First Muslim sorority hopes to form chapters across USA

[Orrin_73]

By Donna Leinwand, USA TODAY
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Christine Ortiz slips quietly from the Muslim prayer room on the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and into a group of squealing young women. Some of them are Ortiz's Muslim sisters, the undergraduate pals who embraced her when she converted to Islam from her family's Roman Catholicism.

Less than a year after she graduated from MIT, Ortiz, 23, has returned to campus on a chilly night to help introduce them to a new concept in Muslim sisterhood: the first Muslim-oriented sorority, Gamma Gamma Chi.

Muslim women at MIT, the University of Kentucky, Rutgers, the University of Maryland-Baltimore and the University of Southern California have expressed interest in Gamma Gamma Chi, says founder and President Althia Collins, who owns an educational consulting business in Alexandria, Va.

Xenia Tariq, 19, a freshman at Kentucky whose family moved to the USA from Pakistan, attended the sorority's recent seminar in Lexington and applied to join. She has been spreading the word among her Muslim girlfriends and hopes the university will have a chapter by fall. "I guess the appeal was that it is the first ever Muslim sorority," Tariq says. "I was thinking this is going to be really cool and groundbreaking, and I wanted to be a part of it."

Thats very interesting, a muslim female sorority!

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

1. Soroities often do good work

and I know that they can be a "home away from home" with support for their sisters. I hope this is how Gamma Gamma Chi turns out.