I watched Brick Lane last night. Full disclosure: I haven’t read the book. I wanted to, I swear. Just never got around to it. So I can’t offer book-versus-movie criticism, which doesn’t seem like such a big deal considering that everyone always says that “the book is better,” anyway. But I really enjoyed the movie. […]

Those of you who know me well know I’m not the most modest person in the world. For those of you who don’t know me very well: I’m not the most modest person in the world. So when I tell you I’ve just spent the past couple of days feeling very, very small and tiny, […]

With so much of American foreign policy being focused on various Muslim countries, it is no surprise that there is a “concern” among conservatives about the issues that Muslim women face in different parts of the Muslim world. I have a wish that their concern is sincere, but when I read essays like Zeyno Baran’s […]

CBC radio’s weekly documentary program, Dispatches, recently ran a documentary by Natasha Fatah on Nia Dinata, one of Indonesia’s best known film directors. In the documentary, entitled Cinema, censorship and sex, Fatah speaks with the internationally acclaimed director about her latest film, Chants of Lotus, as well as her experiences with film making in Indonesia. […]

Over 500 Arab women participated in the first ever Arab Women Leadership Forum, held in The United Arab Emirates last Tuesday. The two-day event focused on the status of women in the Arab world, and discussed ways of increasing their social, economic and political contributions. Themed, ‘Women and Leadership: Global Trends and Local Innovations’, the […]

The latest issue of Chay magazine has come out and MMW is on it. For those of you who are not familiar with Chay, it is a Pakistan based magazine dealing with issues of sexuality. MMW has covered it twice already, once before the first issue, and then again when the first issue came out. […]

Single Muslim mothers must be the new “it” topic for the Western media. There has been a lot of coverage of Rachida Dati, the French minister of Moroccan and Algerian heritage, who just recently had a baby while still being single. Now, the BBC has done a piece on single mothers in Morocco. The story […]

I came across an interesting Associated Press article a couple of days ago titled Egyptian women break new ground at the mosque by Canadian journalist Hadeel Al-Shalchi. The article discusses how Egyptian women are beginning to not only frequent mosques more, but to use their time there to socialize, learn about Islam, and participate in […]

Spoiler alert: this post discusses important plot points. This past weekend I finally went to see Slumdog Millionaire. I have to admit that I loved the film and Jamal’s rags-to -riches tale. The film has a fairytale bent that makes it likable (who doesn’t like for the beat up hero to overcome and be happy […]

Dr. Sherene Razack has a theory called Interlocking Systems of Domination, which says that people can be oppressed in different ways and in interlocking and interconnected ways. The various ways in which people are oppressed cannot be detangled from each other and therefore, the oppression that we face must be examined as a whole, as […]