THE MUSLIM STUDENTS' ASSOCIATION PRESIDENT GAVE ME STDS

hi everyone welcome to the secret sex lives of muslim women i'm your host sadma hindi today we have our first ever panel episode we Today we are talking about the Muslim Students Association or the MSA.

If you went to university in North America as a Muslim, there's a good chance that this organization shaped your social life, your religious life, your politics, your dating life, your friendships, and maybe even your entire relationship with Islam.

So joining me today are two incredible guests, Rania Hanan, who is a Syrian-American stand-up comedian and climate change activist, former van lifer, now making Brooklyn home.

And we have Noor Jahan Ansari, who is the social media intern for the podcast.

She's a third-generation Indian-American from Massachusetts, and she was co-president of the George Washington University MSA from 2021 to 2022.

And she wrote her undergraduate thesis on the history of the GW MSA.

All I'm stuck on is 2021, 2022.

I'm like doing the math.

That's what I'm

saying.

She's young.

She's the most fresh out of the MSA.

And I'm still really far removed from like even now.

So you feel like you lose relevance really quickly.

I don't know if you guys know that I was involved with the McMaster University Muslim Students Association for several years.

I was the dawah and outreach director in 2010.

2011.

No, no, no, no.

And then later as the public relations external officer in 2012, 2013.

So my stories are kind of old, but timeless and universal.

And I think they're still going to be relevant.

And for me personally, the MSA was one of the most formative experiences of my life.

It gave me...

Lifelong friendships until I decided to become a harami and then not threaten those friendships.

Leadership experience and some of honestly my funnest moments.

Okay, so first off, what is an MSA?

The Muslim Students Association.

Association also has different names like I know that in the UK it's like they call it ISOC or something it originally like in like the 60s and 70s when MSAs were first starting out was like literally just like we need a space to pray and over time like more Muslims start coming to be students in the US and so they grow and so they kind of become more of these like community building spaces where you're maybe making friends celebrating Ramadan together because it's people feel like they want experiences or to feel like they have a Muslim community when they're away from their maybe home community or something like that so I think that's when that's how the MSA kind of grew from literally just like space to pray to like now this is like a community that lives and breathes on its own and every single university has a different like MSA culture as