Noor Pervez was encouraged to apply for the Paul G. Hearne Award in 2021 by one of his colleagues. That same year, he won the award and went on to create the first chapter of an Easy Read, transliterated translation of the Holy Quran.
Easy Read is an accessible format of written language using pictures and easy-to-understand words. Easy Read materials make information easier to understand for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, as well as English language learners, people with language processing disabilities, and others who benefit from accessible resources.
In disability spaces, there are a lot of people like himself who are a part of marginalized faith communities and have diverse backgrounds, but do not get the tools or the funding necessary to lead their own projects or to be able to be change makers in their own communities, Pervez said.
“[This project was] trying to address these ways of incorporating and including disabled people into faith spaces, without segregating us, and without trying to make us into a separate, special thing or a charity project,” he said. “It’s taking a space that already exists, and it attempts to give folks tools to be able to exist in them, and in terms of being like a tool or a gateway, I think that that’s really important as something that you can give to faith spaces and to give to the community.”
Pervez said winning the award felt like an affirmation that the community is trying to actively include and incorporate more diverse perspectives and voices.
“There’s definitely a lot of overlap in terms of disabled folks from marginalized faith backgrounds and disabled Muslims. That community has always been there, but for a fairly long time, I feel like there’s been kind of an encouragement of the charity model, rather than of the social model of disability in these spaces,” he said. “So kind of trying to push for self-advocacy by and for disabled folks within Muslim spaces is kind of an aspect of connecting communities that I feel like this touches on pretty strongly.”
The project was a collaborative team effort, as staff members were brought on to help with the Easy Read translation. This was an opportunity for Pervez to develop his leadership skills. With a background in student organizing, he didn’t have much experience with leading his own team, but quickly rose to the challenge.
“I definitely feel like it’s kind of pushed me to learn more about how to teach other people, and it’s definitely taught me more about managing other people and managing both their expectations and schedules and my own,” he said.
Since receiving the award, Pervez said he has felt driven to look for gaps in mainstream understanding within the disability community and the overlap of marginalized communities. For example, he says he has seen very little representation from mainstream disability groups dealing with Indigenous issues.
“Because the Hearne [Award] has kind of pushed me to look at and see those gaps, it in turn has made me, both in my professional and in my broader disability advocacy life, ask more often and push more often for, ‘Okay, who is not in the room with us right now? What gaps are we not touching on in this conversation?’ or ‘What can we talk about that otherwise is going to get left out of the conversation? Whose voices can we platform? Who can we bring in?’”
By pushing forward, he hopes to show other disabled folks that people from marginalized backgrounds can succeed in the disability rights movement, and that the movement can continue to adapt and grow by incorporating more diverse perspectives.
“I think that continuing to be here, continuing to push and continuing, frankly, to not shut up, is a really critical part of trying to get more people from my varieties of marginalized backgrounds in the door,” he said. “I think in turn, once those people are there, being able to continue supporting them and to continue with mentorship, movement work … the landscape of the disability rights movement can continue adopting and growing and incorporating more voices because we need them badly.”
In reflecting on the disability rights movement, Pervez says he hopes it can go broader and deeper, by helping people understand disability through the social model and recognize that disability is not a distant concept, but rather something many people already experience or could experience.
“I think that as a movement, we do a good job of embracing people and pushing people once they’re here. I think that where we can sometimes struggle is figuring out how to build that bridge with folks who have no real understanding of disability history or no real sense of how they fit in, really,” he said. “I want us to make that connection. I want us to reach people and help them understand that we aren’t a separate thing, that we are them.”