ABSTRACT
The Muslim Women’s Auxiliary Committee, which was the women’s voice of the Muslim Students’ Association (MSA), along with the MSA proper, first started with youth camps to nurture Islamic values and positive relationship building among youth. As families were established and male bachelors found wives either back home or in many cases married North American converts, the considerations of children and family needs began to take shape within MSA circles. With the influx of Sunni Muslims through immigration post-1965, the landscape of Islam in America shifted from what Sherman Jackson calls Black Religion to post-colonial religion. Unlike the experience of African American Muslims in the United States, whose history can be traced back to the earliest European settlement, the Middle East and South Asian Muslim presence in Canada and the United States is a more recent phenomenon.
