It has been 30 years since the Islamic Revolution in Iran and Western media has a slew of various features looking at Iran. The subject of many of these features is Iranian women and, the common themes in these stories are that Iranian women have made some progress, but that more progress has to be […]

Last week’s Iraqi elections received lots of media coverage, but at MMW we were mostly fascinated by women candidates, especially since election rules require 30% of the candidates be female. The Huffington Post defines Iraq’s exercise in democracy as rebellious, while the Gulf News qualified it as an act of political maturity. I’ll take a […]

Who says young adult fiction about Muslim girls can only be contemporary or historical? Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu’s 2007 novel shows that Muslim teen lit can venture into the realm of the future.  Young adult novel The Shadow Speaker explores science fiction and fantasy with a story that plays out in a futuristic, magical universe with worlds […]

Various news organizations have reported that a CIA officer stationed in Algeria, identified by CBS News as Andrew Warren, has been accused of drugging and raping two Algerian women. The women, according to CBS, came forward separately and “reported the incidents months after they occurred.”  This from ABC News: The CIA’s station chief at its […]

Sex. Always an attention getter. So there’s no wonder why Jasad, or “Body,” a new quarterly Arabic magazine published in Lebanon, is making waves in the Arab world by promising to “deal with the forbidden,” the *gasp* human body. The magazine’s logo is ‘body’ spelled in Arabic and the first letter is a broken handcuff, […]

The Big Picture usually does an excellent job compiling a diverse set of photos. So it’s especially hard to believe that the blog couldn’t apply that diversity to the gender of its subjects. Women are in only four of 32 photos — that’s 12.5 percent. At the same time, there are multiple pictures of elephants and orangutans. And many, many photos of men. One would think that only men represent the world’s most populous Muslim country.

Israel’s war on the Palestinians may be over for now, but the conflict remains. About a week and a half ago, I received an email from a wonderful organization, Jewish Voice for Peace, asking me to sign onto a letter to President Obama asking him to create a just foreign policy regarding Israel and Palestine. […]

The Saatchi Gallery’s latest exhibition Unveiled: New Art from the Middle East has received considerable media attention. Despite the overused term, the art is refreshingly original, featuring 19 artists, most of them in their twenties and thirties, from Iraq, Iran, Egypt, Tunisia, Lebanon, Syria and Algeria. Their art is raw, tender, vicious and vile. Think […]

Muslimah Source is a new site that is geared towards Muslim women. When I visited the site, I was hoping for something a little different from the norm. Usually sites catering to Muslim women have sections on relationships, health & beauty, motherhood, how to emulate female companions (sahabah) of the Prophet (saws) and dress (i.e. […]

* Asian and South Asian will be used interchangeably to refer to those of Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, etc., origin. Earlier this month, BBC News ran two stories online on young Asian (read South Asian in North America) women, and both stories exposed our dirty laundry. Or at least that was the way they seemed. The […]