Our Achievements
Since our founding in August 2015, we have held over 200 face-to-face programs in both Arabic and English, covering a wide range of topics. For more details on some of our past events, visit our events page. Apart from this, we launched our website in 2018 as a platform to share Islamic content online to Muslims all over the world.
Up until 2020, we were known as ‘Ladies as Leaders’. Our main goal was to encourage women in the community to increase their knowledge and to have an awareness of important issues that exist in society. Above all, nurturing a strong commitment to continuous personal development for the pleasure of Allah (swt) in our audience has been our most prized achievement.
By the tawfiq of Allah (swt), we have encouraged Muslim women to:
- Have increased Islamic awareness
- Develop a sense of responsibility in society
- Advance their public-speaking skills through giving talks at our programs
- Share their knowledge (in whatever field or speciality) with members of the community
Our Name Change
As of 2020, we changed the name of the organisation from Ladies as Leaders to Kalima Institute. Our slogan used to be “empowering women with knowledge”. We felt we had successfully achieved our goals alhamdulillah, and decided that we wanted to shift our focus towards comprehensive educational content that is open to all; men and women. Ladies as Leaders was created to fulfil a huge gap in women’s programs in the community. However, since then, many new women’s initiatives were created so that shortage no longer exists.
Further, terms such as ‘female empowerment’ and ‘leadership’ which are associated with our previous name, have been exploited to represent movements like feminism and are therefore no longer neutral terms. The feminism movement has become widespread in recent years, and the ideas promoted through such ideologies do not represent true Islamic values. In fact, some concepts central to feminism contradict Islamic teachings. It it vital to note that this does not mean that Islam doesn’t give women their rights or encourage women to hold influential positions in society. Islam has given all appropriate rights to both men and women in the most just way. Saying that Islam needs feminism implies that Islam is deficient, which most Muslims would refute as we believe it is a complete way of life, and has the most perfect laws as they are from our Perfect and Just Creator, Allah (swt).
Additionally, ‘leadership’ nowadays has come to mean power, exuding confidence and belief in oneself. Contrastingly, the Islamic notion of leadership is responsibility and servanthood. By definition as Muslims, we have to submit with humility to our Lord. True submission in this day and age is much harder to live out than superficial Western notions of ‘leadership’.
We do not promote the above ideas as they can have damaging effects on society, and as a Muslim organisation we believe Islam is all-encompassing and we reject any external ideology that does not stem from Islamic principles. Therefore, we felt it is crucial to change the name not only to reflect our new goals but also to prevent misinterpretation and misrepresentation of our values and vision.
To find out more about the Islamic perspective on feminism, watch our video by following this link.