I wrote a few weeks ago about the effect of a fictional white character’s Muslim identity on possible constructions and understandings of Islam and Muslim; this week I want to look at a couple non-fictional women in similar positions. On Open Salon, a network of bloggers, this weekend’s top story was written by Sara O’Connell, […]

“Audio blogging” is the new ‘it’ thing in Egypt. Cheap and censorship-free in a country where the airwaves are controlled by the government, it’s not hard to understand its appeal. There are many new web radio stations out there, but perhaps one of the most interesting is Banat w bas, Girls Only, which began streaming […]

Egyptian women have something to celebrate: yesterday the first man in Egyptian history was sentenced to jail for sexual harassment. And not just any sentence: three years in jail with hard labor in addition to an LE 5,001 fine (approximately $1,000). An unexpected, but very welcome sentence. 27-year-old filmmaker Noha Rushdie Saleh was groped last […]

Normally, whenever I see anything with the phrase “Behind the veil” I automatically cringe and get myself ready for Orientalist stereotypes and generalizations about Muslim women. Na’ima B. Robert’s “Behind the veil: the online diary of a British Muslim woman” isn’t quite so bad. Although at first glance it does seem that way, especially considering […]

Disclaimer: Below is an analysis of a debate between Irshad Manji and Dalia Mogahed. This analysis will be about the way in which the women were represented, how they spoke, how they interacted with one another, as well as with the moderator and audience (and vice versa), and some of the comments they made, etc. […]

The Guardian’s Life and Style section has a biweekly series called This Muslim Life. The series consists mainly of vignettes of the experiences of its author, Noorjehan Barmania, who writes on “the life of an Asian immigrant in Britain.” The author brings in anecdotes about topics such as multiculturalism in Britain, her childhood in South […]

How excited was I when our editor, Fatemeh, emailed out a link to a new online magazine called Bekhsoos!? Of course, I jumped at the chance to cover the first issue of the mag, which is called Bekhsoos il Homophobia (Concerning Homophobia) and is chock-full of editorials, personal stories, health articles, media analyses and more, […]

More shameless self-promotion time! Here’s my interview with Kawthar from MidEast Youth. It was originally published there. Reporting on Muslim women has become the craze of the day. While in many cases journalists are well-intentioned and honestly seek to report objectively on aspects relating to Muslim women, a large number of the resulting articles is […]

This was written by Shelina Zahra Janmohamed and originally published at Comment is free. The last few weeks have been particularly eventful for Muslim women on Comment is Free. We would have felt extremely exhausted by all the excitement, were it not for the fact that – with the notable exception of Samia Rahman and […]

We want to talk about sex and sexuality. Particularly, its politics. Particularly the power it has over us, the power to keep us quiet about violences that happen in our homes, the power to kill us with diseases we are not educated about or cannot prevent; how it is used for coercion and how it […]