Meet our Muslims of the Month: Nadir and Yadira Thabatah

by Amatullah Shaw

In our recent piece, Three Ways To Make Your Islamic Center More Accessible, we outlined ways in which Muslim spaces can be more inclusive to our community members who are disabled. But even in implementing those suggestions, that’s only half of the battle. How are we supporting the organizations that are already doing this work? And this month, we want to highlight an organization that’s doing just that.

Yadira and Nadir Thabatah

Islam By Touch is a non-profit organization dedicated to helping blind and visually impaired Muslims. And at the heart of this growing organization are Nadir Thabatah and his wife Yadira Thabatah, who were both born blind. Yadira is totally blind and is a guide dog user and Nadir is legally blind. When you’re legally blind, it means that you have some vision, but your vision is so limited that you are considered to be blind.

Some fun facts about the couple: They’ve known each other for 20 years and have been married for 15 of them. They have four children (two boys and two girls) and they’re homeschooled. Yadira loves to sing and is working on an album with all acapella background tracks, and Nadir is working as her producer and audio engineer!

They started Islam By Touch in 2016 because of the lack of Islamic resources available to the blind community. They noted, “We’re the first organization to take a reliable English translation of the Quran and properly edit and format it into braille. We produce these 10-volume books ourselves and distribute them around the world to blind people at no charge to them.” And you can find a list of masjids here in the United States that have a copy.

Islam By Touch is currently the only Muslim organization giving dawah to the blind community with blind-accessible materials. They said, “We go to blind conventions and set up a dawah booth to talk to people about Islam and give them information about Islam in a way they can interact with.” They also hold workshops and family nights where they educate the Muslim community on how to properly and respectfully interact with those that are blind or disabled. 

If the work that they do is inspiring you to get involved, they offer many ways to support their cause. “They can help by volunteering to be at an exhibitors booth at a Muslim convention or a dawah booth at a blind convention, offering their skills and talents to Islam By Touch to help us grow, reaching out to their communities to let them know about our work, etc.”

You can also listen to and share their podcast, “Behind the Blind,” where they talk about their experiences navigating the world while being blind. But even more importantly, you can help by giving sadaqah or zakat to the organization. “We are in constant contact with blind Muslims from around the world and we know what our community needs to thrive. We just need the financial resources to get it done.” 

Something they feel most people should know is just how “neglected” and “underserved” blind Muslims are within the Muslim community. “Islam By Touch is the only organization in the world offering a multitude of services catering specifically to the blind community, all while perpetually struggling to survive because of the lack of financial support we receive. Muslims should be at the forefront of efforts like this and we are far, far from that.”

Let’s do better as a community to ensure that we’re not just taking surface-level steps to make our spaces inclusive, but are also supporting organizations that are, and always have been, dedicated to accessibility.

Visit Islam By Touch on their website here and be sure to follow them on their Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook pages where they post frequently about their work and their stories.