Meet our Fellows

Naz Georgas, Cordoba House

New York, New York

Creating a new model of faith education and community building

Naz Georgas

Cordoba House Sunday school offers a different model for teaching the stories of the Koran to American Muslim children and families. Founded by Naz Georgas, the Sunday School uses teaching strategies from both the Christian and Jewish traditions to develop curriculum for children’s spiritual education.

Naz Georgas describes her mission to ““shape faith-based communities that embody a universal understanding and are focused particularly on fostering values of compassion, pluralism and spiritual development that unite all human beings.”  A results-focused community builder with over twenty years of experience in Interfaith and Muslim grassroots leadership, Georgas uses her experience as a “global citizen’ who grew up in a number of different cultures as the child of a diplomat to create a new model for education and community building.

 “Through Cordoba House, I started programs that were specifically geared and tailored towards bringing an American-syle pluralistic, compassionate, spiritual identity to the Muslim community; to form leadership programs that would have the specific objective of building a Muslim identity that is American but also authentically Islamic. We’re not changing Islam but we’re saying that Islam is a religion that is pluralistic. Compassion is at the core of it.”

On the day Invested Faith chatted with Georgas, she was in a hijab, ready to head out to a Jewish holy day service, a small detail that reflected the interfaith aspect of her work.

About Naz Georgas

Born in Bangladesh, Georgas grew up as the child of a diplomat, moving every three years and living in nine different countries – including the former Yugoslavia, Kuwait, Egypt, France, India, Australia, Japan and the US. and moving every three to four years. “I finished primary school in Paris, then moved to Calcutta and then to Australia where I went to high school in Sydney and Canberra. Throughout all those moves and starting off from scratch in a new environment every three years, one thing that anchored me was the face of God.”

Seeking a career, Georgas knew that she wanted to be some kind of a minister; however, for Muslim women, that was not allowed. There’s no such thing as a female Imam. And back then, there were no programs or chaplaincy .

Georgas ended up in New York for graduate school at Columbia University, completing a degree in international relations. She went on to work for the United Nations for 7 years. She also worked for UN affiliated not-for-profits, including the National Council of Women and the World Council of Churches.

Her husband was transferred to Singapore in 2007 and the family lived there seven years and had their third child.  “Singapore is the kind of place where everybody's International and international schools are everywhere. They're Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, Jews, Hindus - it's a very multicultural society. Every neighborhood, had a mosque in the on their block.”

 After returning to New York, Georgas felt called to begin a program for children and families. In many mosques, women are not allowed to be leaders or to be taught and children learn the Koran through memorization. “Teaching children and families is new for the Muslim community.” 

In 2013, a Muslim Interfaith group known as The Cordoba Iniative (TCI) hired Georgas as their faith and community affairs director. In 2015, she launched Cordoba House, an innovative Sunday school program designed in collaboration with leading Islamic and multi-faith educators, with only seven families. Islamic scholars, including Dr. Susan Douglass of Georgetown, helped Georgas translate Islamic values into contemporary language.

Rebecaa Hutto from Brick Presbyterian in NY gave her a tour of their children’s program and helped her begin to create lesson plans based on shared faith stories. Educators from the Jewish tradition also shared ideas for helping children not only learn the stories but strategies for engaging with them. The need for music, new to Muslim religious education, was emphasized and Georgas hired an African American music director to help develop music for the new school.

“What we found most amazing was the similarity of the stories in the Judeo-Islamic-Christian story – like Noah and Abraham. We brought in music and activities and cutting edge activities on teaching the Quran which embodied the stories rather than simply memorizing them. This was very new, very innovative in Islamic teaching for children.”

The school accepts teachers from all backgrounds and has now won awards for community building. Prior to the pandemic, the school served 67 children, using space in a Jewish synagogue, using Presbyterian modeled curriculum and teaching Muslim theology.

“We live in a pluralistic world. Education of any kind should not provide a dichotomous model. Education needs to open up people’s being.”

“I have learned two things. One is that that God is eternal, and no matter what changes around you, your relationship with God is ever growing. It's eternal. And if you can find that place within you, no matter how much the wind blows on the outside, and how much the dust is around you or if you have a whirlwind around you, within you, you have inner calm and assurance. The second thing is that I found is that people who are kind, people who are open-minded, people who do not judge or belittle others because of their race or religion are present in societies everywhere. That’s where I found a niche for myself  - where connection to God is authentic.”