Munawwar "Meena" Jehan Khan

Munawwar "Meena" Jehan Khan

Munawwar "Meena" Jehan Khan, founder of the first Islamic library in Ohio and advocate for Muslim-American civic engagement, died peacefully on April 10 at her home surrounded by her loving family. She was 76.

A professor of Library Administration and active member of the Toledo Muslim community, Meena began fundraising to establish a library at the Islamic Center of Greater Toledo in 1982. Eventually, she transformed a large empty room on the second floor into the first Islamic library in the state, complete with English and Arabic titles and a card catalogue system she built. As a professional librarian, she donated thousands of hours to the maintenance and operation of the library for over a decade. In later years, as other mosques and churches opened in the city and across Ohio, she lent her expertise to help those communities begin their own libraries as well.

Meena always cared about politics, but the increasing level of discrimination against Muslim-Americans in the aftermath of 9/11 and her strong opposition to the Iraq War, motivated her to become politically engaged. In 2003, Meena dedicated herself to mobilizing Muslim voters across Ohio, spending months travelling to mosques in Toledo, Cleveland, Columbus, and Cincinnati to hold voter registration drives. That year, the Ohio chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations recognized her for her work, noting that thirty percent of the completed voter registration cards they'd received as part of their statewide voter mobilization campaign, came from her efforts. A lifelong Democrat, she was elected as an Ohio delegate for Dennis Kucinich during the 2004 Democratic presidential primaries and took her family to knock on doors for democratic candidates in every election cycle since.

Meena arrived in the U.S. from India in 1963 on a student visa to attend the University of Toledo. At the time, the country maintained a strict and discriminatory immigration quota system, allowing only 100 Indians to immigrate per year. As one of the earliest, and likely the first South Asian woman in the city, she quickly understood the importance of intercultural exchange and joined the International Students Association of Toledo, helping to organize multicultural nights on campus. A natural leader, she served as secretary and then president of the student group. It was the beginning of a lifetime commitment to intercultural and interfaith exchange in Toledo. In later years, Meena regularly spoke about her faith and Indian heritage at local schools and churches. She was the treasurer and only Muslim member of her local Church and Synagogue Library Association chapter and taught an introduction to Islam course at Lourdes College in their Lifelong Learning Program. In 2003, she contributed a chapter about the history of Muslims in Ohio to the book "Religion in Ohio," a book commissioned by the Ohio Bicentennial Commission to celebrate the state's diversity of religions and faith traditions.

Meena was born in 1942 in Kathgodam, India, a small village in the foothills of the Kumaon Himalayas. Her father Abdul Rehman Khan owned a successful transportation company while her mother Shah Jehan Khan took care of their large family, which eventually grew to include twelve children. Two older sisters died from illness in their youth, leaving Meena as one of two surviving girls along with her eight brothers.

After the Partition of British India in 1947, the family fled to the Muslim-controlled Indian state of Rampur where Meena attended an all-girls high school. Upon completion, she enrolled at the prestigious Aligarh Muslim University where she graduated with a bachelor's degree in Economics, Political Science, and Geography. Like several of her brothers before her, she then applied for and received admission to the University of Toledo, where she earned a second bachelor's degree in Education in 1970 and a Master's degree in Library Science in 1971.

To support herself and help her family, Meena got a job working as a student assistant in the University library system with a starting wage of seventy-five cents an hour. Over the next thirty-four years, she worked her way up from student assistant to librarian, eventually retiring in 2000 in a faculty position as an Assistant Professor of Library Administration and serving as the Head of Information Services at the Learning Resource Center at the University of Toledo's Community and Technical College. Meena was loved by her colleagues and adored by the many student assistants she employed over the years. She cared deeply about her student workers, several of whom attribute their decision to become librarians to their time with her. In the 1980s, when America became largely inhospitable to Iranians because of the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis, Meena made a point of hiring Iranian students to work in the library and helping them in any way she could, becoming a second mother to them.

Outside of her professional and community work, Meena was an avid gardener with a green thumb. She kept her patio adorned with young seedlings and lush greenery which she loved taking care of. A talented cook, her kitchen was the hub of the entire family and the weekly meeting place for her extended family to congregate. She was a caring and loyal friend, always willing to go out of her way to help anyone in need. Despite all the work she put in to her community, Meena was most devoted to her family. She took in and cared for her bedridden mother for six years, all while raising her young family and advancing in her career. More recently, when her brother Ahmad's health deteriorated, she stepped up and took care of him in his final years as well. Meena was the glue and the matriarch of her large and sprawling family, holding together its disparate parts, the only person who could. By far though, she was most proud of the family she built with her husband of fifty years. An incredibly loving and generous mother, she readily joined her kids' silly dance parties, took off from work to be a parent driver on class field trips, and always had a big plate of fresh cut vegetables waiting for them in the kitchen when they came home from school.

Carrying on her memory with love are her husband, Abdul Hafeez Khan; daughters, Zeba Khan and Zeenat (Omar Siddiqui) Khan; son, Zia (Shazia Sheikh) Khan; brothers, Nasr (the late Karen Butler Morley) Khan, Habib (Beverly) Khan, Usman Khan, Shaukat (Malka) Khan, Azmat (Shehnaz) Khan, and Amir (Shahida) Khan; and her five granddaughters. Also carrying on her legacy are her 26 nieces and nephews and 34 great-nieces and nephews, as well as many cousins and friends. She was preceded in death by her parents; sister, Zohra (the late Samdani) Khan; brothers, Aman (the late Molly Andrews) Khan and Ahmad Khan.

Funeral services were held April 11, 2019 at the Islamic Center of Greater Toledo in Perrysburg followed by burial at Ottawa Hills Memorial Park in Toledo. Memorial contributions may be made to the Islamic Center of Greater Toledo, which Meena was a member of for over fifty years. Funeral arrangements were entrusted to Witzler-Shank Funeral Home, Perrysburg, Ohio.