Shahina Siddiqui’s article “True Muslim society protects women,” published this past weekend in the Winnipeg Free Press, presents one woman’s response to some of the sexism and misogyny within Muslim communities that has been in the media recently. Siddiqui condemns the murder of an Afghan women’s rights activist, the flogging of a young women in […]

You know things are sad in the world of news about Muslimahs when “Muslim women value sexy” seems like not a bad headline.  After all, it’s a nice change from “Muslim women are oppressed,” “Muslim women are passive objects and could not possibly have any personality” and “Muslim women need the West to rescue them.” […]

This piece is also posted at Muslim Lookout. I know I just talked about this last week, but all these questions about Canada’s involvement with the rights of Afghan women have remained a major news story, so I thought it was worth doing a follow-up.  There are still quite a few articles out there about […]

A few weeks ago, the news of a new law for Shi’a Muslims in Afghanistan was met with outrage in governments and media around the world.  This law would, among other things, force women to have sex with their husbands and obligate them to seek permission for activities outside the house. News since then has […]

Check out Muslim Lookout for an expanded version of this post. Be prepared for some major eye-rolling in this article from the Calgary Herald.  In it, Mahfooz Kanwar praises Canadian Immigration Minister Jason Kenney (see here for why this is a bad idea), and berates Canadians that he perceives as not having “assimilated” enough. I […]

After Sobia’s post last week about The Other Half of the Sky, a Tunisian film that tells a story about a woman’s experience with inheritance laws, I was interested to see this article, which talked about other cracks that women may fall through in another shariah-inspired legal system.  In this case, Mariam Mokhtar is writing […]

This piece was written by both Sobia and Krista and originally posted at Muslim Lookout.  Viewers in Canada can now watch full episodes of the show here.  This review looks at Episode 18, “Baber Makes an Entrance.” Sobia: It’s been a while since I’ve written about Little Mosque on the Prairie. Unfortunately I haven’t been […]

A recent BBC News article has provided an astonishing suggestion that, far from being the monolithic oppressed group that many readers of mainstream Western media have come to expect, Muslim women can come from a wide range of possible experiences and backgrounds.  Who knew? Journalist Christopher Landau begins his article by telling us, The role […]

I was excited when the book Does My Head Look Big in This? came out a few years ago (see Melinda’s MMW review of it here.) In that book, author Randa Abdel-Fattah tells the story of Amal, a young Australian Muslim woman who decides to wear hijab and navigates the challenges of expressing her identity […]

This piece was written by both Sobia and Krista After getting all of that sarcasm out of our systems two weeks ago, we decided it might be useful to put together a list of actual guidelines for writing about Muslims.  Of course, this is mostly just wishful thinking, because if reporters actually seemed willing to […]