About Omer Bajwa

He grew up, as he puts it, acutely aware of being both a religious and an ethnic minority. His grandfather, a veterinarian in the colonial civil service who left government work to run a dispensary for villagers, was the family’s model of devotion. Childhood trips to Karachi and Lahore, arranged by his father to keep the children close to their roots, became what he now calls a spiritual awakening.

At Binghamton University he arrived open-minded about medicine, took an introductory literary theory class, fell in love with literature and philosophy, and abandoned pre-med in his first year, to his parents’ dismay. He graduated in English Literature and Rhetoric in 1998. Every summer and winter break he lived at a traditional Islamic seminary in Buffalo, seeking the company of scholars. He still calls it the turning point of his life.

He went to Cornell to become a journalist. His master’s thesis in communication, “Negative Media Coverage of Islam,” examined how the Western press framed Muslims before September 11th. Then the attacks came. With no mosque and no Muslim clergy in Ithaca, the Near Eastern Studies department’s phones rang off the hook, and a graduate student found himself explaining Islam in school gymnasiums, public libraries, churches and radio studios across the Finger Lakes. He stayed on for a second master’s in Near Eastern Studies and began a doctorate, mentored by Professor Shawkat Toorawa, who told him to think hard about what to do with his gifts.

The academy began to feel isolating. Toorawa put him in touch with Ingrid Mattson at Hartford Seminary, who described a job he had never heard of: campus chaplaincy, the meeting point of community work and the university. He enrolled in 2007, served that year as Cornell’s first Muslim chaplain, and in 2008 was chosen in a national search as Yale’s first full-time Coordinator of Muslim Life. He finished his chaplaincy certificate in 2010.

At Yale he built the Muslim Life program from a single part-time role into a full chaplaincy: weekly Jumu’ah, study circles, halal dinners, an Eid banquet that now fills a hall, a conference that draws students from across the Ivy League, and a pilgrimage fund so that money never decides who goes to Mecca. In 2022 he and three colleagues published Mantle of Mercy, the first collective account of Islamic chaplaincy written by its practitioners.

He lives in New Haven with his wife, Lisa Kinney-Bajwa, and their children, as residential fellows of Timothy Dwight College. He is fond of long hikes and has strong opinions about local desserts.