Up until this year, my Ramadans had all been spent in Canada.  While I often hear people around me reminiscing about the festivities and exuberance of Ramadan “back home,” I have come to appreciate the quiet suhoor mornings by myself, and intimate iftars with friends that have become part of my own Ramadan traditions.  But […]

A Catholic-run school in Zamboanga, a Muslim-Christian city in the southern Philippines, bans the headscarf, causing controversy in the country. Last week it was announced in Iran that female students will be banned from 77 areas of study at 34 universities, in fields like accounting, counseling and chemistry. The parents of Shafilea Ahmed, who was murdered […]

I wanted to go back to one of the points I made in my first Ramadan post, namely that how we carry ourselves during Ramadan is in itself a form of dawah. Telling people about Islam isn’t just street preaching and teaching at the masjid; it is also the image of Islam we project to […]

I like the long dark winter months in Sweden. This is something that tends to make people question my sanity. But even I will admit summers here are special, as everything seems to burst into exuberant life, Mother Nature in a hurry to her work done before the cold weather returns. Though the summer is […]

Six years ago, I moved from Mexico City to Edmonton, Alberta, in Canada. Although I moved here to study, my trip to the north resulted to be a whole religious experience. Having grown up in a nuclear family that had left Catholicism and had sought dogmatic atheism, I was largely unfamiliar with religious diversity. Thus, […]

Previously, I told you about Ramadan in Cairo, Egypt in a general way. Now I’m going to tell more personal details about what Ramadan is to me. This year it is very different, since it’s my first Ramadan as a married woman. Yes it’s exciting and nice to be married, but let’s call a spade […]

The 2012 London Olympics have had a strong focus on women: for the first time women will be competing in all sports and every country has sent at least one female athlete. While this does all look mighty good on paper, “male” sports remain overall more popular and male athletes are often better paid, make […]

This post was written by guest contributor Sya, and originally posted at her blog, as well as in Dutch in “Ramadan” Al-Nisa, Islamitisch maandblad voor vrouwen (Islamic monthly for women), 31st year, No. 7/8, Jul/Aug 2012. I am a Malay Singaporean who has been living in the Netherlands for almost two years now. There are […]

This week I will not include any Olympic news, and there is plenty of it, in the Friday Links; a post on Muslim women in the 2012 Olympics will follow. Thanks to a new law on gender parity, a record number of women have been sworn in as legislators in the new parliament of Senegal. Women […]

For me, growing up as an expat, Ramadan has been largely about celebrating my Pakistani heritage.  Living in Buenos Aires, in the late 80s when Muslim communities were still a rarity, the act of observing and celebrating such an occasion was often relegated to a handful of Pakistanis who were able to brave sundown in […]