Warning for Spoilers!  Loving You Wasn’t Enough is a book about an unexpected love between two Muslim girls. I stumbled upon it randomly on Amazon and was immediately excited by the premise. It a book that claims to explore homosexuality from a Muslim perspective, and it tells a story that is not talked about […]

When I attempted entering “Islamic erotica” in a search engine, I was not sure what to expect. A few weeks before doing that, I had stumbled upon the genre while reading Afrocentric Muslimah’s blog post on the need for Muslim women to embrace their sexuality. Curious to know more about Islamic erotica, I decided to search for […]

Reading Hajiya Balaraba Ramat Yakubu’s Sin is a Puppy That Follows You Home was to me like watching a Nigerian movie, in particular one on Africa Magic Hausa, a channel devoted to Hausa language movies. I could picture popular actors and actresses in the roles of different characters and imagined them bringing these roles to […]

Fasting during Ramadan is one of the easiest duties for me as a Muslim. Even though I’ve struggled with my faith and with praying five times daily, I always maintain my fast, and passionately too. This year I started fasting on Mondays and Thursdays, according to Sunnah, after considering it for a while. My mother […]

The plight of Nigerian girls recently caught the attention of the world after the kidnapping of several hundred schoolgirls in Chibok over a month ago. Another story did not garner as much attention from either local or international media: that of Wasila Umaru. Apparently forced to marry a man in his thirties, Umaru Sani, and […]

Coming Out Muslim: Radical Acts of Love is a storytelling performance that highlights the experiences of LGBT Muslims. While I was aware of Coming Out Muslim, I did not realise that one of the people behind the project is a West African Muslimah. I was connected with Terna Tilley-Gyado through a mutual friend Mikael Owunna […]

Radio Amina and Aisha’s Song are two documentary-style short films produced by Grain Media, a London-based production company, as part of the Girl Effect campaign, a movement that states that the 250 million adolescent girls who live poverty are the most powerful force for change on the planet. Following that theme, Radio Amina and Aisha’s […]

If Islam is the fastest growing religion in the world, the fastest growing religion in African countries may be Christianity. In Nigeria, it is so rare to see or hear news of women converting to any religion other than Christianity that when it does happen, the initial assumption is that the conversion must have been […]

During Ramadan, a great uproar took place in Nigeria over actions by the government that were interpreted as trying to legalise child marriage. During a constitutional review, Senator Ahmed Sani Yerima argued that a subsection of Nigeria’s 1999 constitution should not be removed as it affects the rights of Muslim women. Section 29 of the […]

This year marks the second or third time I’ve observed Ramadan as an adult in Nigeria. I have always been aware of how ethnic and religious lines are drawn in Nigeria but each time I am in the country, it always strikes me again like a slap in the face. In a context where hyper-religiosity […]