Born in 1954 in Johor, Malaysia, part of the peninsular Malaysia, Zainah Anwar started her career studying journalism after completing her SPM (end of secondary school exams). After completing her degree, she took a job working with the the prominent New Straits Times paper. She studied at Boston University in the US to get another Masters before returning to her home country to work in advocacy. In 1987, she was among a group of lawyers and journalists who began to study issues Muslim Women were facing in the court system. This work was the start of the organization Sisters in Islam, officially founded in 1990, which was founded to challenge laws that used Islam to discriminate against women. She went on to become the leader of this prominent NGO and under her leadership @sistersinislam.my went on to address a number of issues, including democracy, human rights and constitutionalism. For her work, she named one of the Top 10 Influential Muslim Women by the International Museum of Women. Her work focused on addressing the diversity of interpretations of Islam, citing that for far too long, the interpretations had been left to men, who tended to interpret the Quran and the Hadith, in ways that were discriminatory to minority groups. Her activism work meant she was criticized heavily in her home country of Malaysia, but popular abroad, especially in other Muslim countries, like Iran. She had addressed a number of forums overseas and domestically, including the World Economic Forum in Switzerland, lecture series in Singapore, and Harvard University. Currently she is the Director if Musawah, a global movement for quality and justice in the Muslim family and continues to write in a monthly column called Sharing the Nation, addressing politics, human rights, and women’s rights issues.