Krista speaks with an AP reporters about Aisha’s Time magazine: Krista Riley, a sociology graduate student and contributor to a Muslim women’s website, Muslimah Media Watch, finds the photo “invasive and deeply troubling.” To Riley, the image plays into racial divides and cultural distances. Read more on the conversation here. Check it out!

Yesterday, we interviewed Shubnum Khan about her book, Onion Tears. Today, we have a preview of her book, which has been shortlisted for the Penguin Prize for African Writing. KHADEEJAH Khadeejah knew a great deal about husbands. In her many years of moving around the country she had come across a number of them. There […]

Shubnum Khan is a young Muslimah from Durban, South Africa. Her book Onion Tears has been shortlisted for the Penguin Prize for African Writing. Her novel explores the lives of South African Indian Muslim women. I interviewed Khan about her book and her writing. Safiyyah for MMW: Tell us a little about the book. Shubnum Khan: Onion […]

  Editor’s Note: This week’s Time magazine featured an 18-year-old Afghan girl named Aisha on the cover. Aisha’s face is framed with dark hair and a loose scarf; it looks like any other portrait Time might publish. Except there is something missing: Aisha’s nose. Her nose and ears were cut off as punishment for running […]

Raaz for MMW: I found Nomad Diaries a wonderful introduction to the lives of Somali women living in the United States.  There were times where I was reminded of my own immigrant grandmother and mother as I read about Nadifo’s life. As I mentioned in my review of Nomad Diaries, I am not familiar with […]

My parents sent me to an Islamic school from the age of five to thirteen; it was their effort to keep me safe from the dangers of succumbing to the evils of “Western decadence.” During that time, we were a captive audience for many kinds of experimental lectures meant to keep us on a clearly-defined […]

It is said that in Islam, marriage is half the faith.  Yet marriages are increasingly breaking down in divorce or marriage in name only, and examples of healthy marriages in keeping with our deen are becoming scarcer. I was curious to read Suzy Ismail’s When Muslim Marriage Fails–I wondered, do Muslim marriages fail for the […]

Urban fiction novels have been filling up bookshelves across America for generations. Characterized by city settings and an incline towards the profane and dark, these novels are made to appeal to a mainly African-American reading audience. Urban fiction’s cousin, the Christian urban fiction genre, does not entirely exclude the profane, but instead inserts images of […]

Dear Maureen, I hear you’re back from your jaunt over in Saudi Arabia. Kudos to you for making it back from that big, bad place. Somebody get this woman the gin and tonic she deserves! First, a secret: I am so tired of frothy, pop-culture media and art about the question of veiling. It’s really […]

In Yasmeen Maxamuud’s novel, Nomad Diaries, Maxamuud tells the story of an upper-class Somali woman, Nadifo, who comes to Minneapolis as a refugee in the mid-1990s during a time of civil unrest in Somalia. Maxamuud highlights the challenges Somali women face as they transition to life in America as the story follows Nadifo and her family’s […]