The Center for Global Muslim Life

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The Center for Global Muslim Life

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The Center for Global Muslim Life (CGML) is a future focused research center and cultural incubator for cutting edge conversations across diverse Muslim communities.

03/05/2025

The month of Illumination is upon us! Pray for us our global family

02/19/2025

It’s always an honor to lift up any call about our beloved martyr Malcolm X Malcolm X’s Legacy: 60th Anniversary of El Hajj Malik Shabazz’s Martyrdom

Join us for a discussion on Malcolm X’s influence on Black liberation, trans-national solidarity, and Black self-determination—a message.

🎤 Featuring panelists from Sapelo Square, The Institute of Qur’an Study and Leadership, ICON, & International Museum of Muslim Culture

📅 Feb 21 | 6 PM EST
📍 Live on MuslimARC YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn & Facebook

Let’s study his life, learn from his organizing strategies, and uplift his family’s quest his for justice.

10/25/2024

Everything has changed over the last year. For those of us who have studied genocide and the endless reality of warfare and death led by the United States for centuries the last year didn’t change much but it sure shows clearly the divisions in our world between people who believe in truth, and people who will do whatever it takes to create a world made up of lies and disinformation. To say it most clearly, the masks have come off and as our teachers have told us the world is dividing into clear camps of spiritual light and spiritual darkness.

As someone who has been Muslim now for 23 years, and who has done the hard grassroots work in the community for decades it became clear to me that we have to support the next generation. Because the reality is our older generations, mine included, have failed in many ways. We have done the hard work of institution building but it’s not enough. Our time calls for focus and vision and so it is with that in mind that we have decided to shift much of our work to focus on how we educate our community in a holistic way from early childhood education starting in preschool to continuing education for adults and parents. We are calling this framework, the School of the Ummah.

The School of the Ummah is a transformative education initiative that builds deep community in response to the crisis of Muslim education in the United States and around the world. Our critical interventions are focused in five primary areas:

Through community workshops what we are calling Future Ummah Builders

In youth leadership development programs

Through Arabic immersion and bilingual education programs

Through culturally relevant and Islamic rooted curriculum development and publishing focused on Islamic schools and parents who homeschool

And finally it is a continuing education platform to connect global educators to global parents and students.

09/24/2024

"Last year, I celebrated the occasion of your blessed birth with my children Yamen, Kinan, Orchida, and Carmel. We slaughtered a sheep in joy and distributed it, and we bought a lot of sweets and gave them out. They were so happy, and I looked at them with pride, waiting for the day when they would grow up, so I could tell them about you.

But they didn’t wait for me to do so. Two months later, they were all called to your embrace and hastened to join you. They are with you now, and that is the greatest consolation in this immense trial of mine. Should I ask them to send you my greetings, or should I ask you to send them my greetings?

Regardless, I will continue to celebrate you with them until the end of time, for I carry you all with me in my small heart forever."

Why this contemporary piece of devotional writing exceeds in its beauty the mystical works of history's most well-known Sufi poets.

06/04/2024

Over the last few months I've been fundraising to finish my book Decolonizing the Heart in an Upside Down World. I have been working on this book off and on for the last ten years. These last nine months of genocide in Gaza have made me deeply reflective in knowing that I need to finish this project now, especially for all the young people in the streets and who are occupying college campuses around the world. The book is written in a way where it is accessible to Muslims, but also general spiritual seekers like myself who are looking for guidance as we deal with both Truth and Power in our world today.

You can support the project on LaunchGood here - https://www.launchgood.com/DecolonizeYourHeart

Check out an excerpt from the opening chapter here - https://www.globalmuslimlife.com/decolonizing-the-heart

And check out the overview of the book below, please share widely.

In a world where so many questions about Islam and Muslims have been at the center of Western society over the last 30 years, this two part series of books flips all of these questions on their head and examines global Western dominance from the perspective of the worldview of Islam. Mustafa Dustin Craun, born and raised in the suburbs of Colorado embraced Islam in 2002 and has spent the last twenty years working and living between Muslim spiritual movements, and grassroots political movements in the US and around the world. This book Decolonizing the Heart in an Upside Down World - Book 1 - Philosophical Foundations on Ways of Being and Knowing, creates a unique connection between Islamic spirituality and the radical decolonial traditions of the Americas and more broadly the global south.

For the mind centered epistemology of the West, white western man has been placed on a god like pedestal as an imagined pinnacle of civilization. For the integrative epistemology of Islam, the heart of a believer is said to rule over all other faculties, the body and the mind, with the heart also being the seat of the soul and the spirit. For decolonization to be possible in these times we have to come to terms with both Truth and Power, as in a world where power is so all-encompassing as part of nearly every aspect of our lives we have to chip away these layers of falsehood to get to the truth and transform our hearts.
In our world today we are dealing with the layers of colonialism, the coloniality of power in the remnants of these colonial systems, the reality of neocolonial rulers around the Muslim world, and this late stage of technocratic capitalism where algorithms drive our every desire. As we understand Islamic spirituality here we then have to understand not just what has happened externally but also internally as Islamic education has been transformed and our very saving grace, our spiritual practice at the center of Islam, Sufism, has been marginalized to such an extent that Muslims around the world do not have easy access to these traditions of purification of the heart

05/30/2024

05/15/2024

Theres so much happening all over Turtle Island as students call for their universities to divest from apartheid and genocide. This is the story of how the San Diego Sheriff’s treated student protesters by pulling out a loaded gun in the midst of their protest. Imam Taha Hassane the Director of the Islamic Center of San Diego and advisor to the UCSD MSA responded as clergy have historically responded at protests in calling police to a higher conscience and telling them to put away the gun for this he was pepper sprayed in the face. This protest was in response to SDPD, Border Patrol, and the SD Sheriff dismantling the student encampment earlier in the day.

04/02/2024

Salaam friends thank you for all your support with the launch of our founder book Decolonizing the Heart! If you want to support the project you can give a gift on our LaunchGood of $100 where you will receive the book next Ramadan inshallah and the Decolonize Your Heart hoodie as soon as we print them in the next few weeks. We are also looking for Muslim owned hoodie printers to work with on this campaign. Please comment below if you have any suggestions. Link for the campaign is in the bio! LaunchGood.com/DecolonizeYourHeart

03/25/2024

Final Call for the Seattle Iftar tomorrow night at Seattle City Hall. Tickets are almost sold out. Tickets are at the link in our bio. We invite Muslim leaders, leaders from across the city of Seattle, our social movement friends, and our friends in philanthropy to join us at our Iftar dinner.

This event will also mark the launch of the Center for Global Muslim Life’s Seattle Muslim Impact Project which will take place over the next year. This project looks to research and map Muslim social and spiritual impact starting in Seattle and spreading more broadly throughout the Cascadia corridor reaching from Portland to Vancouver. This work will include a set of research looking at the demographics in the region, public workshops, and public art projects looking at the state of Muslim impact and issues of belongingness in the region. We will recognize a group of these impact leaders from the Muslim community during our iftar program.

The dinner will be catered by the Neighborly Needs project of Wasat which provides free meals to community members as a form of mutual aid, while also working to build the economic power of Muslim-led businesses. Launching during COVID in 2020 Neighborly has served more than 75,000 meals and will serve over 5,000 meals throughout Seattle this Ramadan.

03/23/2024

Beautiful

📢 *UPDATE*

This Ramadan, we’ve been giving the gift of the Qur’an to those donating as part of our Qur’an 100 campaign – and masha Allah, what an incredible response we’ve had. 🤲

If you’ve donated, thank you for your generosity – we’re packing yours right now! 💖 And if you haven’t, what are you waiting for? Get yours in Ramadan, the month of the Qur’an, before they’re gone for good! ⏳

ℹ️ Visit https://cambridgecentralmosque.org/quran100 for more information.

Address

Oakland, CA

Website

https://www.globalmuslimlife.com/

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Connecting the Diaspora of Hearts

The Center for Global Muslim Life (CGML) is a future focused research center and cultural incubator creating cutting edge conversations across diverse Muslim communities. The Center for Global Muslim Life builds connections between a diverse set of researchers, cultural strategists, artists, technologists, community organizers, and policy makers from throughout the United States and from around the world working on key issues in global Muslim communities. The CGML is focused on the unique set of issues facing the worlds largest and most diverse religious community on this planet while asking key questions about the role Muslims are playing in creating global social impact, diverse narratives, and unique contributions to the fabric of our rapidly changing world.

In 2018 Dustin Craun was living in Kuala Lumpur, and started reflecting with a group of interlocutors on how little we actually know about the diversity of Muslim life around the world. We know about our crises, the wars, and Islamophobia but what do we know about the leaders in our community building the collective future of the world’s largest and most diverse faith? What do we know about Muslims making a social and spiritual impact around our world? What do we know about diverse narratives about Muslims being produced around the world? The diverse startups growing around the world to serve Muslim communities?

We asked the question, what would it look like to create a center that is future oriented and that creates space for cultural producers? What would it look like to create something visionary and move away from the constant reactionary thinking that our community has been stuck in for the last twenty years?

Today global Muslim communities are known primarily through the singular narrative produced through media and cultural production, of terrorism, war, Islamophobia, and the global refugee crisis with media and academic institutions focusing on Arab Muslims who make up only 15-20% of global Muslim populations. Nearly 70% of the worlds Muslims live in Asia and Africa yet in terms of popular representation the uniquely diverse Muslim populations across the world have very little representation. Muslims are unique as a multi- civilizational community with large diasporas of peoples all around the world. With large populations in Southeast Asia, South Asia, throughout north, east, and west Africa, with large populations across the middle east and eastern Europe, and with large minority populations in Europe, the Americas, and East Asia.

Over the next 50 years, our world will see unprecedented change with more than 70% of humanity is expected to live in urban areas, as global power will continue to shift to Asia. Technology will play an ever increasing role in our daily lives and climate change will impact our world in ways that we cannot fully predict. The landscape of religious communities will also change rapidly over the coming half-century as global Muslim populations will grow from an expected population of 2 billion in 2020 to over 3 billion people by 2070, making Islam the largest religion in the world for the first time. Muslims have created unique global networks that despite great differences across communities, have historically shown strong solidarities most explicitly represented in the life and legacy of Malcolm X’s global vision of Islam, what Sohail Daulatzai calls the “Muslim International.” This international collective of global Muslim life is a call to global solidarity amongst Muslims and with peoples throughout the world who face similar forms of oppression. As Daulatzai clearly states,

“Malcolm forced and compelled the Muslim International to be a broad and inclusive space that understands the overlapping histories and interconnected struggles that not only shaped the modern world but that also shaped the conscience of the Muslim International as a site for radical justice and equality.”

Today Muslim communities face oppression and are building resistance both within Muslim majority countries, as well as throughout the US, Europe, and Australia. This reality of overlapping countries where Muslims make up large minority diasporic populations and global spaces of social impact, political, and artistic resistance is an emerging reality, that has been grossly understudied within the Muslim community or academic studies at large. Islamic studies departments in Western academia have never fully distanced themselves from their colonial roots within area studies and have primarily focused on lands that US and European military power were interested in.

As we launch in 2020 we are focused on a unique set of research on emergency response research to the global COVID-19 crisis, research focused on Muslim wellness, the 2020 election in the United States, emerging narrative infrastructure within Muslim communities.

The Center for Global Muslim Life is tasked with conducting key research on these issues as well as create convening's for academics, community leaders and the media. We must take our narratives into our own hands to more fully understand these issues beyond the current scope of Muslims seen only in the light of terrorism and Islamophobia. Below is an outline of the core issues we will focus on in the coming years as we build out the Center for Global Muslim Life.