Last month, the Lahore High Court made an interesting decision: to hand over a Pakistani child, Amina Tarar, to her French mother.  The case made headlines because the child’s mother, Ingrid Brandon Burger, is a non-Muslim. Amina’s father, Abdul Razzak Tarar, had taken the child from France to Pakistan in 2005, but the parties disagree […]

As MMW’s Artsy Niqab Spotter, man my hands are full!  If I’m not checking out French performance artists or Swiss campaign posters with minarets and niqabs, there are just so many people using niqabs as their accessory du jour and not enough time to write about them all.  I can’t keep up! So I had […]

The Crescent Directive was, for me, a fun but perplexing read.  The concept is simple and noble: it gives guidelines for American Muslims on how to lay a groundwork for action in our communities in order to improve our image in America. Written by Khurram Dara, the book starts out with looking at how Islam […]

Almost a year ago, for my very first MMW post, I wrote about Sura al-Shawk, a professional Swiss basketball player from Luzern who was forced to choose between wearing her headscarf and playing professional basketball due to the supposed “uniform” regulations of the local and national basketball associations, both affiliated with FIBA, the International Basketball […]

One of the main criticisms of TLC’s All American Muslim was that the show’s characters were representative of only a small part of the American Muslim community.  If you felt that way, then a great antidote is “Me, the Muslim Next Door,” a web documentary produced for Radio Canada International.  Filmed in Montreal and Toronto […]

Is it just me, or has this spring seen a lot of de-jabbing articles lately?   As a “dejabi” myself, I alternate between taking these articles with a grain of salt and hoping that something put forth by the journalist will resonate with me. One of the recent pieces is NPR’s “Lifting the Veil” (har har), […]

For me, Gayle Tzemach Lemmon’s The Dressmaker of Khair Khana is a journalistic field story masquerading as a feel good beach novel in the Oprah Book Club genre. That isn’t to say I didn’t enjoy reading it, but I felt it warranted something more. While Lemmon’s storytelling is her strength–the way the book is organized […]

In France, they really don’t like any type of head coverings.  After decades of one headscarf affair after another, where generations of young women who wear hijab are forced to stop their education (way to go in liberating women, France), things got serious when France woke up in recent years to the threat of illegal […]

The ongoing sexual excesses of Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi routinely make headlines. In fact, the tabloid fodder that is his life has been somewhat of a release for me in a time of heavy news (Egypt and Tunisia, anyone?).   Orgies with showgirls, presents for nubile barely legal girls who are “just friends,” and assorted […]

The Swiss political and media landscape is charged with loaded images of Muslim women.  The French side of Swiss media (namely, in newspapers like Le Temps) usually presents a balanced view of Muslim women, and television shows are of a decent quality, especially compared to television in the U.S. So I had no reason to […]