Sixteen women arrived from across England and Scotland. Most had never met each other. Most had never met the woman they had travelled to see. It began with an almost casual invitation. Ms Sadia Ramzan had posted on a Facebook community for Muslim women about an upcoming trip to Northern Ireland, sharing where she was going and where she would be staying. Anyone who wanted to join her was welcome. Sixteen women did. “Something had driven those women to leave their homes, book their travel and meet a group of strangers,” recalls Ramzan. “That was the moment I realised this was more than an online community. Muslim women wanted to see the world, but they also wanted to do it in a space where they felt understood.”
That spontaneous gathering would help transform an online community Ramzan founded in 2015 into The Muslim Women Travel Group (MWTG), which has since taken more than a thousand women around the world. Yet the story behind its growth says something larger about how Muslim women are travelling today. The destination matters, of course. But increasingly, so does the community found along the way. For Ramzan, travel had always been a personal passion. She was fortunate, she says, to have a family that supported her travelling independently. But after she began wearing the hijab, something shifted. “When I began wearing the hijab and became visibly Muslim, my experience of travel changed,” she says. She began searching for other independent travellers who looked like her, women with whom she could exchange not only recommendations for hotels and destinations, but also answers to the smaller questions that can shape the experience of a journey: Where could she find halal food? Where could she pray? What would she wear? How would she navigate a destination as a visibly Muslim woman? “I could not find Muslim women discussing things such as halal food, prayer, modest clothing or how it felt to navigate certain destinations while visibly Muslim.” So she created the community she could not find.
There is a particular kind of freedom that comes from not having to explain yourself. For Muslim women travelling in conventional groups, Ramzan says, seemingly small moments can become unexpectedly tiring. “I sometimes felt awkward being the only person asking whether food was halal or whether we could stop so I could pray,” she remembers. Then there were questions surrounding modesty. Someone might wonder why she did not swim, for example, without understanding that a hijab extends beyond the scarf covering a woman's hair. “It influences choices about clothing, privacy, shared accommodation and certain activities and facilities,” she says.
Ramzan began imagining a different kind of travel experience, one in which those considerations had already been made. “I wanted to build MWTG so women would not always have to be the person who asks,” she says. “They should not have to ask twice whether prayer has been considered, whether the food is halal or whether they will feel comfortable taking part in an activity. We think about those things before they arrive.” That consideration can take surprisingly practical forms. Prayer times are incorporated into itineraries. Halal food or appropriate alternatives are researched in advance. In Kosovo, MWTG has privately hired spa and swimming facilities so women could enjoy them comfortably. For an activity such as diving, a female instructor can make the experience more accessible for a woman who may need physical assistance in the water.
Yet Ramzan is equally adamant about what Muslim-friendly travel should not mean: assuming that Muslim women are all the same. “The foundation is no judgement,” she says. A woman may wear hijab, jilbab or niqab, or none of them. She may pray regularly or not. She may be drawn to luxury hotels, adventure travel, history, wellness or the outdoors. MWTG's responsibility, Ramzan says, is not to determine how a woman practises her faith but to create an environment in which the choice remains hers. “If a Muslim woman does not pray, that is her choice. If she chooses to eat something different, that is also her choice. Our responsibility is to ensure that suitable provision is available.” It is a distinction that challenges one of the most persistent shortcomings in the way the wider travel industry has approached Muslim travellers: accommodating faith is not the same thing as defining a woman by it. “Muslim women are also too often treated as one homogenous group,” Ramzan says. “We differ in our cultures, lifestyles, budgets and levels of religious practice. A Muslim budget traveller will have different expectations from a Muslim luxury traveller.” What they share is not sameness, but an understanding.
Perhaps that explains why women who begin a journey as strangers can become close so quickly. “Commonality creates connection,” Ramzan says. The women arriving for a trip may span generations and nationalities. One may be an introvert, another an extrovert. Their relationships with their faith may look different. Their careers, cultures and lives at home may have little in common. And yet certain things need no explanation. “An introvert and an extrovert may approach a trip very differently, but when prayer time comes, they understand what the other needs,” Ramzan says. “That sense of being understood helps people lower their guard, and connections form quickly.”
Travel accelerates intimacy in other ways too. The moments that stay with us when we return home are rarely ordinary ones. Perhaps it was the first time we jumped from a boat into impossibly blue water, watched the sun disappear behind a landscape we had only previously seen in photographs, or attempted something we were convinced we could not do. The person standing beside us becomes part of that memory. “Travel creates powerful shared memories, and those memories connect people,” Ramzan says. “When a moment makes you feel alive, peaceful or proud of yourself, the women who shared it become part of that memory.” “That is how strangers become friends and how a trip becomes a sisterhood.”
For women nervous about joining a group in which they know nobody, Ramzan offers a reassuring truth. “Almost everyone else is thinking the same thing.” Every MWTG trip therefore has a group lead whose role extends beyond keeping the itinerary running smoothly. She watches for the woman who has become quiet, the traveller struggling to settle in, or someone who needs a little reassurance. Ramzan has another name for the role: “good vibes coordinator”.
Ramzan's definition of success is unusual. For the founder of a group travel business, it does not necessarily mean keeping women dependent on group travel. Quite the opposite. “I never want a woman to believe that she can only see the world if our group takes her,” she says. Some women return trip after trip because they enjoy the friendships, convenience and sense of sisterhood. Others initially join because travelling with a group gives them the reassurance they need to take a first step. Eventually, Ramzan hopes some will take the next one on their own. “I want women to find their people,” she says. “I want them to meet women they would never ordinarily have encountered, gain confidence and then travel in whatever way feels right for them.” “Empowerment means giving women more choices, not making them dependent upon us.” It is a philosophy that also pushes against familiar assumptions surrounding Muslim women and independence.
Ramzan still encounters people who ask whether husbands are “all right” with Muslim women travelling. “It is an extraordinary generalisation,” she says. “It assumes, firstly, that every woman is married and, secondly, that Muslim women do not make independent decisions.” The more interesting conversation, she believes, is not whether Muslim women are travelling; they are, but whether the travel industry truly understands them as travellers. “Muslim women are not waiting for permission to participate,” she says. “We are already travelling, spending, creating and leading.”
And sometimes travel becomes about something much more intimate than independence. One traveller's story has remained with Ramzan. Later in life, the woman had reconnected with a man she had known years earlier. Their lives had taken different paths, and both had married other people, but after their respective divorces, they found one another again and married in their forties. Their time together was devastatingly short. He became seriously ill, and she cared for him until he died. They had always planned to travel to Jordan together. Before his death, she promised him that one day she would still go.
After completing her iddah, the Islamic waiting period following the death of a husband, she came across an MWTG trip to Jordan. The timing seemed almost providential. She wanted to honour the promise she had made but did not know whether she was ready to undertake the journey alone. With the practical details arranged and other women around her, she went. “She had honoured a promise to her husband, but she had also taken an important first step back into her own life,” Ramzan recalls. The group could not remove her grief, nor was that the intention. “We did not take that grief away,” Ramzan says, “but we gave her a safe and supported way to do something she had never believed she would be able to do.” For Ramzan, it crystallised something about travel that no itinerary could adequately describe. “Travel can represent courage, healing, remembrance and the beginning of finding yourself again.”
More than a decade after Ramzan first searched online for Muslim women travellers and could not find the community she wanted, the landscape looks markedly different. But visibility alone is no longer enough. “Representation is not simply about photographing Muslim women in beautiful destinations,” she says. “In today's world, it is about Muslim women having a meaningful role in shaping the travel industry: designing trips, leading groups, building businesses, influencing decisions and deciding how our stories are told.” That distinction feels important. Because perhaps the evolution taking place is not simply about Muslim women travelling more visibly. It is about women determining for themselves what those journeys should look like, where they want to go, what they need when they arrive, and who they want beside them along the way.
Ramzan hopes the question will eventually change altogether. “I want Muslim women to see the whole world as somewhere they are entitled to explore,” she says. “I want a woman to look at a destination and ask, ‘How can I make this happen?’ rather than, ‘Is this really for someone like me?’” Perhaps that is what lies beyond the destination: not simply seeing somewhere new, but finding a community that makes the world feel a little more open, and then carrying that confidence into the next journey.
