The Literary Salon for Black Muslim Women builds on a 2023–2024 pilot delivered under the Rabbani Project, where online and in-person gatherings revealed a hunger for Black women’s voices and for shared reading, reflection, and intellectual companionship.

Women with full, noisy lives described reading in the quiet of night, in snatched breaths between responsibilities, on buses and trains. They spoke of underlined sentences, tears wiped away, deep pangs of sweetness and pain, and of the relief of placing their feelings and thoughts beside others in a space where they could be safe, seen, and expanded by the reflections of others. It confirmed that there are few sustained spaces where the trifecta of marginalisation as Black, Muslim, and woman can be examined, reimagined, and collectively held.