Muslim Leadership Lab

The Muslim Leadership Lab (MLL), founded in 2018 at Yale University’s Center for Public Service and Social Justice, builds long-term systems change by investing in Muslim students and their allies at a pivotal moment in their personal and political formation: their time on college campuses. The program cultivates students not only as leaders for Muslim communities, but as ethical actors shaping the common good. By equipping students with the confidence, tools, and spiritual grounding to lead from where they are, MLL catalyzes lasting impact that travels with them—into their professional, civic, spiritual, and community lives. 

MLL is rooted in two powerful leadership traditions: the Prophetic model of servant-leadership, grounded in mercy, justice, and accountability; and Ella Baker’s vision of a “leader-full” movement, where leadership is shared, cultivated, and collective. From this foundation, MLL works with students to co-create spaces of belonging and growth, centering their lived experience and emerging needs. 

The program trains students to engage in public life without shedding their spiritual identity, to organize strategically, and to resist injustice with both courage and care. In recent years, MLL programming has tackled racial injustice within Muslim communities, deepened commitments to gender equity, and held space for the moral and spiritual reckoning brought on by witnessing genocide and mass death in Gaza. At each step, we ensure students are not only reacting—but building: building community, coalitions, tools, and imagination. 

MLL builds long-term impact by embedding leadership development within campus life—not by extracting students into elite silos, but by investing in them where they are.  

Through leadership retreats, intensive training sessions, campus-wide lectures, and national convenings like the April 2025 MX100 events and the Imam Hussein Lecture, the program offers students the tools of storytelling, community organizing, ethical analysis, and spiritual resilience. These are not abstract skills—they are the daily tools needed for movement-building. 

Muslim Leadership Lab alumni go on to establish justice-centered organizations, serve in faith-based and interfaith leadership roles, and take up careers in journalism, activism, law, and public service. Their work bears the imprint of their time in MLL, and they often return to serve as mentors and trainers for current students. 

In a moment of intensifying surveillance, repression, and political marginalization of Muslim students, this work is urgent. MLL is building leaders and building a movement rooted in dignity, service, and lasting systems change. 

Please contact Abdul-Rehman Malik at abdul-rehman.malik@yale.edu if you are interested in getting involved.