The nurse who secured a fatwa to save Muslim infants

Early in her nursing career, Munira MaalimIsaq walked into a patient’s room, ready to provide care. Before she could speak, the patient turned her away.

“Nope,” the patient told another nurse, “that girl with the scarf cannot come in.”

In that moment, Munira’s license and her skills didn’t matter. All the patient saw was her hijab. 

The hospital staff quietly reassigned her. No one checked on her. No one defended her right to be there.

It was her first lesson in the realities of being a visible Muslim woman in American healthcare. 

That moment of disempowerment, however, would not define Munira. Instead, it set the course for her entire career: one dedicated not just to treating patients, but to fighting for their dignity and changing the systems that failed them.

The origin of that resilience isn’t found in a hospital, but in the memory of a nine-year-old girl in Fargo, North Dakota.

Munira arrived from Kenya to a world of snow and endless vanilla ice cream from a kind social worker.

But her new life was soon overshadowed by a serious health problem. Doctors diagnosed her with latent tuberculosis and prescribed a powerful medication she had to take every day for nine months, with little explanation.

The pills made her sick, but her mother’s instructions were firm: “If we're going to be here, you have to take it.”

“I hated the idea of just having to take something and not understanding it,” Munira recalls.

That feeling of helplessness became a quiet promise she made to her younger self: if she ever went into healthcare, she would be a partner to her patients, ensuring they always had a voice in their own healing.

That desire to partner with patients would define Munira’s career. 

Her first test came during a clinical rotation in nursing school, assigned to a detox center where the system was a revolving door for the older Somali men who comprised most of the patients.

Munira saw the deeper problem, one she would later detail in her academic research: in the Somali community, alcoholism was often seen not as a disease, but as a moral failing. This led to intense stigmatization, leaving the men as outcasts with no formal system of support. 

When she discovered there wasn't a single certified, Muslim-led recovery group in Minnesota, she became certified herself while still a student.

Her next step was to find a home for the group, a place where the men would feel both safe and spiritually supported. So she approached three different masjids for a space. Two refused. One reluctantly agreed on the condition of secrecy.

With that fragile foothold, she started with 10 men from the detox center. Within months, 68 men were attending every Wednesday.

The weekly meetings were just the beginning. 

Munira soon began bringing in resources, from police officers who could help the men get their licenses back, to eventually empowering one of them to lead the group himself.

That man, she says with pride, is still clean and working the same job she helped him secure years ago.

Having proven she could build something from nothing on the outside, Munira turned her attention to changing the system from within. She started by listening to her patients, her colleagues, and the quiet frustrations of the hospital floor, soon identifying troubling patterns.

She learned of the "aggression flag," a label disproportionately applied to Black patients, including those from the Somali community, that followed them through the healthcare system like a felony. 

She saw how families in crisis were misunderstood. A Somali father, terrified by an advanced directive, a form that would decide his dying son's end-of-life care, found security repeatedly called on him.

Munira recognized these weren't isolated incidents, but symptoms of a systemic failure.

She interviewed 75 immigrant families about the confusing medical forms and redesigned them with culturally relevant options, like designating a mosque for burial. 

Her advocacy eventually led the hospital to hire its first in-house Muslim chaplain, a position that took 18 months of persistence to create.

But her most complex challenge arrived as a life-or-death question pitting modern medicine against Islamic tradition.

One day, a neonatalist called her in a panic: a mother of premature quintuplets, one of whom had just died, was refusing life-saving donor breast milk for her surviving infants.

She was afraid it could unintentionally create kinship under Islamic law, which carries marriage and family implications.

Munira recognized this wasn't just about one family; it was a systemic issue that would happen again. She knew a lasting solution was required, one that honored both faith and medical necessity.

Her first step was to build a bridge between the two worlds.

She secured a grant and began a months-long process of convening more than 10 Islamic scholars to meet with medical experts from leading local hospitals.

She educated the scholars on the science: pasteurized donor breast milk is medicinal, pooled from multiple anonymous donors, and given in such small amounts that it doesn’t meet the Islamic criteria for creating kinship (at least five full feedings from a single woman).

At the same time, she counseled the medical team on the importance of patience, respecting the scholars' need for weeks of careful deliberation.

The result of this collaboration was a landmark fatwa from the Minnesota Islamic Council, affirming the use of donor breast milk to save a child's life.

Still, Munira knew a document alone wasn't a solution. The challenge was in the delivery. A well-intentioned, non-Muslim nurse trying to explain a complex Islamic ruling to a distressed mother was a recipe for conflict. It would sound as if an outsider were lecturing them on their faith. The family's guard would go up, and the life-saving advice would be rejected.

The messenger, she realized, was as important as the message.

So she designed a simple solution. Instead of forcing nurses to become religious experts, she gave them a QR code. Their only job was to say, "Hey, there was a fatwa made by Muslim scholars. Would you like to watch it?"

This act put the power back into the parents' hands. They could scan the code and watch a short video in English, Somali, or Arabic, featuring a sheikh, a trusted and authoritative voice, who explained the ruling.

By removing the potential for conflict, she allowed the life-saving message to be heard.

The impact was immediate and global. 

After a single press conference, over 500 emails flooded in from around the world.

The most powerful validation came recently in a call from a local hospital. A mother of premature twins had initially refused donor milk. After the hospital staff showed her the video, she said yes.

Still, Munira knew that fixing a flawed system from the inside has its limits. To truly provide the care her community deserved, she had to build a new one from the ground up.

On July 23, she left her distinguished career at HealthPartners, one of the largest healthcare providers in Minnesota, to devote her energy to Inspire Change Clinic, an organization she founded, built on a simple yet revolutionary premise: what if healthcare weren't rushed?

Her clinic focuses on preventative care, nutrition, and patient education, the very activities large institutions often sideline. It’s a space where clinicians drink tea with patients, and the goal is not volume, but empowerment.

When asked for her advice to young Muslim professionals, her message is clear. Start with a strong foundation. Know your values. Know your mission. And most importantly, know yourself.

“As selfish as it may seem,” she advises, “once you know yourself, you're less likely to let the system change you. Instead, you change the system.”

For Munira, that foundation of self-knowledge is what empowers a professional to take practical, system-changing action. It means speaking up strategically, in safe spaces. It means building a village of allies because, as she notes, "you cannot do this work by yourself." And above all, it means seeing the work through, especially when it gets ugly.

She recalls her send-off party, the day she was leaving the hospital system for good. Her colleagues stood up and listed all the system-wide changes she had led. Her daughter, who was also there, later wrote her a card.

Using the Somali word for mom, the message read: "Hooyo, I'm proud."

That self-knowledge, the kind that earns a daughter’s pride, is built on integrity. It is the lesson of a nine-year-old girl who was once a powerless patient, now embodied in the principle that has become the foundation of her entire clinic: true healing begins with trust.