Student Highlight: Sumaiya Zama

Sumaiya Zama is an MA candidate for the Columbia and Aga Khan University dual degree in Islamic Studies and Muslim Cultures. She is the 2020 recipient of the Aga Khan University dual-degree fellowship as well as the recipient of Columbia University’s 2020-2021 Racial Justice Mini-Grant through the Office of Student Life. She is currently a research fellow with the Center for the Study of Religion and the City at Morgan State University. She holds a BA from the University of Massachusetts in Boston in Political Science with minors in Africana Studies and Human Rights.  

Sumaiya entered her graduate school journey with several years of professional and personal experience in youth work, civil rights, and community organizing sparking her academic interests which include reading Islamic texts as liberation theology, and learning from scholars in the field so that she may further develop its theory and praxis.  

Sumaiya’s research explores how Muslims in different contexts respond to the expansion of surveillance and policing vis-a-vis the weaponization of Artificial Intelligence, specifically facial recognition software. Furthermore, she is interested in theorizing possible ethical formations for Artificial Intelligence within the broader realm of Islamic ethics while employing gender, race, and class analyses on issues of surveillance and AI in her research.

Most recently, she wrote for Nazar about the U.S. military’s purchase of location data from the prayer app MuslimPro and the subsequent anxieties around surveillance that Muslims experience.

Sumaiya organized and moderated Malcolm's Worldmaking Practice: Reclaiming his Local and Global Legacy, a discussion hosted by CSMS in partnership with the Shabazz Center. A recording of the event can be viewed here. She was also interviewed by the Columbia Daily Spectator on receiving the Racial Justice Mini-Grant and on her work with the Malcolm X and Dr. Betty Shabbazz Center in Harlem.