When Fatima Salaam was fifty, she was standing on a beach in Playa del Carmen and thinking about what she wanted next. The thought she came back with — I want to do something that makes a difference in other people’s lives, and I want my voice to be heard, valued, and appreciated — eventually became the work she does now as Director of Strategic Growth at Rabata, the Muslim women-led nonprofit founded by Dr. Tamara Gray.
On May 20, AMCF welcomed Fatima for the next chapter of our ongoing partnership with Rabata: a workshop called Redefining Leadership: Women, Belonging, and Justice, hosted by AMCF Director of Community Programs Lisa Kahler and accompanied by ASL interpretation through the Minnesota Deaf Muslim Community (a 2025 Women’s Giving Circle grantee).
What followed was less a lecture and more a guided exercise — Fatima invited every participant to interrogate their own assumptions about what leadership means, where it comes from, and what it costs when its foundations are wrong.
The starting question
Fatima opened with a deceptively simple prompt: write your own definition of leadership in the chat. Don’t make it academic. Just say what you know.
The answers came in quickly — modeling, encouraging, empowering others to achieve great things together. Recognizing the talents of a team and bringing out their best. Helping others see a vision and inviting buy-in. Justice. Each one true, none of them complete.
The workshop set out to do three things: examine the dominant definitions of leadership most of us have inherited, build a shared understanding of what belonging and justice actually mean, and leave each participant with a personal leadership statement they could carry forward.
Belonging is not compliance. Justice is not a feeling.
Fatima drew a careful line between two ideas that often get blurred. Belonging is the experience of being held in your full humanity — seen, heard, valued, and accountable for your own well-being. It is not earned through performance or productivity. It is extended to every member of a community by virtue of shared humanity. Not about race, gender, ethnicity, class, or religiosity. About being human, and being treated as one.
Justice, drawing from the Arabic word ‘adl — one of the most frequently commanded virtues in the Qur’an and an attribute of Allah Himself — is the system that makes belonging possible. It is the rule, the structure, the policy, the practice. Justice is not what a leader feels. It is what every person, every situation, and every relationship is given in measure.
Compliance, by contrast, is simply following rules. Fatima offered the example of a middle school that banned outside lunches without ensuring the cafeteria menu was inclusive of Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, vegetarian, and other students. Every child became compliant. Many were excluded. Compliance was achieved. Belonging was not.
The same trap shows up in workplaces, schools, and faith communities. Performative belonging — affirmative-action hiring goals treated as quotas, diverse student recruitment without retention support, “we welcome everybody” mission statements paired with decision-making rooms where everyone looks alike — fills the air with the language of inclusion while quietly suffocating the experience of it.
Three reframed definitions of leadership
The heart of Fatima’s workshop was the introduction of three reframed definitions of leadership, each drawn from a different thinker, each opening a different door:
Leadership as Emergence — drawn from Adrienne Maree Brown’s Emergent Strategy (2017). Leadership is not a position you hold; it is a practice of noticing what wants to emerge and creating the conditions for it to grow. The leader does not push people toward a predetermined outcome. She tends to relationships, holds the vision, and trusts that when people are genuinely connected to one another and to shared purpose, the right things will happen. Belonging is the soil, not the goal. Justice is not the destination; it is how you get there.
Leadership as Liberation — drawn from Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and bell hooks’s Teaching to Transgress. Leadership is the practice of creating conditions where every person can fully show up, fully contribute, and fully become. It is not about managing people toward outcomes. It is about dismantling the structures, assumptions, and systems that prevent people from accessing their own power. Old leadership asks, “How do I get more for my people?” Liberation leadership asks, “What is in the way of my people being everything they already are?”
Leadership as Covenant — drawn from Max De Pree’s Leadership Is an Art (1987), which itself invokes the Islamic principle of amanah, or sacred trust. Leadership is a sacred covenant between a leader and the people entrusted to their care. It is not a transaction. It is a relationship built on mutual accountability, deep respect, and shared responsibility for the community’s well-being. A covenantal leader understands that their authority is borrowed, not owned. They hold it in trust on behalf of the people they serve and the values they have committed to uphold.
Each one is true. Each one is incomplete on its own. Each one challenges the next.
A framework already given
Fatima closed by returning to a source she’d kept implicit through most of the workshop and made explicit at the end: the Last Sermon of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ, delivered fourteen hundred years ago. She read its passages on the rights of women, the equality of human beings across race and ethnicity, and the responsibility every believer carries to convey what they have learned to those who come after.
“Belonging and justice are centered there,” she said. “And there’s a history of why he had to talk about women and why he had to talk about race — because by that time, sexism and racism and patriarchy were alive and well in the society. Fourteen hundred years later, we’re still dealing with that.”
The framework, in other words, was already given. The work is in the implementation.
What to do next
Fatima left attendees with one action item: write your personal leadership statement. She invited anyone who wanted feedback to email her directly. For further reading, she recommended Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire, Teaching to Transgress by bell hooks, The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership by John Maxwell, and Build by Tony Fadell.
For our community, the next chapter is yours to write. If this kind of programming — practical, accessible, grounded in our tradition, and built around the Muslim women shaping it — resonates with you, the AMCF Women’s Giving Circle is where this work lives. Learn more and join here.
You can also explore Rabata’s work and revisit our earlier conversation with Dr. Tamara Gray on Rabata’s ten-year journey of Muslim women-led nonprofit building.
With special thanks to Fatima Salaam, to Rabata, to David Evans for ASL interpretation, and to the Minnesota Deaf Muslim Community for partnering on accessibility.