical Islamic sciences in his studies within the United States and abroad and holds a Master’s degree in Islamic Studies & Muslim-Christian Relations from Hartford Seminary. In addition to his work at universities, Kaiser has served as the Muslim Chaplain at Hartford Hospital and as a youth director at various Islamic centers, most recently at the Farmington Valley American Muslim Center.

Dr. Sylvia Chan-Malik: Dr. Sylvia Chan-Malik is a scholar of race and ethnic studies, American studies, women’s and gender studies, and religious studies. Her research focuses on the junctures of race, gender, and religion in struggles for justice in the U.S., with a focus on the history of Islam in America, Black American Islam, and Black-Asian intersections. She is a core faculty member in the Departments of American Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and affiliate graduate faculty for the Department of Religion at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. She is the author of Being Muslim: A Cultural History of Women of Color and American Islam (NYU Press, 2018), and is currently working on two book projects: (1) A Part of Islam: A Journey through Muslim America, which offers an essential history of Islam and Muslims the U.S. for a general audience, and (2) The Soul of Liberation: Race, Religion, and Struggles for Freedom in America, which examines the role of the soul and spirit in 20th-21st-century U.S.-based racial liberation movements.

Ousseina D. Alidou: Ousseina D. Alidou is Distinguished Professor of Theoretical Linguistics, Gender and Cultural Studies in the Department of African, Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Literatures and Comparative Literature at Rutgers University. She directed the Center for African Studies at Rutgers University from 2009 to 2015. She is the author of Muslim Women in Postcolonial Kenya: Leadership, Representation, Political and Social Change and Engaging Modernity: Muslim Women and the Politics of Agency in Postcolonial Niger, which was a runner-up for the Aidoo-Schneider Book Prize of Women’s Caucus of the Association of African Studies. She has co-edited numerous books including Writing through the Visual and Virtual in Francophone Africa and the Caribbean, Post-Conflict Reconstruction in Africa with Ahmed and A Thousand Flowers: Social Struggles Against Structural Adjustment in African Universities. In addition, she has published book chapters and articles which appear in Research in African Literatures, Sprache und Geschichte in Afrika (SUGIA), Comparative Literature, Africa Today, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, and Africa Today.

Maya Mikdashi: is an Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and a Lecturer in the Program for Middle East Studies at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. She is the Director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Rutgers University. She received her PhD in Anthropology from Columbia University, and also holds an MA from Georgetown University and a BA from the Lebanese American University in Beirut.

Maya is the author of Sextarianism: Sovereignty, Secularism and the State in Lebanon (Stanford University Press, 2022), which was awarded Honorable Mention by the Michelle Rosaldo Biannual Book Prize at the Association for Feminist Anthropology, and won the Gregory Bateson Book Award from the Society for Cultural Anthropology, the Fatima Mernissi book award at the Middle East Studies Association, the Association for Middle East Women’s Studies Book Award, and the LGBTQ Caucus Book Award at the International Studies Association. Her scholarship has been translated into Arabic, Turkish, Farsi, Spanish, Korean, French and German. She is on the editorial boards of Social Text and the Journal of Palestine Studies.