Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons is a profoundly spirit-filled woman, an activist, an organizer, and a scholar who has lived her life searching for the most meaningful ways to be human in the world. How to do justice, how to cultivate peace, how to resist and transform diminishment and inequity -- these are the kinds of issues with which she has been grappling for many many years. And always, in the midst of that grappling, she has marveled at the depth and richness of God -- seeking it constantly, consistently. Seeking it in the night skies from the back porch of her grandparents' Memphis home when she was eight or nine years old. Seeking it in the raging thunder and sheeting rain of a Tennessee summer afternoon, when none of the downtown white faces, watching her from behind dry windows, offered her a refuge. Seeking it in the liberatory history she learned from white radical teachers at Spelman College. Seeking it in her grandmother's wisdom and fears and tall, tall hopes. Seeking it in Hattiesburg and Laurel, Mississippi, in Freedom Schools and voting drives. In Atlanta, Georgia and in the Nation of Islam. In deepening answers to deepening problems. In decades of organizing for political and economic rights in the African American community. And in the compassionate example of her teacher -- Bawa Muhaiyadeen -- a slight, brown man who spoke Tamil and was presumed Sri Lankan -- though no one knew for sure.

Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons, or Zoharah, as she is known to friends, was one of Bawa's first American students. Her daughter, Aishah, now a gifted and persevering filmmaker, was then a baby -- the first person Bawa greeted when he got off the plane in Philadelphia in 1971. Zoharah's relationship with her teacher has grown in the intervening years such that now, her life and work is saturated with the wisdom and insights of the Sufi sheik. Still, that wisdom and those insights had important counterparts in the lessons of Zoharah's youth -- lessons learned in church, in school, in the embrace of her family and community as well as in the best hopes and commitments of the southern freedom movement in which she participated as a teen and young adult.

We have known Zoharah a long time. She was a regular visitor to Mennonite House, the retreat, meeting and voluntary service center for movement activists which we founded and directed in the early 1960s in Atlanta. We met each other again in Philadelphia in the mid 1970s when Zoharah was working for the American Friends Service Committee. In those days, she was also organizing the National Black Independent Party. She served as treasurer of that important political project for the first three years of its existence. Most recently, Zoharah has been teaching in the religious studies department at the University of Florida at Gainesville and completing a doctoral program in the department of religion at Temple University. True to the brilliant combination of spiritual, political and social concerns which have been at the heart of her life for so many years, Zoharah's dissertation is focussed around the position of women in Islamic Sharia Law -- always looking for the deepest possibilities for gender equality within Islamic tradition; expanding and challenging the places where patriarchy has enforced unnecessary limitations. In all of our encounters with Zoharah, we have been most impressed by a certain joy in her countenance, a wondrous and wonderful spirit that deftly combines openness and discernment. Perhaps because she has had such a range of experiences in her own life, Zoharah is a quick study of the relative merits and possibilities of new situations. At the same time, her loving, inclusive disposition allows her to enter into new environments with the highest and best expectations.

One Thanksgiving, about fifteen years ago, Zoharah and her daughter Aishah were guests at our home with the Muslim scholar Hasan Askari and two friends from South Africa, Pat and Rajan Naidoo. It was a cool evening and the small dining room of our house on the Swarthmore College campus was warm and lively with candles, lamplight and good conversation. To accompany our turkey, cornbread, stuffing, fresh cranberry sauce, candied yams and sweet potato pie, Zoharah bought a magnificent pot of collard greens that Vincent remembers very well to this day. As the evening wore on, Zoharah and Hasan began to talk about themselves, their lives, the faith they shared and the exquisite mysticism and peace at the heart of Islamic tradition. Sitting around the table and listening to their stories in the soft radiance of the room, we were all especially moved by Zoharah's gentle conviction of the many expressions of the divine in our very human lives.

As we think now of all that she has meant to us, to the movement and to the many people who have been touched by her vision, her struggling and her joy, we are thankful for our sister. Alhamdulillâh -- all praise is to and of God.

Vincent Harding and Rosemarie Freeney Harding
Co-chairpersons, The Veterans of Hope Project
October 2000