Cultivate a more meaningful life by reflecting the lights of righteous women with our distinguished lineup of workshop speakers: Shaykha lesha Prime, Ustadha Hosai Mojaddidi, Ustadha Maryam Amir, Ustadha Shamira Ahmad, & Ustadha Dr. Rania Awaad.

This is a follow-up to our women’s retreat last November and the second retreat in March.

Saturday, May 20 | 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. PST | MCC Prayer Hall | Women only | $35.00/in-person (includes mid-afternoon lunch) or $15.00/person (watch live online) | Register here https://mcceastbay.org/reflect

There will be a parallel program for teenage girls. See the schedule below. Ustadha Prime will also speak to teen girls from 7 p.m. to 8 p.m. on Friday, May 19: https://mcceastbay.org/event/shaykha-ieasha-halaqa

No children under 12. No babysitting is provided. Lunch is provided by Falafel Flame in Dublin, which is HFSAA-certified. 

Girls aged 12+ are welcome to register to attend the retreat. No babysitting is provided. The program will begin promptly at 11 a.m. Please arrive at MCC by 10:45 a.m. for check-in. Please park in the MCC and HP parking lots: https://mcceastbay.org/hp

Event	Time	All  Speakers	Speaker 1 & Talk	Speaker 2 & Talk	Topic/Theme
Intro & Qur’an/Dhikr Circle	9:30 a.m. – 11 a.m.		Ustadha Hosai Mojaddidi Conference Room		Qur’an & Dhikr
Joint Session 1	11 a.m. – 12 p.m.		Hafidha Suzane Derani Ustadha Shamira Ahmed Conference Room	Sahar Javed (children’s storytime) Prayer Hall	Quran Recitation (15 min) + Intro Session
Joint Session 2	12 p.m. – 12:45 p.m.		Ustadha Hosai Mojaddidi Conference Room		Reflecting Righteousness
Breakout Session 1	12:45 p.m. – 1:30 p.m.		Ustadha Iesha Prime (women) Conference Room	Hafidha Suzane Derani (teens) Banquet Hall	Reflecting the Light of Devotion (women) Reflecting the Light of the Quran (teens)
Lunch & Dhuhr	1:30 p.m. – 2:30 p.m.
Breakout Session 2	2:30 p.m. – 3:30 p.m.		Ustadha Maryam Amir (women) Conference Room	Ustadha Ieasha Prime (teens)  Banquet Hall	Reflecting Resilence (women) Reflecting Resilience (teens)
Joint Session 3	3:30 p.m. – 4:15 p.m.		Ustadha Dr. Rania Awaad women & teens Conference Room		Reflecting Radiance
Closing	4:15. p.m. – 6 p.m.	All speakers panel	Conference Room

In-person registration is positively capped at 450 women and closes at 7 p.m. on Friday, May 19. The online option is only offered after that.

Mid-afternoon lunch is provided by Mirchi Cafe Dublin or Falafel Flame Dublin (HFSAA certified).

The event will not be publicly live-streamed. Public release of the recordings will be at the discretion of each speaker. There is no guarantee that recordings will be released on the media channels for The Rahmah Foundation, or MCC East Bay. Please try to attend the program in person or register to watch live online. The event is taking place in Pacific Standard Time.

For all attendees (in-person and online-only viewers), the private live event link will be emailed one hour before the program begins (10 a.m. PST on Saturday). In-person and online attendees will access the unlisted Livestream recording both during the live stream and indefinitely after the event.

MCC has a standing policy that financial need should never prevent a person from attaining spiritual knowledge. For a financial-based scholarship discount code, please email scholarship@mcceastbay.org.

Sponsored by The Rahmah Foundation & MCC East Bay.

• – More talks in partnership with The Rahmah Foundation: https://mcceastbay.org/rahmah-foundation
• – More Dr. Rania: https://mcceastbay.org/rania
• – More Ustadha Maryam: https://mcceastbay.org/maryam
• – More Ustadha lesha Prime: https://mcceastbay.org/prime
• – More Ustadha Hosai: https://mcceastbay.org/hosai
• – More sessions for Muslimahs: https://mcceastbay.org/women

Questions? events@mcceastbay.org

About our speakers:

Ieasha Prime is the Director of Women’s Programming at Dar al-Hijrah Islamic Center in Virginia and the founder of DC Muslim Women’s Conference. She converted to Islam more than 20 years ago after being a Youth Ambassador to Morrocco and Senegal. There she developed a thirst for knowledge that would cause her to sit at the feet and learn from some of the top Islamic Scholars of our time. After participating in several circles of knowledge in the US, Ieasha pursued religious studies abroad. She studied Arabic and Quran at the Fajr Institute in Cairo, Egypt. Later, she moved to Hadramaut, Yemen, and enrolled in Dar al Zahra, an Islamic University for Women. There she studied Aqeedah, Quran, Hadith, Arabic, Jurisprudence (Fiqh), Islamic law, Purification of the Heart, and other religious-related learning. She has received several scholarly licenses (ijaza). The work that she is most committed to and enjoys has been the development of Islamic programming, Islamic Studies curriculum, and Rites of Passage programs for youth and adults. The majority of her life has been spent as an educator and activist. She is most passionate about combining Islamic studies, cultural art, activism, and service to train leaders to rise above whatever challenges stand in their way and that of the community they serve. In addition to her full-time work, she is the co-founder and Executive Director of Barakah INC, an organization committed to training Muslim women in traditional Islamic sciences with a focus on modern application. Sister Ieasha is recently known for participating in the National Women’s March and the courses she teaches on traditional knowledge, the challenges of race and gender in the Muslim community, and Spirituality. Ieasha Prime is a proud wife and mother of three children.

Ustadha Dr. Rania Awaad, M.D., is a Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the Stanford University School of Medicine. She is the Director of the Muslim Mental Health Lab and Wellness Program and the Director of the Diversity Clinic. She pursued her psychiatric residency training at Stanford and completed a postdoctoral clinical research fellowship with the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). Her research and clinical work are focused on the mental health needs of Muslims. Her courses at Stanford range from teaching a pioneering study on Islamic Psychology, instructing medical students and residents on implicit bias, and integrating culture and religion into medical care to teaching undergraduate and graduate students the psychology of xenophobia. Her most recent academic publications include an edited volume on “Islamophobia and Psychiatry” (Springer, 2019), Islamic Psychology (Routledge, 2020), and an upcoming text on Muslim Mental Health. She has also produced a toolkit, fact sheet, and CME course and is now editing a clinical textbook on Muslim mental health for the American Psychiatric Association. Dr. Awaad is particularly passionate about uncovering the historical roots of mental health care in the Islamic intellectual heritage. Through her outreach work at Stanford, she is also the Clinical Director of the San Francisco Bay Area branches of the Khalil Center, a spiritual wellness center pioneering the application of traditional Islamic spiritual healing methods to modern clinical psychology. She has been the recipient of several awards and grants for her work. Before studying medicine, she pursued classical Islamic studies in Damascus, Syria, and holds certifications (ijaza) in the Qur’an, Islamic Law, and other branches of the Islamic Sciences. Dr. Awaad has also served as the first female Professor of Islamic Law at Zaytuna College, a Muslim Liberal Arts College in Berkeley, CA, where she taught courses on Shafi’i Fiqh and Women’s Fiqh and Qur’anic sciences for nearly a decade. In addition, she serves as the Director of The Rahmah Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to educating Muslim women and girls. At Rahmah, she oversees the Murbiyyah spiritual mentoring program for girls. Dr. Awaad is a nationally recognized speaker, award-winning teacher, researcher, and author in the Islamic and medical sciences. Follow her on I/T: Dr.RaniaAwaad

Ustadha Maryam Amir received her master’s degree in Education from UCLA.  She holds a second bachelor’s degree in Islamic Studies from Al-Azhar University.  Maryam has studied in Egypt, memorized the Quran, and researched a variety of religious sciences, ranging from Quranic exegesis, Islamic jurisprudence, Prophetic narrations and commentary, women’s rights within Islamic law, and more for the past 15 years.  She’s featured in a video series on faith produced by goodcast.net called The Maryam Amir Show. She actively hosts women who have memorized Quran from around the world to share their journeys through the #FOREMOTHERS campaign.  She is a SWISS and Hikmah Institutes instructor and has been a bonus lecturer with AlMaghrib, DiscoverU, and more.  Major news outlets, including BBC, NPR, and CBS, have interviewed her for her work.  Maryam’s focus on spiritual connections, identity actualization, social justice, and women’s studies has humbled her with the opportunity to lecture throughout the United States and the world, including Jerusalem, Mecca, Medina, Stockholm, London, Toronto, and more. She holds a second-degree black belt in Tae Kwon Do and speaks multiple languages.

Ustadha Hosai Mojaddidi co-founded MH4M (www.mentalhealth4muslims.com), a site that provides mental health-related content tailored to the Muslim community. She has served the American-Muslim community for over 20 years as a spiritual advisor, mental health advocate, writer/editor, mediator, interfaith organizer, and public speaker, covering a variety of topics, including women’s issues, marriage/family, youth/teen issues, education, self-development, interfaith bridge building, spirituality, etc. She offers monthly self-development and spiritual wellness classes with MCC East Bay Masjid and regular workshops for local Islamic school students and teachers. She also provides periodic talks throughout California and nationally for the Muslim community on various topics. She enjoys reading, writing, blogging via social media, doing arts and crafts, visiting gourmet coffee shops, and exploring the countless beautiful beaches and state parks throughout California, where she lives with her husband and two sons. Learn more about her at http://hosaimojaddidi.co

Ustadha Shamira Chothia began her journey in seeking sacred knowledge at the women’s Dar-ul-Uloom Mu’eenal Islam seminary in South Africa and completed the five-year intensive ‘alima program at Ja’mia Al-Imam Muhammad Zakariyya, one of Britain’s first and most renowned Islamic universities for women. There she was granted ijāzah (authorization) in Sahīh al-Bukhārī, Sahīh al-Muslim, Sunan at-Tirmidhī, Sunan Abī Dāwūd, Sunan an-Nasā’ī, and Sunan Ibn Mājah. Thereafter, she continued her Arabic and Qur’anic studies in Damascus, Syria, where she obtained an ijāzah in Tajwīd of the Ḥafṣ recitation from the late eminent Syrian scholar Shaykh Ḥasan al-Kurdī. Ustadha Shamira is a co-founder of The Rahmah Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to disseminating traditional Islamic knowledge by qualified female teachers to Muslim women around the globe. She is a passionate advocate for natural birth, infusing her natural birth classes with Islamic spirituality since 2009, and has been a qualified lactation counselor since 2011.  Her latest endeavor is her sisters-only YouTube channel catering to women’s educational and spiritual needs through short talks and reminders. Ustadha Shamira resides in sunny Southern California with her husband and four children.