Individual journeys

These are not composites. Each person named below is a real, named individual who has spoken publicly, on the record, about being a plant-based Muslim, and each account is drawn from an interview or article you can read in full at the link provided. Where someone holds a view that is a minority position — most obviously on qurbani — we say so rather than letting their story imply a consensus that does not exist.

Fawzia Jaffan

Fawzia Jaffan is a Bahraini photographer, yoga instructor and animal rights activist who leads the Vegan Islam Initiative run under the Middle East Vegan Society. In an interview with the society, she explained that her journey began around 2016 as an on-and-off vegetarian, and that it was only later — after watching a documentary and doing her own research — that she moved to full veganism (Middle East Vegan Society interview). She has said publicly that the more she studied Islamic teaching on animals and mercy, the more she felt her faith deepened rather than conflicted with her veganism, a point she developed further on the Alternative Kitchen podcast, describing her path "through art, spirituality, and ethical awakening" (Alternative Kitchen podcast).

Jaffan's work through the Vegan Islam Initiative is explicitly built around Islamic sourcing — hadith on kindness to animals, the concept of amanah (trusteeship) over creation — rather than importing a Western vegan framework wholesale. Her public role also touches directly on sacrifice: the podcast title itself, "Rethinking Sacrifice", signals that she engages critically with qurbani as practised today, a position discussed at greater length under Sammer Hakim and Elysia Ward below, and one that remains a minority view even among plant-based Muslims.

Sammer Hakim and Elysia Ward

Sammer Hakim and Elysia Ward co-founded the Vegan Muslim Initiative, a global network based between Canada and Australia that aims, in their words as reported by Plant Based News, to "educate Muslim communities" about veganism and to show that plant-based living is compatible with Islamic values (Plant Based News / All-Creatures.org, 2018). The Initiative has run outreach and educational content aimed specifically at Muslim audiences rather than the wider vegan movement, reflecting the founders' view that Muslim communities need arguments pitched in Islamic terms, not borrowed secular ones.

The criticism the founders describe is not abstract: reported reactions from Muslim commentators and audiences accused the Initiative of undermining a rite with clear Qur'anic and prophetic grounding, and of imposing an outside ethical framework onto a practice most Muslims consider settled. Hakim and Ward have continued the Initiative's work regardless, framing it as advocacy from within the faith rather than a rejection of it.

Roqaia Albeesh, "The Syrian Vegan"

Roqaia Albeesh is a Damascene activist known publicly as "The Syrian Vegan" and the founder of the Syrian Vegan Community. In an interview conducted by Roland Azar for the Middle East Vegan Society, she is described as someone whose activism deliberately links veganism to social justice concerns across the Middle East, not only to animal welfare in isolation (All-Creatures.org, republishing MiddleEastVeganSociety.org, March 2025). Her public profile is built around building community in a region where, as the interview notes, vegan advocacy has to reckon with economic hardship, limited access to plant-based staples, and a food culture where meat is heavily symbolic of hospitality and celebration — pressures that shape how she frames her message rather than something she can simply argue away.

Albeesh's work is a useful corrective to an assumption that plant-based Muslim advocacy is a Western, English-language phenomenon. Her organising happens in Arabic, inside a Syrian and wider Levantine context, addressing an audience for whom the practical obstacles — cost, availability, family expectation, war and displacement — are as pressing as any theological question.

Aiysha Younas

Aiysha Younas is a journalist who wrote "Veganism and Islam" for The Vegan Society's own blog in August 2022, describing her own vegan journey as beginning six years earlier, when she was twenty-one (The Vegan Society, "Veganism and Islam"). Writing as both a lifelong Muslim and a journalist, she frames compassion as the shared driving force behind veganism and her faith, and — notably — says she did not want to speak only for herself, so she sought out other Muslims to hear their experiences too, treating her own story as one data point among several rather than a universal template.

Younas's piece is aimed at a mainstream vegan readership unfamiliar with Islam as much as at Muslim readers, which shapes its tone: it explains basic Islamic concepts (halal, the reverence given to the Qur'an) for an audience that may know neither, while making the case that ethical veganism and her religious identity are not in tension for her personally.

Aina Fazlin Ibrahim Bajunid and Faisal Mansor

Aina Fazlin Ibrahim Bajunid and her husband Faisal Mansor are a Malaysian couple profiled by Free Malaysia Today in March 2025 for raising their family on a fully plant-based diet (Free Malaysia Today, "'Being vegan doesn't make me less of a Muslim', says Aina"). Aina had been vegetarian since her teenage years before the family moved further to a plant-based diet together. The article is notable for showing what this looks like at the level of an entire household and its festivals, not just an individual: it describes the family serving an entirely plant-based spread at Hari Raya, the Eid celebration that in Malaysia is traditionally built around dishes like beef rendang, ayam masak merah and grilled satay.

The headline itself — "Being vegan doesn't make me less of a Muslim" — reflects a defensive framing that recurs across several of these accounts: a felt need to pre-empt the assumption that dietary choice signals reduced religious commitment. Faisal Mansor is also separately reported, in coverage of the Kuala Lumpur Green Iftar event, as a journalist covering that community initiative (see Community Initiatives), which is a reminder that the individual and the organised sides of this movement in Malaysia overlap directly.

Sumaya, Mara and the BBC Three profile

In January 2020, BBC Three's Rahil Sheikh profiled two young British Muslim women, Sumaya and Mara, under the headline "Vegan and Muslim: why I kept my plant-based diet secret from my family" (BBC Three). Sumaya, eighteen and from west London, described her mother's reaction to the news as visceral: "What?! You are vegan?….VEGAN?!… What's next… taking off your hijab?!" Sumaya recalls that "her whole body language changed. It was like I'd murdered someone." Sumaya's own response leaned on ethical reasoning drawn from her faith rather than against it, pointing out that she had not harmed anyone and that her diet was, if anything, consistent with the compassion she had been raised to value.

The article's framing — that both young women had, for a period, kept their diet secret rather than confront family disapproval head-on — captures something the more polished advocacy stories can miss: for many younger Muslims, going plant-based is not a public campaign but a quiet, sometimes lonely negotiation conducted meal by meal inside a household that has not agreed to it. Read the piece in full for the fuller picture of how each young woman eventually did discuss it with her family, and with what result.

What it costs, socially

The recurring theme across these accounts is not nutrition and it is not fiqh. It is the dinner table. Almost every person profiled above describes some version of the same conversation: a parent who hears a refusal of meat as a refusal of them, a grandmother whose love is expressed in a dish that took her all morning, an uncle who is certain that this is a Western fashion dressed up in religious language. Sumaya described her family reading her veganism as a rejection of the culture that raised her. Aiysha Younas has written about being told, more than once, that her position implies the Prophet ﷺ was somehow at fault — which is precisely the accusation that most Muslim plant-based writers are at pains to deny, since none of them claim that what was lawful then is unlawful now.

What seems to reduce the friction, judging by the accounts themselves, is a set of ordinary social moves rather than arguments. Cooking well, and bringing enough of it to share, does more than any citation. Framing the choice in the language of one's own reasoning — “this is what I have concluded I should do” — rather than the language of prohibition keeps the conversation from becoming a dispute about whether relatives are sinning. Eating what is offered at a wedding or a funeral, where refusal would wound, is a judgement many of these people describe making, and a defensible one: the Muslim moral tradition weighs the harm of breaking a heart heavily. Several also describe simply giving it time, and finding that a family which argued fiercely in the first year had stopped noticing by the third.

Two of the accounts note the opposite cost as well — friction from within plant-based spaces, where Islamic practice around qurbani, halal slaughter or the permissibility of meat in principle is sometimes treated as indefensible. Muslims who eat this way often find themselves explaining their religion to vegans and their diet to Muslims, and belonging fully to neither room. That double position is part of why the community groups described in Community Initiatives exist at all.

What these stories have in common

Read alongside these individual accounts, the organised initiatives, iftars and campaigns covered in Community Initiatives show what happens when this becomes a collective project rather than a private decision. And if you are facing a version of these conversations in your own household, Family and Community was written for exactly that.