So the Italian-speaking canton of Ticino’s burqa ban (voted on since 2013) now involves fines for those who dare venture into Ticinese streets in burqas. I always joke that Switzerland is about twenty years behind its neighbors politically and here we are with Swizerland catching burqa ban fever. Things that get voted in Switzerland take […]

On the occasion of Michel Houllebecq’s Submission being released in English, I volunteered to read it in order to review it here. In fact, I refused to read Submission when it first came out in French, and I still approached the book begrudgingly. The short version? I hated it. At the ripe old age of […]

Saba Ahmed, the founder of the Republican Muslim Coalition, appeared on Fox News in an American flag hijab. See the BBC news article here (as I refuse to link to anything going to Fox News) and if you want to buy her hijab, Forbes has let us know it is ten dollars and can be […]

Emma Watson met with Malala Yousafzai in an interview posted online this week. I will let you draw your own conclusions (more sources here and here). Speaking of Malala, U.S. Presidential candidate Marco Rubio named her as someone he would like to have a beer with. The Republican Party, always with its fingers on the […]

Canada: MMW’s own Shireen Ahmed was on the CBC radio show The Current talking about what this week’s Canadian election results mean. One take away in Colorlines from the obsession with the niqab in the Canadian election is the #doimatternow campaign, which highlights the relative silence of the major candidates on the issues affecting a […]

I am apparently on a book review kick for MMW, with my last post being about the interfaith anthology Faithfully Feminist, and next week’s post on Michel Houllebecq’s Submission (stay tuned). This week’s book review is for a lovely little book in French, Des voix derrière le voile (Voices behind the Veil) by the French […]

I really love all that feelgood interfaith stuff, so I was excited to read Faithfully Feminist: Jewish, Christian and Muslim Feminists on Why We Stay. Ok, maybe I balked a little when I found out MayimBialik raved about it, (where do I begin, her flip flopping on being an anti-vaxxer or not, or her buying bulletproof vests […]

As is usually the case in France, any time anything happens where Muslims could even remotely be involved, it becomes a media circus – any time is a good time to talk about how “Muslims want it their way” or how “Muslims don’t want to integrate.” Last week, a 21 year old woman in a […]

I write a lot about France and its national psychosis over headscarves. I wrote my undergraduate thesis on the 2004 law on secularity and conspicuous religious symbols. I lived there as a hijabi for almost five years. So it is safe to say nothing really involving France and headscarves shocks me any more. Until recently. […]

  Le Temps is the French part of Switzerland’s newspaper of record, and one of the newspapers I read daily. I am a huge fan of their literature section, I have acquaintances who work there, and (full disclosure) I have even had the honor of being citied in that paper. So in other words, I […]