Since images often speak louder than words, from this week on I will include every week a news picture, which features Muslim women, with a special focus on women that usually do not receive a lot of “face time”. An image from Iran, where a major earthquake struck last Saturday, starts us off. May Allah […]

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 […]

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 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 […]

When I chose Islam, almost a decade ago, I did not have much experience with fasting. I had grown up in not a very diverse environment and my experience with the Lent was very limited, coming from a Protestant background. Still, some years we would attend weekly “soup meetings,” where different families would come together […]

SETimes reports that domestic violence in Kosovo remains a problem; most victims are married women suffering at the hands of their husbands. Iranians, from inside and outside Iran, have started a facebook campaign called “No to Mandatory Hijab,” where both men and women post pictures of themselves supporting the right of women to chose whether or […]

Last week, Hanifa Safi, an Afghan Women’s Affairs official was killed by a car bomb. While she is not the first female Afghan official to be killed, the Afghan government has not done much to prevent these murders, or to bring those responsible to justice. In the same week, a young Afghan girls, Tamana, was killed, which […]

On July 11, World Population Day, an international conference on Family Planning was held in London, which has resulted in a relatively large number of related articles in the news. Quite some articles covered the north-south divide in maternal health in Nigeria. The predominantly Muslim north is poorer and the topic of contraception is still very sensitive there; in […]

Six women from Gaza have appealed to the Israeli Supreme Court to grant them permission to pray at the Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem. While Christian women from Gaza have been allowed to visit religious sites in Israel, Muslim women are generally denied to enter Israel for this reason. Last Sunday voters in Senegal hit the polls, it is for the first […]

A group of Syrian women from the city of Homs have announced the formation of an all-female armed organization, the first of its kind in Syria. The group is not affiliated with any existing organization and will be fighting against the current Syrian regime. The victory of Algerian women during the election concerns some Algerians; […]