A Map of Home by Randa Jarrar is a book that does not fall into a category easily. A Map of Home provides the vivid portrait of a girl, who is Muslim, who is Palestinian and Egyptian and Greek and from Kuwait and born in America, who fulfills her parents’ expectations and dashes them fiercely. […]

Skunk Girl is Sheba Karim’s first novel. It is told from the point of view of 16-year-old Nina Khan, self-described as “a Pakistani Muslim girl” and from a small white town in upstate New York. Although published in 2009, the story is set in approximately 1993. In a fast-paced, entertaining read, Nina narrates her life […]

News media reported at the beginning of the month that Saudi Arabia will hold its first beauty pageant, now in its second year. This pageant, unlike the standard pageants that feature contestants in various outfits and judge them on their appearance, is looking for “Miss Beautiful Morals.” The contest, open to women ages 15 to […]

If FOX News does anything well, it’s make its bias clear. A recent article entitled “Muslim Women in U.S. Struggle to Balance Western Freedoms and Islamic Culture” makes no attempts to hide the opinion of the writer and the message she wants to convey to her readers. Each line is so riddled with assumptions and misconceptions, I don’t know where to begin.

It wasn’t but several years ago when a Google search for “gay Muslims” or “lesbian Muslims” turned up few results on actual people, mainly just pages on why homosexuality is a sin in Islam and perhaps one or two articles, usually focusing on men. Since then there’s been an increase in profiles on people who […]

This post continues my look at the portrayal of Muslim women in young adult fiction. Marina Budhos is not a Muslim. She is not an immigrant. But the daughter of an Indo-Guyanese father and a Jewish-American mother, Budhos has had a strong interest in the stories of immigrant teenagers. Her book Ask Me No Questions: […]

If you’re looking for Muslim teenagers in young adult fiction, you’ll be hard-pressed to find many good examples. There are plenty of Orientalist novels about exotic Muslim girls in distant lands. A standard example is the narrator of Shabanu: Daughter of the Wind (Suzanne Fisher Staples, 1991), who at age 13 is forced into marriage […]