Yasmin Alibhai-Brown’s Refusing the Veil, part of the Provocations series by Biteback publishing, is a very short, refreshingly honest book about why the author thinks Muslim women should give up wearing the veil, in all its various forms, so that they can be liberated women in the 21st century. The book begins with a list […]

When I attempted entering “Islamic erotica” in a search engine, I was not sure what to expect. A few weeks before doing that, I had stumbled upon the genre while reading Afrocentric Muslimah’s blog post on the need for Muslim women to embrace their sexuality. Curious to know more about Islamic erotica, I decided to search for […]

For the last month, I have been looking into the literature on discrimination in academia, reading books with titles such as Making Our Voices Heard: Women of Color in Academia and Overcoming Adversity in Academia: Stories from Generation X Faculty. At the same time, I have been attending a course intended to teach academic teachers […]

I was expecting a review copy of the book She Wore Red Trainers in my mailbox any time. It was early September, the time of year when the kids start school, get busy with homework, enroll in a soccer team, and so on, so it is the time of year when I have no time […]

As an American Muslimah who graduated from an American university in 2004, I was very interested to read Shabana Mir’s new book Muslim American Women on Campus: Undergraduate Social Life and Identity, to see how her conclusions lined up with my experiences. In this book, Mir looks at how Muslim women students forge their social […]

Reading Hajiya Balaraba Ramat Yakubu’s Sin is a Puppy That Follows You Home was to me like watching a Nigerian movie, in particular one on Africa Magic Hausa, a channel devoted to Hausa language movies. I could picture popular actors and actresses in the roles of different characters and imagined them bringing these roles to […]

In her recent book, Sandcastles and Snowmen, Egyptian writer Sahar El-Nadidelivers what she calls “a personal search for spirituality.” By combining her personal stories and experience with the main pillars and teachings of Islam, El-Nadi tries to give her readers a glimpse of her perspective on what Islam is. Sahar El-Nadi is a writer and […]

This post was originally published at Aquila Style. Stories of gender-based violence, especially in times of conflict, is nothing new. But what pulled me towards this book was the geopolitical situation and demographic of conflict: the Khmer Rouge regime (also known as Democratic Kampuchea) of 1975-1979, and women of the targeted minority group of Cham […]

Content note: This post includes discussions of domestic violence and of scholarly attempts to justify it. For a number of Muslim women I know (myself included), one of the most complicated Qur’anic passages to contend with is verse 4:34, a verse that, at least in many of the most straightforward translations, appears to establish men […]

When Love, InshAllah, edited by Ayesha Mattu and Nura Masnavi,  was initially published two years ago, I was thrilled. I may not have necessarily related to all the stories of those women but was happy to read them. And as cliche as it sounds, it was really challenging the notion that Muslimahs are a monolith. […]