Zara Kay

Faithless Hijabi was involved with the case of Rahaf Mohammed, the 18-year-old Saudi Arabian woman who managed to escape from her family in January 2019, but was held by Thai authorities at Bangkok Airport, after which she was able to raise international pressure via social media to allow her continue to Canada.

Kay founded Faithless Hijabi (FH) in 2018 in Sydney. Faithless Hijabi is a storytelling platform that enables ex-Muslim and questioning Muslim women to share their stories of apostasy, doubt and freedom. While being a platform that creates safe spaces for women to express their dissent, Faithless Hijabi strives to take an active role in advocating for women's rights. FH is active on numerous social media in order to enable people to reach out for help. At present, the organisation primarily publishes stories and blogs in English, but has recently launched their Arabic social media pages. FH's mission is "Educate through stories," and "to empower an underrepresented group of women."

After about 3½ years in Malaysia, when she was nineteen, Kay moved to Australia in 2012 in order to continue her studies at the Australian campus of Monash University in Melbourne. There, she finished her bachelor's degree in information technology and her master's degree in business information systems at the age of twenty-one. Kay got a job as an engineer for an IT company in Melbourne, and then worked as a technical support engineer at Google in Sydney until 2018, the same year in which she also became an Australian citizen. She relocated to London in 2019.

Although she began to not wear a hijab in 2011 when she was eighteen, Kay still identified as a Muslim, and says she "even went on pilgrimage (ziyarat)" to visit Shia Islamic holy sites in Iran (including Qom and Mashhad) in 2011 and Iraq in 2013.

Zara Kay (born 1992) is a Tanzanian-born ex-Muslim atheist, secular activist and women's rights activist, based in London. She is the founder of Faithless Hijabi, an international non-profit organisation that seeks to support the rights of Muslim-raised women, especially those who are in the process of leaving or have left Islam.

Kay was born in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania in 1992, and raised as a Khoja Twelver Shia Muslim. The languages of English, Gujarati, Swahili, and Kutchi were spoken at home, but not Arabic. Her mother is Kenyan, her father is Tanzanian. Her parents were conservative Muslims; she has four sisters and one brother. She began wearing the hijab from the age of eight, because she "wanted to be more pure, I wanted God to love me more." In hindsight, she said "that's not a choice. That is coercion."