Khalilah Sabra (pronounced /ˈhɑːlilə/, birth name Christina Couzan, born 18 December 1967) is an American Muslim advocate and author best known for her work with refugees in the Middle East, and literary contributions to the Joe L. Kincheloe and Shirley R. Steinberg series Transgression: Cultural Studies and Education.
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Her early life was lived in Westwood, a district in western Los Angeles, California, United States. Westwood is best known as the home of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). She attended Saint Bernadette School, a private, Roman Catholic elementary school in New Haven, Connecticut, founded in 1956 and merged with Saint Bernadette Catholic Church. She later attended Hamilton High School, a public high school in Westside of Los Angeles, California.
Sabra studied Criminal Justice at California State University earning a graduate degree. Postgraduate work was completed at UCLA in Paralegal Studies.
Her conversion to Islam was mentored by some of the most famous scholars of that time, including Sheikh Ahmed Naufal, director of the Islamic University of Jordan, and the Palestinian scholar Abdallah Azzam. In the late 1980s she was recruited into the Muslim Brotherhood (Ikwan Al-Muslimeen), the only American female at that time. The organization dissolved itself in the United States and reorganized itself as a moderate organization, forgoing the name Ikwan Al-Muslimeen. For two years she worked at the Institute of Islamic Studies as an ESL instructor. She then lived and worked in refugee camps in Afghanistan and in Palestinian refugee camps in Southern Lebanon, and has since advocated for the rights of women living under oppressive regimes and cultural transgressions prevalent in Third World societies.
The Joe L. Kincheloe and Shirley R. Steinberg series Transgression: Cultural Studies and Education is multicultural educational set of strategies and materials for U.S. education that were developed to assist teachers in the promotion of democracy while responding to the many issues created by rapidly-changing demographics.
Sabra is the author of An Unordinary Death: The Life of a Palestinian, a work on critical pedagogy, the teaching approach that attempts to help students question and challenge the beliefs and practices that dominate, providing a theory and practice helping students achieve critical consciousness. Critical pedagogue Ira Shor defines critical pedagogy as "Habits of thought, reading, writing, and speaking which go beneath surface meaning, first impressions, dominant myths, official pronouncements, traditional clichés, received wisdom, and mere opinions, to understand the deep meaning, root causes, social context, ideology, and personal consequences of any action, event, object, process, organization, experience, text, subject matter, policy, mass media, or discourse." (Empowering Education, 129)
Sabra has been on numerous media outlets insisting that the American courts and public adhere to due process during trials of alleged terrorist, insisting that "men must be proven guilty in a court of law."
She has gone on record as saying that government-initiated torture is a crime whether it is committed by the CIA or any government entity in the United States or elsewhere.
Khalilah Sabra designs and implements programs that educate non-Muslims about her moderate version of Islam that denounces violence and extremism. Khalilah Sabra's advocacy activities include supporting international human rights, national civil rights, the promotion of democratic immigration protocols, and the advancement of the recognition of Muslim rights, and the rights of other marginalized citizens.
Sabra is critical of Muslims in America, accusing the masses of being proactive advocates and lobbyists for religious rights and social equality.
An anti-war advocate, Sabra believes that the United States exceeds its authority by its presence in Iraq, and that its presence continues to create an environment of hatred for the American government throughout the Middle East along with its support for Israel. She has lived throughout parts of the Middle East and Europe.
In 2007, she became North Carolina Director of Civil Rights for the Muslim American Society.
She is married to a Lebanese national.
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