You’ve probably heard that France banned the niqab. Some people like it and some don’t. More here and here and here and here and here. Bangladesh bans local elders from meting out punishments according to religious law, which will make it difficult for them to order the flogging of rape victims. The USA Today examines […]

Urban fiction novels have been filling up bookshelves across America for generations. Characterized by city settings and an incline towards the profane and dark, these novels are made to appeal to a mainly African-American reading audience. Urban fiction’s cousin, the Christian urban fiction genre, does not entirely exclude the profane, but instead inserts images of […]

When I watched Afshan Azad entering the Yule Ball as Padma Patil with Ron Weasley in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, I did not even think about whether or not she was a Muslim. Instead, like many Potter fans, I was thinking about Hermione, and how the two of them really just needed […]

Dear Maureen, I hear you’re back from your jaunt over in Saudi Arabia. Kudos to you for making it back from that big, bad place. Somebody get this woman the gin and tonic she deserves! First, a secret: I am so tired of frothy, pop-culture media and art about the question of veiling. It’s really […]

In Yasmeen Maxamuud’s novel, Nomad Diaries, Maxamuud tells the story of an upper-class Somali woman, Nadifo, who comes to Minneapolis as a refugee in the mid-1990s during a time of civil unrest in Somalia. Maxamuud highlights the challenges Somali women face as they transition to life in America as the story follows Nadifo and her family’s […]

The Arab Times interviews Dr. Naif Mohammed Al-Ajmy about the “phenomenon” of divorce in Kuwait. Hillary Clinton’s longtime aide Huma Abedin is marrying Representative Anthony Weiner. A council in Britain has been slammed for blacking out the windows of a glass-paneled swimming pool in order to protect the modesty of Muslim women. The Express Tribune […]

This post was written by Sara Khorshid Doost. You can read Part I here. The reactions to Davoodi’s “de-jabbing” have not been as much as you’d expect. There are the usual suspects, those who praise Davoodi for the courage to free herself from the chains of the veil, some while expressing their general dislike for […]

This post was written by Sara Khorshid Doost. Fariba Davoodi Mohajer is an Iranian women’s rights activist. She moved to the United States a few years ago after things got tough for her in Iran. Recently, she has decided to no longer wear hijab. Most notable among Iranian media reactions is a surprising interview with […]

When Margaret Atwood wrote The Handmaid’s Tale, a feminist dystopia set in a world run by a totalitarian theocracy, she said that she hadn’t “invented anything,” but taken her inspiration from fundamentalist Christianity in the United States, and the Islamic Revolution in Iran, among other things. In the context of the war on Afghanistan, Mary […]

This June, one of the first all-women radio stations in the Arab world was launched from the most unlikely of places, the West Bank. Appropriately titled NISAA FM, (nisaa means “woman” in Arabic) this station is by women, for women. Maysoun Odeh, founder and manager of NISAA FM, describes the aims of the station: “NISAA […]