Miriam Cooke has described her use of “Muslimwoman” in one word as a reference to embracing and performing a singular gendered and religious identity, a way of reflecting the intertwining of gender and religion and describing this erasure of diversity. In 2008, in her essay on deploying this term, Cooke explained: The neologism Muslimwoman draws […]

As 2011 draws to a close, we at MMW are looking back at our year of posts.  For those who missed posts earlier in the year, or for those who want to look back through some of the things we wrote about, we’ll be going through some of those through the rest of this week.  […]

In a short interview in The New Yorker this past September, American photographer Lynsey Addario, who has covered the Middle East and South Asia for over a decade, talks about her experience photographing Muslim women: “The more I photographed Muslim women, the more I was able to metaphorically strip away the burqas and hijabs, and […]

Editor’s note: A longer version of this post is available on Tasnim’s personal blog. Craig Thompson’s graphic novel Habibi took 7 years to complete and is close to 700 pages. The result is described on the book’s website as “a parable about our relationship to the natural world, the cultural divide between the first and […]

I recently had the opportunity to see Zehra  Fazal preform her musically-inclined comedy show titled “Headscarf and the Angry Bitch” at the Hollywood Fringe Festival.  Her one-woman show centers on a fictional character named Zed Headscarf who tours around mosques, giving lectures in order to educate congregants about Islam through her folk songs. Her “lecture […]

“My voice is a gift from God.” Khaira Arby in an interview with Steve Hochman for Spinner. Reading through a list of upcoming acts at my local music venue, I came across a woman whose name I hadn’t heard of before—Khaira Arby. Intrigued, I clicked on her act to learn more about her. Singing in […]

When I clicked on a link forwarded to me, I was pleasantly surprised to see a woman wearing a headscarf with a guitar in hand, an almost rare sight given some socio-communal stigmas associated with music. I was even more intrigued by the subject of the video, “The Ramadan Song”–a take on Adam Sandler’s “The […]

Pearls on the Ocean Floor, directed by Robert Adanto in 2010, profiles female artists who identify with an Iranian background to discuss their work.  The 16 artists explore the fluid confluence of identity, religion, and political expression for Iranian women as they strive to present it in their art.  The film is currently making its […]

Last week, we profiled Abdulaziz Al-Qahtani’s “An Intimate Geography” exhibit at the Lahd Gallery. This week, we sat down for an interview with the artist himself. Sara for MMW: I noticed that you never explicitly mention Islam in your work. Was this intentional? Abdulaziz Al-Qahtani: I wanted to move away from Islam, because I do […]

Abdulaziz Al Qahtani is a Saudi Arabian artist based in London. His first exhibition, “An Intimate Geography,” is at the Lahd Gallery. It examines the contradictory relationship between Middle Eastern women and Western society. The exhibition is comprised of a series of twelve images that aim to show the complexities of life in the Middle […]