On April 15th about 300 girls were kidnapped from a Government Girls Secondary School in Nigeria by gunmen dressed as Nigerian army-men.  ABC News reports that some of the girls were taken to Chad and Cameroon for the purposes of forced marriage.  The news of the kidnapped Nigerian girls made it slowly to Facebook and […]

Editor’s note: Anneke is taking a break from the Friday Links at the moment because she has just given birth to her third child.  We wish her and her family all the best, and I apologise that the links will not be nearly as extensive in Anneke’s absence! The situation of the more than 200 girls […]

This post was written by Laila Alawa (@lulainlife). There is a serious paradox within the fashion industry. More specifically, within the subset of fashion ruled by Muslim women, a niche that has shifted greater fashion perspectives on hijab and modest-leaning clothing, and one that taps into the wide-open Muslim consumer market valued at $170 billion […]

Hany Abu-Assad’s film Omar (2013) has been described as “a film about love in the face of grueling adversity,” with the various obstacles facing the young couple symbolized by the very literal obstacle of the separation wall  that meanders into the West Bank, cutting off Palestinian areas from each other. Omar routinely scales the wall […]

An article in the Jakarta Post last week followed the latest developments on a pesantren (Islamic boarding school) for transgender people in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Although it is called a boarding school, the Pondok Pesantren Waria Al-Fatah functions more like a religious school where students can learn classical religious subjects like fiqh and Qur’an recitation, as […]

A new campaign aimed at discouraging young British Muslims to go to Syria to fight, is now asking Muslim women to play an active role in convincing their male family members to stay put. Mistrust of the police among Muslim women, however, makes that many women would be afraid to report their family members, one […]

On April 30th the Jaafari Personal Status Law will be voted on in the Iraqi Parliament. The Jaafari Law, as it’s being referred to, has been controversial because it would enable Shia men to marry girls as young as 9 years old. Whereas the legal age for marriage in Iraq is 18 years of age, […]

According to statistics provided by RAINN, the United States-based Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network, “1 out of every 6 American women has been the victim of an attempted or completed rape in her lifetime.” The organization further notes that women who have experienced sexual assault are at higher risk for depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, […]

The predominantly Kurdish southeastern region of Turkey has the highest number of female mayors after the March 30 elections, partly because of a quota for women in the popular pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party (BDP). One of the new female mayors in this region is former child bride Berivan Kilic. The controversial draft law in […]

Last month, I looked at Eliza Griswold and Seamus Murphy’s work profiling Afghan women poets particular form of poetry, the landay. Their work, as they presented it in an article on Slate, came across as nuanced and reflective (my own words) of Afghan women’s experiences. I was eager to review their book, I Am the […]