We live in violent times… Donald Trump has been elected president of the United States, and Canada is battling its own white supremacist demons, as we see with figures like Kellie Leitch. At the same time anonymous acts of everyday violence against women, LGBTIQ folks, people of color, Indigenous and Black communities, immigrants and religious minorities […]

Last November, Muslim Girl announced the launch of their subscription boxes. For $20 US a month, you are provided with a box that “intends to package the Muslim woman’s revolution,” offering products to satisfy the needs of Muslim women in today’s world. If you are in Canada, add an extra $15 for shipping. The first […]

A few weeks ago Musleh Khan, a chaplain working for the Toronto Police, was all over the media for his comments on women and obedience on a 2013 webinar for couples. In the webinar titled “The Heart of the Home: the Rights and Responsibilities of a Wife” (the video has been taken down), he asserts […]

Over the past few years MMW has often covered issues of sexuality and women’s pleasure, particularly because the ways in which Muslim female sexuality and pleasure are framed not only in the media, but also among Muslims themselves, tend to be quite problematic. Muslim women’s sexuality has made it to the headlines on a number […]

This is the second, stand-alone, part of Decolonizing the Mosque. Part I is available here. “Mexican and Muslim? Does that mean Al-Qaeda is teaming up with El Chapo, now?” Border patrol officer in Canada, 2014. I am on edge. As Ramadan unfolds, I know images of Latinx Muslims will make it into the media again. […]

Two years. Life does not look like I had planned. I wash myself in the form of wudu remembering what I envisioned my life being. She had a name. She was going to be named Sara. It worked in Spanish, in Arabic and in English. She would also be given the middle name Nhis YA, […]

International development policies have been my bread and butter for the past two years, both academically and professionally. When I first entered this field, I wanted to understand why development programming was only guided towards non-white people. Didn’t the world overall need “development”? As I soon learned, the word “development” as it is used in […]

Growing up in Mexico, neither hijabs nor niqabs were a thing. On paper, we are still a very Catholic country with 83% of the population being identified as such in the national census. Muslims in Mexico are concentrated among Lebanese-Mexican communities and southern Indigenous communities in Chiapas, Mexico. Broadly speaking, twenty years ago we were […]

When I came to Canada almost ten years ago, multiculturalism was sold to me as the one and only policy that could guarantee the peaceful and productive mingling of cultures within a country. When I was enrolled in English as a Second Language (ESL) program, “integration” was one of the things we were taught. Thus, […]

Four years ago I wrote “How are Muslim Women doing in Political Cartoons,” a piece that analyzed the use of gendered and islamophobic language in Anglophone political cartoons. At the time, I was writing my undergraduate thesis, which focused on media coverage of First Ladies in Mexico, particularly in political cartoons. Later that year, I […]