Daisy Khan

Daisy Khan
Born	Jammu and Kashmir, India
Nationality	American
Known for	Executive Director of Women's Islamic Initiative for Spirituality and Equality (WISE)

Daisy Khan is the Executive Director of the Women's Islamic Initiative for Spirituality and Equality (WISE), a women-led organization committed to peacebuilding, equality, and justice for Muslims around the world. Khan is a frequent media commentator on topics such as Muslim women's rights, Islam in America, Islamophobia, and violent extremism.

Daisy Khan was born in the foothills of the Himalayas in the state of Jammu and Kashmir, India. Khan was raised in a Muslim household that was both traditional and forward-looking, where education was highly valued.

Khan attended a Christian missionary school, St. Patrick’s Presentation Convent School. In an environment with an amalgam of Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims – harmony, tolerance and unity of religious believers was the primary mantra of her Kashmiri childhood.

Khan’s grandfather, Ghulam Hassan Khan, was a powerful influence in her life. The chief engineer for the state of Kashmir, he studied civil engineering at Harvard in the 1920s and he encouraged his children and grandchildren to pursue the best education available regardless of locale.

At the age of 16 with the support of her parents, Khan left for the United States to pursue an education in art and design. She arrived on Long Island, and lived in Jericho with an aunt and uncle.

After high school, she earned a degree from the New York School of Interior Design. In her early 20s, she decamped to Manhattan and embraced the professional life, pulling 80-hour weeks as an architectural designer.

Through this period, Khan continued wrestling with Islam: she was forced to juxtapose the peaceful Islam of her childhood memories with the violent struggles portrayed by the media during the rise of the Iranian Revolution of 1979.

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Wikipedia