Our Team
During Ramadan of 2018, Reconstructed was born out of a conversation at the Muslim Justice League iftar in Boston, MA. Sarah, Anissa, and Fatema shared their feelings about their very different relationships with Islam, their own unique creative practices, and how those intersect to nourish them in their respective spiritual journeys.Anissa Abdel-Jelil
founder, editor
is passionate about equity in the archives and open access to information. The Chinguetti libraries in her home country Mauritania are her favorite manuscript libraries. She comes from a Sunni Muslim family and feels the divine most present in community, storytelling, and the Sahara desert. In her free time she enjoys carving out spaces to meet people’s spiritual needs in the reproductive justice movement. Anissa is primarily a visual artist whose work focuses on different conceptualizations of roots (heritage + botanical art).
Mirfat Abraham
editor
is a Somali, Sunni Muslim based in Birmingham, England. She first remembers connecting with the most divine at the age of six, when she made dua asking for rain and it started to rain shortly after. She is a devoted daydreamer who enjoys conjuring up wondrous scenarios about the future. She has led and facilitated workshops on issues such as accessibility in audience, spirituality, blackfishing/voicefishing, violence against womxn of color online and the erasure of black people by non-black people in the Muslim community. She was also one of the Producers responsible for organizing the 2019 Festival of Audacity, a multidisciplinary festival of activist art. In her free time, she volunteers for Let’s Feed Brum (a soup kitchen). She enjoys journaling, swimming ,and assembling furniture, and she is currently on a lifelong quest to learn how to keep a plant alive.
Sarah Hakani
founder, editor
is a South-Asian, Shia Ismaili Muslim from Atlanta. She has a background in Neuroscience, which she applies to better understanding her esotericism. She works through her relationships with the divine through ethnographic, literary, and artistic research coupled with mixed-media creation. After graduating with her Masters in Education, Technology and Innovation from Harvard, Sarah works as an educator and technologist, learning how creation can serve as a tool for learning and innovation for marginalized learners. Although Sarah is primarily a visual artist, she loves to DJ, experiment with textiles, and tinker with all things creative.
Lameesa Mallic
designer
is a Pakistani multidisciplinary designer based in Brooklyn, born in Queens, and raised in Saudi Arabia. Her stories are constantly being told and retold around issues of personal identity, the body, sociality and agency. She aims to undo this through her creative practices over manifestations of her narrative as a Sunni Muslim exposed to a rhetoric of cross-culturalism. After graduating with a BFA in Graphic Design, Lameesa has been in the process of furthering her education in Integrated Digital Media, while working as an in-house and freelance designer. Although most of her practices involve media/technology, she makes time for traditional crafts and visual poetry as a means of reconnecting to the roots of this earth.
Najma Sharif
guest editor
is a Somali-American writer and creative director based in Brooklyn. She hails from Minnesota, the Somali capital of the United States. Najma Sharif is dedicated to telling stories that amplify the most marginalized people and she’s interested in creating challenging work that complicates how we think about and navigate the world. Her writing and public speaking centers Black Muslims from the diaspora, technology, fashion and Black womanhood. She has moderated and spoken on panels focusing on issues from the Muslim Ban, to representation in the literary world. She’s been featured and quoted in i-D, Nylon, Tidal, The Los Angeles Times, Yahoo, BET and the Fashion Journal. Her writing has appeared in Paper Magazine, Nylon, Vice, Lenny Letter, Bitch Media, OkayPlayer, Playboy, Teen Vogue and Vibe among others.
Fatema Elbakoury
founder
is a student at Harvard Divinity School researching the Nubian diaspora in contemporary Egypt. While an undergraduate at San Jose State, she studied English with a concentration in creative writing and religious studies. Her work has appeared in Reed Magazine, The Dudley Review, and Periphery. As an Egyptian immigrant, she is a product of an African Diaspora that she reckons with through her characters and her essays. As a Sunni Muslim of African descent, she is particularly affected by and involved in the crucial intersection that Black Muslims inhabit. In her free time, she enjoys braiding, talking to family, tea and/or coffee, plants, and discovering new shops on Etsy.