Last Thursday, I went to the launch of AQSAZINE, a project that describes itself as “a grassroots publication open to 16-35 year old women and trans people who self-identify as Muslim.”  The theme of this first issue is “resistance & self defense,” and it includes poetry, rants, articles and artwork on themes including war, occupation, […]

Okay, I’ll admit it. When I first heard the title, my immediate reaction was to roll my eyes. “Not again!” I thought. “Not another book with sad kohl-rimmed eyes peeping out from under a black niqab on the cover and which talks about a poor/ downtrodden/ oppressed (add your own adjectives) Muslim woman who is beaten/ […]

Last summer saw the launch of ALO Hayati, “America’s Top Middle Eastern Lifestyle Magazine.” Thanks to a gracious donor, I finally got my hands on a copy of the July 2008 issue. All lifestyle magazines have an aspirational feel to them, and this one was no different. Chock full of advertisements for Dubai hotels and […]

Who says young adult fiction about Muslim girls can only be contemporary or historical? Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu’s 2007 novel shows that Muslim teen lit can venture into the realm of the future.  Young adult novel The Shadow Speaker explores science fiction and fantasy with a story that plays out in a futuristic, magical universe with worlds […]

Sex. Always an attention getter. So there’s no wonder why Jasad, or “Body,” a new quarterly Arabic magazine published in Lebanon, is making waves in the Arab world by promising to “deal with the forbidden,” the *gasp* human body. The magazine’s logo is ‘body’ spelled in Arabic and the first letter is a broken handcuff, […]

I watched Brick Lane last night. Full disclosure: I haven’t read the book. I wanted to, I swear. Just never got around to it. So I can’t offer book-versus-movie criticism, which doesn’t seem like such a big deal considering that everyone always says that “the book is better,” anyway. But I really enjoyed the movie. […]

Muslimah Media Watch thanks Hijabtrendz for the tip! Those of you who speak French should go check out MWM, a new magazine for Muslim women, published in France.  It’s first issue is free and currently online.  It seems like future issues will require a subscription, but their subscription section isn’t up yet. The magazine introduces […]

The latest issue of Chay magazine has come out and MMW is on it. For those of you who are not familiar with Chay, it is a Pakistan based magazine dealing with issues of sexuality. MMW has covered it twice already, once before the first issue, and then again when the first issue came out. […]

This was written by Cycads and originally published at her blog. Syria’s unlikely notoriety for racy underwear collides head on with the stereotyped image of the veiled and prudish Muslim woman. In a way, ‘The Secret Life of Syrian Lingerie‘ (2008, Chronicle Books) had come at an opportune time to dispel these fossilised images, but […]

In this past week’s Friday links, Fatemeh mentioned that Al-Azhar University had for the first time approved a tafsir (interpretation) of the Qur’an written by a woman, Kariman Hamzah. The BBC story on this event left a lot to be desired. The first thing that was seriously wrong was the headline “Egypt clerics back woman’s […]