This post was originally written by Shehnaz Haqqani, and originally published at her blog, Freedom from the Forbidden.  A slightly shorter version of the review was published in the American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences, vol. 33, Issue number 1, Winter 2016.  It is reposted here with permission from the editor. At a time when […]

Leila Aboulela’s The Kindness of Enemies, her fifth novel, explores the complexities of loyalty, religion and of nationalism, and the human yearning for belonging. The story is structured as two parallel narratives, a third person historical narrative set during the 19th century Caucasian war, and a contemporary narrative narrated in first person by Natasha Wilson, […]

Izzat. It’s Old Rei, the language spoken by Scholars before the Martials invaded and forced everyone to speak Serran. Izzat means many things. Strength, honor, pride. But in the past century, it’s come to mean something specific: freedom. – Sabaa Tahir, An Ember in the Ashes  Recently, and in tandem, I read Sabaa Tahir’s An […]

Islam and the Future of Tolerance is a dialogue about the possibilities of reforming Islam between Sam Harris, neuroscientist and New Atheist, (one of the Four Horsemen of the Non-Apocalypse), and Maajid Nawaz, a former Islamist turned reformist. As the book details, the idea for this discussion began in the wake of an Intelligence Squared […]

This week, I am excited to write about Secrets Under the Olive Tree, a book about a Palestinian-American girl written by a female Palestinian-American author. As a passionate champion of diverse narratives, I think it is incredibly important to have narratives by writers who belong to the communities they are depicting. I believe this adds […]

Moroccan sociologist and feminist writer Fatima Mernissi passed away on the 30th of November, aged 75. As the news broke on social media, many of us at MMW shared stories about the lasting impact Mernissi had on our lives, and what we had learned from this pioneer of Muslim feminism. Here is that conversation.   […]

On the occasion of Michel Houllebecq’s Submission being released in English, I volunteered to read it in order to review it here. In fact, I refused to read Submission when it first came out in French, and I still approached the book begrudgingly. The short version? I hated it. At the ripe old age of […]

When I first heard the title of Dr. Nina Ansary’s latest book, Jewels of Allah, on the life of women in Iran, I must admit I had to restrain myself. In general I’m pretty wary about labelling women as two-dimensional objects, whether in a negative (‘lollipops’) or positive (‘pearl in its shell’) way. Ansary explains […]

I am apparently on a book review kick for MMW, with my last post being about the interfaith anthology Faithfully Feminist, and next week’s post on Michel Houllebecq’s Submission (stay tuned). This week’s book review is for a lovely little book in French, Des voix derrière le voile (Voices behind the Veil) by the French […]

I am not going to lie, I started reading Without Shame with some skepticism – and I have to confess that skepticism stemmed at least in part from the author’s background and previous writing. Katherine Russell is a non-Muslim, white Western writer with a background in poetry and love stories. In 2006 she published a […]