Our Stories, Our Lives is an anthology of a diverse group of women in Bradford, England, offering a glimpse into their lives and their issues with reconciling their Muslim identities with being British. With the media’s daily onslaught on the image of Muslims and assumptions about so-called conflicting alliances (Islam and the West), a “proud […]

Melinda wrote a while ago about negative media representation of Latina Muslim women.  She described a lot of the common one-dimensional assumptions attributed to Latina women who become Muslim, such as the idea that: in Latino culture, men are macho jerks and women are sex objects. In Islam, they are covered up and immediately respected. […]

When I first saw the book Muhajababes by Allegra Stratton in a bookshop in Beirut, I was intrigued enough to buy it. The cover boldly claims to have found, “the new Middle East–cool, sexy and devout”. I happily forked out the $14. On closer inspection however, the cover of the book is quite problematic (featured […]

This piece was written by Guest Contributor Asma T. Uddin. Asra Nomani’s recent piece in Marie Claire, “My Big Fat Muslim Wedding”, underscored everything that is wrong with Marie Claire’s coverage of Islam and Muslim women.  Nomani’s piece was a confused narrative at best, conflating culture with religion and individual bad experiences with larger truths […]

“Sara, I could never get with a Muslim girl, how do they make you guys so unattainable?” a womanizing co-worker once asked me in all seriousness. There is nothing that I love more than a man that sees “ethnic” women as another check mark on an international bingo card.  I’ve heard a number of men […]

At the heart of many of the problems plaguing Muslim women in developing nations is a dollar bill, not a Qur’an. That was the overall impression I received from reading last Sunday’s Times Magazine. The issue of women in developing nations may not appear to be an impending issue for the Muslim community. In fact, […]

This was written by Tasnim, and originally published at AltMuslimah. The post-9 /11 period has seen a proliferation of texts on the Muslim world which fall under the genre of the travel narrative. In recent years this has included a wave of personal accounts by journalists reporting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, such as […]

It is very rare to find a book that deals predominantly with Muslim women that does not have the words, “women”, “Muslim”, and most significantly “veil” in the title, especially when hijab is a recurring topic in the book. An Enchanted Modern by Lara Deeb immediately gets 10 points from me, for breaking the “behind/beyond/under/inside/uncovering […]

Whenever I encounter Asra Nomani’s works or see her in an interview, I usually wonder,“What is her point?” I don’t say this derisively. Is she trying to speak about gender inequality among the ummah? Is she trying to deal with gender norms in her own South Asian community? These questions formed in my mind as […]

Rabble.ca, an alternative news source in Canada, recently posted a podcast that was originally broadcast on Co-Op Radio in Vancouver, on their show “The F Word,” which looks at feminist issues.  Entitled “Islam, women and feminisms,” this segment features interviews with two Canadian Muslim women, Itrath Syed and Farzana Doctor. The host of the show […]