New York City’s controversial first lady, Rama Duwaji, is co-hosting a pro-Palestinian all-female spiritual retreat where they will honor Jesus’ mother Mary, described as a “Palestinian woman giving birth under occupation.”
Duwaji, 29, will travel to the sold-out “spiritual” retreat in Corsica this week, where participants — most of them Muslim women — will pray at a 15th-century monastery for “our sisters in Palestine,” according to a report.
The event, starting July 9, is being organized by The Women Sanctuary, a Muslim-and-women-focused travel group run by Parisian designer Rym Nur.
In Corsica, attendees will “honor the legacy of Mary, the most honored woman in the Quran,” according to a description on the group’s website. The retreat, priced from $3,100 to $5,260 for a private “casita” with a living room, garden views and a private bathroom, features lectures, daily prayers and farm-to-table dining.
“At every prayer, lecture and meal, there was mention of our sisters in Palestine,” said a 2025 Vogue Arabia article about last year’s Corsican retreat, which was also held in celebration of the Virgin Mary, who is honored in both Christianity and Islam.
“At the heart of this retreat is the luminous legacy of Mary, the most honored woman in the Qur’an, chosen, purified, and elevated above all women of the worlds,” says the Women Sanctuary website.
“She is the only woman mentioned by name in the Qur’an — mentioned 34 times. Her story is not only one of divine motherhood, but of unwavering faith, sacred retreat, and total devotion to Allah.
“One guest… had just returned from Gaza’s Nasser Hospital, where she volunteered for a month to help deliver babies under bombardment. She spoke of mothers laboring through terror and of tender life arriving in the shadow of death,” wrote one attendee in the article for Vogue Arabia.
“It is not lost on us that Mary, too, was a Palestinian woman giving birth under occupation. In the Qur’an, she cries out in anguish, ‘I wish I had died before this and had been long forgotten,’” she added.
Scholars are wary of the politicization of the divine memory of Mary and placing her in a modern context.
“It’s historically complicated,” said Rachel Fulton Brown, a history professor at the University of Chicago and the author of “Mary and the Art of Prayer: The Hours of the Virgin in Medieval Christian Life and Thought.”
“Trying to pretend that now is 2,000 years ago is not helpful to anyone,” she continued. “It’s not going to help us deal with the situation in Gaza.”
Last year, Nur gave each participant a handmade keffiyeh, created by New York-based Palestinian designer Sarah Musa, who sends 100 percent of the profits from the sale of select styles of keffiyehs to the Palestine Red Crescent Society and the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund, according to her website.
The Palestine Red Crescent Society has been criticized by the Israeli military for alleged ties to Hamas in Gaza. The California-based Palestine Children’s Relief Fund has also been accused of links to the terrorist group, according to NGO Monitor, a Jerusalem-based research group that studies nonprofits that do work in the region.
The PCRF said it “complies with US laws checking all individuals and agencies against terrorist organization lists published by the US Treasury Department,” to prevent donations reaching Hamas. Palestine Red Crescent Society says it is an independent body which complies with international protocol and has denied it has any links to Hamas.
“Nur gifted each guest a keffiyeh from Palestinian designer Sarah Musa, which we donned while praying on the grass, laughing at the dinner table and on journeys for espresso to the nearby village,” said the Vogue Arabia article about the 2025 retreat.
The retreat is taking place on an island that, unlike most of France, has not wavered in its support for Israel, especially after the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack that left 1,200 Israelis dead, the leader of the island’s nationalist movement told The Post Monday.
“Corsica is the only French department during the [Nazi] occupation during the Second World War that did not deport any Jews, which is why it was named ‘the island of the just,’” said Nicolas Battini, the direcor of Mossa Palatina, a conservative political movement he founded in 2024.
Battini, whose party is now allied to France’s right-wing National Movement, added that islanders are very pro-Israel and have a “conflicted” relationship with Islam. In the past, Duwaji has “liked” posts celebrating Hamas and created an illustration for an anti-Israel article.
Despite Duwaji’s anti-Israel views, “she is free to participate in the events that she pleases” on the island, Battini told The Post. “Her presence in Corsica raises neither approbation nor enthusiasm.
In addition to Corsica, which is in its second year in the Women’s Sanctuary program, the group organizes retreats in Tanzania, Portugal and Spain, according to its website.
Last weekend, Syrian-American artist and illustrator Duwaji ditched America’s 250th anniversary celebrations to jet off to the Women Sanctuary’s earlier retreat on the Spanish island of Mallorca, where she was the “artist-in-residence” at a sold-out “Plants Of The Quran” workshop.
The retreat revolves around sacred flora mentioned in Islamic texts through art, botanical workshops, and spiritual reflection, according to the group’s website.
