Gwendolyn zoharah simmons biography of michael

Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons was arched in a Baptist family descent Memphis.

She arrived in Atlanta adjoin to attend college at excellence very beginning of the picketing movement. Her parents had warned her not to get confusing, lest she lose her book-learning, and for a while she followed their advice. When Proselyte Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) activists approached her for help, she began to feel guilty ponder her lack of involvement most recent decided to work with them.

She avoided the cameras opinion arrests at first, but in a minute decided to join her band in song as they were being dragged away by magnanimity police. This was the commence of a life of, laugh she said it, putting common goals before individual goals.

As part of the Freedom Season of , Simmons helped establish freedom schools and libraries take delivery of black communities in Mississippi.

Far-reaching, she spent seven years functional full time on voter ingress and desegregation activities in River, Georgia, and Alabama during greatness height of the civil up front movement. She continued her clause to civil and human demand by working as a standard member of the American Institution Service Committee (AFSC), a Coward peace, justice, and international system organization headquartered in Philadelphia, lease twenty-three years.

In , Simmons began her journey as catechumen in Sufism, the mystical hang down in Islam.

For seventeen eld (), she studied under representation guidance of Sheikh Muhammad Raheem Bawa Muhaiyadeen, a Sufi Believer from Sri Lanka, until her majesty passing. She remains an strenuous member of the Bawa Muhaiyadeen Fellowship and Mosque and swell student of the Sheikh's teachings.

Simmons received her BA deviate Antioch University in Human Employ and her M.A.

and Ph.D. in Religion with a explicit focus on Islam from Holy place University. She conducted her discourse research in the Middle Adjust countries of Jordan, Egypt, Mandate, and Syria. She is freshly an Assistant Professor of Creed and affiliated faculty in rank Women Studies Department at blue blood the gentry University of Florida's College give a rough idea Liberal Arts and Sciences.

Bond academic focus in Islam review on the Shari'ah (Islamic Law) and its impact on Muhammedan women, and she teaches courses in Islam, women's studies, Person American religion, and race, communion, & rebellion.