When I first read the BBC’s article on Tajik women who are left destitute because their Islamic marriages (nikaah) were not recognized by the secular government in Tajikistan, I have to admit that I cringed and felt a bit defensive. Here was another story portraying Muslim women as poor victims of Muslim men but, even […]

This post was written by Farah Banihali and originally published at Nuseiba. For another perspective on Persson’s documentary, check out Alicia’s article from a few weeks ago. Iran has always been a country I’d love to sit down and read up on. When I first started university, I wrote a (terrible) essay on the causes […]

The Fédération des femmes du Québec (Federation of Quebec Women; abbreviated as FFQ) recently had a special assembly in order to clarify its position on whether headscarves should be permitted for people working in the public service.  (The question of “reasonable accommodation” for minority groups has been the subject of intense debate in Quebec for […]

It’s become common belief that Muslim women, particularly those wear the hijab, are liberated from the media-driven standards of beauty that values the thin and the willowy. But it’s a belief that couches on the idea that head-coverings and modest clothes provide little incentive for showing off a great looking body in public. In other […]

Reading Yasmin Alibhai-Brown’s commentary in The Independent reminded me a bit of a group of people that Khaled Abou El Fadl mentioned in his introduction to Amina Wadud’s Inside the Gender Jihad. The group of people I refer to are “self-hating Muslims” with “tormented soul(s)” who seem all too eager to assuage the bigoted view […]

This was written by Youssef Rakha and originally appeared in The National. “Happy Mother’s Day! Happy Mother’s Day, Mama,” the woman spewed forth, her face taking up far too much of my TV screen. “Thanks so much for breast-feeding me for so long.” The woman was too emphatically ordinary to be convincing as a representative […]

Shahina Siddiqui’s article “True Muslim society protects women,” published this past weekend in the Winnipeg Free Press, presents one woman’s response to some of the sexism and misogyny within Muslim communities that has been in the media recently. Siddiqui condemns the murder of an Afghan women’s rights activist, the flogging of a young women in […]

For a relatively high-brow TV channel, BBC4 is known for providing top quality programs and dramas. So when the BBC commemorated the 30th anniversary of Islamic Revolution in Iran, I became glued to the channel’s string of intriguing documentaries on all things Iranian, post-1979. There were plenty on Iran-US nuclear politics and the fall of […]

A couple of weeks of ago, the BBC featured a story on Kurdish women football teams. Two weeks later, the story is still on the front page of the Middle East section of the BBC News’s website. I kept flirting with the whether or not to cover the story, but since it covers two issues […]

The March 2009 issue of Time magazine carried an extensive article about Islam, called “A Quiet Revolution grows in the Muslim world” by Robin Wright. While the article speaks broadly about Islam, I will focus on those passages and statements which deal with Muslim women. This is how Time describes the “soft revolution”: Today’s revolution […]