Mafaz Al-Suwaidan

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Mafaz Al-Suwaidan is a Kuwaiti American academic and current doctoral candidate at Harvard University. She is also a producer and writer for American Muslims (2024),^[1] a PBS film series about Muslims in America.^[2]

Al-Suwaidan was born in Oklahoma, the Sooner state, to Islamic author and speaker, Tareq Al-Suwaidan,^{[3][unreliable source?]} a leader of Kuwait's Muslim Brotherhood.^[4][5] Although she was born in the US, she grew up in Kuwait,^[6] and has also lived in Canada.^[7]

In 2010, Mafaz married Kuwaiti singer-songwriter Humood AlKhudher.^{[8][unreliable source?]}

Al-Suwaidan received her undergraduate degree in journalism from Toronto Metropolitan University (formerly Ryerson University) in 2011.^[9] She then worked briefly as a journalist in Kuwait.^[10][11][12] In 2016, she received her Master of Fine Arts (MFA) degree from Emerson College, in Boston, Massachusetts.^[13][7]

She earned a Master of Theological Study (MTS) degree from Harvard Divinity School in 2018.^[14] She is currently a PhD candidate at Harvard University in Philosophy of Religion, focused on Islam and Modern Thought, with a secondary degree in African and African American Studies. She is also a member of the university's Committee on the Study of Religion.^[15]

She has been named as Dorothy Porter & Charles Harris Wesley Fellow for 2024—2025 by the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research.^[16]

Al-Suwaidan is and has long been a supporter of social justice, human rights, and specifically, Palestinian liberation, in relation to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.^[17]

She has participated in conversations and writings about racism in the Arab world in context of the Black Lives Matter movement.^[18][19] She started the #ArabsForBlackLives campaign with Egyptian-American community organizer, Rana Abdel Hamid, about how Arabs can work to fight against anti-Black racism.^[20][21]

In 2021, when philosopher Cornel West had threatened to (and eventually did) leave Harvard after his request for tenure was denied; Al-Suwaidan, who had trained with West as a master's student, organized a letter of support for him, which was signed by more than 60 other doctoral candidates.^[22]

She was one of the representatives of HGSU-UAW who wrote a letter in February 2024 to Shawn Fain, president of the United Auto Workers (UAW), on behalf of the UAW Arab Caucus, demanding the union divest from Israel.^[23]

In March 2024, she withdrew her participation from a Lowell House panel on antisemitism and Islamophobia, following a lack of institutional support for the event.^[24] Lowell House Faculty Deans and the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Ethics had removed themselves as co-sponsors for the panel, after some HDS students complained that "the event failed to include Jewish and Zionist voices". The students had criticized the moderator's affiliation with Harvard Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine, which had reposted an antisemitic cartoon on Instagram,^[25] and Al-Suwaidan's social media posts about Israel and Palestine allegedly equating Zionism with Nazism.^[26]