Noorain Khan’s piece on bad burqa puns, which MMW reposted yesterday, came as I have been coincidentally trying to pull together an explanation of exactly what is wrong with headlines that use these puns.  (For those unfamiliar with the structure, here’s an easy formula:  “behind/beneath/under/beyond” +”the” + “veil/hijab/burqa/niqab.) Read her piece first for a great list […]

The Independent recently published an article by Jerome Taylor, titled “First woman to lead Friday prayers in the UK,” talking about the mixed-congregation Friday prayers that Canadian Raheel Raza was to lead the following day.  I read it, feeling confused: didn’t Amina Wadud do this already? Well, yes, she did.  The beginning of the article […]

The father and brother of Aqsa Parvez, a Muslim Canadian teenager who was killed in December 2007, recently confessed to murdering her and were sentenced to life in prison.  Canadian media outlets covered this news widely.  At the Toronto Star, one of the reporters writing about the case was Noor Javed, who co-wrote one detailed overview […]

Today is the Day of Action on Quebec’s Bill 94, which I wrote about last week. In honor of this, I wanted to share a video of a community dialogue on the bill, which took place in Toronto in early May.  It was a really impressive event, with a very engaging panel and over 150 people […]

The provincial legislature of Quebec, Canada, is currently considering a bill that would refuse key social services to anyone wearing a face covering if made into law.  Political discussions around this bill have made it clear that the law specifically targets women who wear niqab, a face veil worn by some Muslim women. As Muslim […]

In March, MMW ran a guest post by Özlem Sensoy and Elizabeth Marshall about representations of Muslim women and girls in young adult literature (part one, part two, and part three.)  The article focuses on stories, written by non-Muslim Western authors, of Muslim girls living in places like Afghanistan, and the kinds of images that are created through these novels.  In […]

The Quebec niqab thing keeps going and going (ugh), and I’m still avoiding talking about media coverage of the issue head-on, mostly because I think I’ll explode if I think more about the absurdity of it all, and I’ve written on niqab so much already that there’s not a lot else to say.  This post at […]

I am so, so sick of talking about the niqab.  So I’m not really going to, despite the fact that the Canadian province of Quebec recently introduced a bill that, if made law, would force everyone to show their face when dealing with provincial government bodies.  If anyone else has intelligent insight on recent Quebec-related […]

Ayesha Nasir’s recent article on Slate about signing her religious marriage contract in Pakistan tells of the family pressures that she and many of her “well-educated female friends” faced that led them to sign marriage contracts without reading them fully. The article is generally well-written, and brings up some important points.  Nasir talks about the ways that the […]

Of Hockey and Hijab: Reflections of a Canadian Muslim Woman, published last October, is a collection of monthly columns written by Sheema Khan and originally printed in Canada’s Globe and Mail newspaper, between 2002 and 2009.  Khan, who founded the Canadian Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-CAN), was born in India and moved to Montreal when […]