The Western fascination with the burqa has crept up again in a new and mind-boggling way. A few months ago, I wrote about the Charming Burka, an art piece that used Bluetooth technology to take people “behind the burqa” by showing them a photo of the woman underneath. Now? Just in time for the Christmas […]

Natasha Bakht, a law professor at Ottawa University, has recently published a book called Belonging and Banishment: Being Muslim in Canada. I haven’t gotten my hands on the book yet, but from an article published in the Toronto Star this past weekend, it looks promising. Bakht describes her book in the Star article, saying: I […]

I wrote a few weeks ago about the effect of a fictional white character’s Muslim identity on possible constructions and understandings of Islam and Muslim; this week I want to look at a couple non-fictional women in similar positions. On Open Salon, a network of bloggers, this weekend’s top story was written by Sara O’Connell, […]

You know that game called “broken telephone” (it goes by other names too, I think), where one person whispers a message in someone’s ear, who whispers it to someone else, and so on, and by the time it reaches the last person, it gets a bit warped? That’s probably a pretty good analogy for what […]

The third season of Little Mosque on the Prairie has just started up, so I figured it was time to have a discussion about it. Actually, I’ll be honest and admit that really, the reason I’m talking about it is that I wrote a paper on it for a class on popular culture last week, […]

I referred to this article in the comments section of my piece on the coverage around Samira Laouni’s candidate for NDP MP of Montréal-Bourassa, but I thought it deserved its own post as well. I debated whether it was really worth talking about it, because I don’t think that the author is really worth our […]

The Guardian’s Life and Style section has a biweekly series called This Muslim Life. The series consists mainly of vignettes of the experiences of its author, Noorjehan Barmania, who writes on “the life of an Asian immigrant in Britain.” The author brings in anecdotes about topics such as multiculturalism in Britain, her childhood in South […]

There is a whole lotta ugly going on out there in the election coverage these days. (I’m thinking Canada, but this is true in the U.S. as well, and, come to think of it, likely anywhere else that might be having an election. But that’s a different story.) Montréal-Bourassa NDP candidate Samira Laouni (pictured below […]

I want to take a temporary (temporary, I promise!) break from our moratorium on headscarves to highlight this article, which actually deals with many of the points I brought up in a post a while ago, asking why people get so caught up in headscarves and burqas when there are so many bigger fish to […]

Study blames mums for Afghan child mortality Seriously? The article tells us: High child mortality rates in conservative Afghanistan are linked not just to war but to mothers being uneducated and having little or no say when their children need medical help, a study has found. And according to the headline, this is somehow the […]