Debra Majeed

Majeed died from complications due to surgery on March 20, 2022 in Charlotte, North Carolina. She was 68 years old.

Majeed was the first Black woman and first Muslim to be tenured in the history of the college. She held the title of Edwin F. Wilde Jr. Distinguished Service Professor. She retired from teaching in 2020 and became Beloit's first Black and Muslim professor to achieve Emeritus status.

Majeed is best known for her 2016 work, Polygyny: What It Means When African American Muslim Women Share Their Husbands, an ethnography studying Muslim followers of W.D. Muhammad. Her book approaches polygyny from a Muslim womanist perspective. Majeed advocated for and invented the term "Muslim womanism", a recognition of what it means to be simultaneously Black, Muslim, and a woman. Majeed was critical of the centering of Christian women and perspectives in womanist thought. Her work dealt with issues of race, marriage and family life, gender, and family law.

She briefly taught American religion at Loyola University Chicago. In 1999, Majeed took a position teaching philosophy and religious studies at Beloit College in Beloit, Wisconsin.

She converted to Islam in 1998 at age 42 while studying the appeal of Islam to Black American men in Chicago in a joint doctoral program with Northwestern University and Garrett-Evangelical Seminary.

Debra Mubashshir Majeed (January 7, 1954 – March 20, 2022) was an American religious historian, activist and womanist.

Debra Majeed was born in 1954 to an African-American Catholic family, but later became a Protestant. At 16, her family moved to Los Angeles.