News
Fall 2022 - Fall 2024
We are thrilled to have received Public Accelerator funding from the Public Engagement office of Memorial University to complete our Muslim Narratives and Lives in Newfoundland and Labrador book and share its findings! More soon.
Summer 2022
Throughout the spring and summer semesters, new student members joined our team and began working to locate, prepare and scan materials that we plan to use in our upcoming coffee table book. We are thrilled to announce that we have secured an advance contract with Memorial University Press for the book. We will be working throughout the fall semester to finalize its components.
Spring 2022
Interviewing Update: The MNL in NL team has been hard at work! We completed 22 oral history interviews altogether - 11 in studio on Memorial University’s campus and 11 online. Our interview schedule is available here. No transcribed and submitted the 22 interviews to our archivist. These are now available on the Digital Archives Initiative.
Funding Updates: We are grateful to have received a few new sources of funding for our project:
Memorial University (through its MUCEP and GradSWEP programs)
J.R. Smallwood Foundation for Newfoundland and Labrador Studies
The MNL Project is part of a larger national one, The Muslims in Canada Archives. The MiCA project was included in the last Canadian Federal budget with a $4 million commitment! Please read more about this announcement here. We extend our gratitude to MNL advisory board members Anver Emon, Moska Rokay and to the Institute of Islamic Studies team (University of Toronto) for their incredible lobbying efforts to secure the MiCA across Canada – including in NL - in perpetuity. Amazing!
October 2021
October was a busy month for the MNL research project! Our team spent several months completing interview transcripts and editing videos from our life history interviews. Most excitingly, we launched some of our findings over the course of October for Islamic History Month. The team decided to focus on folks from the early community in the 1960s and 1970s, and conclude with the beginning of the Al Noor Mosque construction in the 1980s. See our Instagram account here.
Project lead, Jennifer Selby, and project coordinator, Ayse Sule Akinturk, hosted a public information session about the history of Muslims in NL in coordination with the A.C. Hunter Library on October 7th. Our thanks to their team for all their support and their production of this virtual event:
See our project team share some of our work today starting at 5:12.
September 2021
In September our team hosted a second information session at the Al Noor Mosque. We launched our information brochure, answered questions, and heard new stories of activities among the early community. It was a big success!
June 2021
A big thanks to Hassam Munir, a University of Toronto graduate student in History, who led an inspiring workshop with our team and several guests entitled, “History in the Making Webinar: Muslims in Canada at the Archives.”
May 2021
Thanks to our advisory board for all their feedback and sharing ideas amidst our annual advisory board meeting on May 17th.
February 2021
We continue to gather archival materials and have completed another 10 life history interviews, this time remotely.
On February 5th, Dr. Selby spoke to Martin Jones on CBC Newfoundland Morning about the MNL project. A podcast can be heard here.
On February 18th, we welcomed Dr. Afua Cooper (Dalhousie University), who drew on evidence from NL, as well as from Maritime and Ontario histories, to “imagine” the Black Muslims who likely landed in the province during the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Her talk can be viewed on our Youtube channel, here.
January 2021
We are excited to present a Dr. Afua Cooper in conjunction with our archival project and with Black History Month in February. She presented a talk on the historical evidence of Black Muslims in Newfoundland and Labrador on Thursday, February 18th at 7pm NST. For more information, including registration details, please see our ‘Events’ page.
December 2020
We are working with several local self-identified Muslims to record and share their narratives of settlement and life in St. John’s, NL. We are also working with Colleen Quigley at Memorial University’s QEII Library to process and catalogue archival materials. Please be in touch with us (through ‘Contact Us’) if you would like to discuss a donation.
Nov 4, 2020. MNL Archival Info Session
The Muslim Narratives and Lives in Newfoundland and Labrador team - Ayse Sule Akinturk (Postdoctoral Fellow at Memorial U and MANAL representative), Jennifer Selby (Team Leader and Memorial U professor), and Colleen Quigley (Head of Archives and Special Collections at Memorial U) - describe how YOU can donate to this new archival collection. See the video below.