The following is a sample profile from the book Holy Troublemakers & Unconventional Saints by Daneen Akers.

Mahdia Lynn

It’s Jummah, the Friday prayer service that Muslims attend each week. Mahdia Lynn is sitting in a circle with a group of other members of the Masjid al-Rabia mosque that she co-founded in Chicago. “Who would like to lead prayer this week?” Mahdia asks.

A mother with an infant in her arms volunteers to lead the gathered community in prayer. Mahdia smiles as she follows along with the prayers. She loves seeing the different community members take turns leading them. Last week a transgender teenager led prayers. Next week someone else will lead. Whoever leads prays according to the type of Islam they practice. Mahdia herself is a Shia Muslim. Her co-founder of this mosque is a Sufi woman. They don’t pretend that they are all the same when it comes to their faith, and letting each person who leads Jummah do so according to their own tradition is one way they celebrate differences.

Mahdia has been working to create a world that is more fair and safe for everyone. People who work for the rights of groups of people at the community level are called “organizers,” and Mahdia has been an organizer since she was in high school. “I think it’s in my blood,” Mahdia says. “I grew up with union families in Detroit, and I spent a lot of time in labor union halls as a kid.”

When she was in high school, Mahdia sensed that she was a bit different from most of her classmates, and she came out as transgender when she was 18. She began working for the rights of LGBTQ people in her high school, and later within the Muslim faith when she converted to Islam in her early 20s. “I was trying to find meaning in the world and my place in it—especially being different. Islam spoke to me. The words of the Quran spoke to me,” Mahdia says. “I now think that I was always a Muslim in my understanding of how the world works, but I didn’t know that I was until I really started studying and found that the truth of Islam really spoke to me.”

Mahdia has been working for the rights of LGBTQ people for decades, and this mosque came about in 2016 when many Muslims and LGBTQ people felt especially unsafe and unwelcome. Mahdia knew she had to do something to help. Masjid al-Rabia began as a spiritual community that practices radical inclusion. The mosque welcomes all people, especially those who have often been excluded elsewhere. “I’ve prayed beside a bunch of people—women, trans, and queer people—who couldn’t have imagined being in a mosque, let alone leading prayer. It’s a constantly wonderful and intense experience,” Mahdia says. “It’s nothing short of a blessing.”

An important part of including everybody at Masjid al-Rabia for Mahdia is making sure the services and community are accessible to disabled people. This means everything from making sure the public transit stops near where they meet are wheelchair accessible, to making all services available online for those who can’t travel, to making the leadership model shared so that no one person runs everything.

Mahdia herself is disabled, and that sometimes means she’s in the hospital or home in bed, unable to come into the office. The community was designed so that other people can step in when needed. That helps everyone truly be part of the shared leadership of the community. It also helps model that people have value because of who they are, not because of anything they do. “We have so much wisdom in our community because we lift up the experiences of disabled Muslims,” Mahdia says. “We disrupt the idea that you have to always be working, always be making something to have value.”

This value of honoring every person for who they are extends to one of the programs at Masjid al-Rabia that Mahdia is most proud of—the care packages they send out every month for LGBTQ Muslims who are in prison. In 2017, Mahdia began a pen pal program for LGBTQ Muslims in prison who had almost no spiritual support and often are treated unfairly by the prison system simply for who they are. She wanted them to realize that they were not forgotten, and that they matter, too.

The program has grown, and now the volunteers at Masjid al-Rabia send a newsletter several times a year to hundreds of individuals in prisons, detention centers, and other institutions. They also send out care packages with items like prayer rugs, Qurans, and other religious reading materials. Mahdia and the others at Masjid al-Rabia think of these “siblings in the faith” as part of their community. Every day that they have prayers, the person leading prays on the exact same prayer rug that they send to the LGBTQ Muslims in prison so they’ll feel like they belong and have a spiritual home.

For Mahdia, helping people and trying to make the world a better place is just part of who she is. “I cannot see people suffer and not help. It’s a calling. Every day is just a question of how I answer that calling.”

What might your “calling” be?

Glossary Terms

Called/Calling
The sense that God, or a messenger of God, has specifically assigned a person a certain job; often applied in religious job settings, such as, “I was called to become a minister.”

Coming Out
An announcement of one’s true sexual orientation or gender identity, either to oneself or publicly.

Islam
The faith of Muslims; a monotheistic (belief in only one God) Abrahamic Religion; the name comes from the Arabic word for peace. Islam began with the visions of the prophet Muhammad in 610 AD. It is the second most widely practiced religion in the world.

Jummah
A congregational prayer that Muslims hold every Friday around noon.

LGBTQ
The acronym for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people; other commonly used acronyms for gender and sexual minorities include LGBTQI, LGBTQIA, and LGBTQ+.

Mosque
A Muslim place of worship.

Muslim
A follower of the religion of Islam.

Queer
A word used to identify with and celebrate people of all gender identities and all the ways people love each other; was used as a mean word in the past, but is now being reclaimed by many people as a positive term.

Quran
The sacred book in Islam, written in Arabic and believed to be the word of Allah as dictated by the prophet Muhammad.

Radical Inclusion
The act of intentionally welcoming everyone, especially individuals from groups that have often been excluded.

Shia
One of the two main branches of Islam (the other is Sunni).

Spiritual
Something that relates to the human soul or spirit.

Sufi/Sufism
A person who is part of the mystical branch of Islam called Sufism; Sufis seek direct communion with God through certain rituals and practices such as meditation, chanting poetry or scripture, singing, and sometimes dancing or whirling.

Transgender
The opposite of cisgender; when your gender identity (how you feel inside) is different than what sex doctors/midwives assigned to you when you were born (boy, girl, or intersex).

Union Family
A working, middle-class family associated with a formal labor union in the U.S.; labor unions advocate for workers’ rights.