Moroccan novelist Mohammed Berrada’s Lu’bat al Nisyan (The Game of Forgetting, 1987) begins with “In the Beginning was the Mother.”   The main character in the novel, Hadi, is a leftist journalist suffering from a midlife crisis, disillusioned on the communal level by the deteriorating political situation in Morocco, and devastated on a personal level […]

This post was originally posted at wood turtle’s blog. Two years ago, Mohsina Nosarka contacted me asking for feedback on an Islamic book series she was in the process of writing and illustrating. As I’m always on the lookout for new and exciting children’s Islamic literature, I gladly obliged. And since our initial contact, I’m thrilled […]

In Egyptian writer Ahdaf Soeuif’s novel, The Map of Love, there is a scene that describes the statue Nahdet Masr (Rise of Egypt), a statue of a peasant woman unveiling as she stands next to the Sphinx: “The statue of Nahdet Masr rises before her: the statue at whose feet they had gathered in the […]

When I volunteered to write a review of the monthly magazine Sisters for MMW last month, I had no idea how challenging it would be for me. Weeks passed with the PDF copies that Sisters had kindly sent waiting in my inbox, until my deadline finally prompted me to give them more than a skim-read.  Sisters was founded by […]

This post was written by guest contributor Rahela Choudhury, whose initial review of Gardens of Water can be found here. Other writing by Rahela is available here, here, and here. This second post about Alan Drew’s novel Gardens of Water will serve as a critique of the book’s accompanying teacher’s guide. In particular the focus […]

I have been hearing about Taslima Nasrin from the time I was a child. The Muslim Bangla woman was accused of writing blasphemous anecdotes about Islam in her 1993 novel  Lajja, which drew a number of protests, including at least one group calling for her death and offering a reward; Lajja was banned in Bangladesh […]

The Girl who Fell to Earth is the coming-of-age story of a self-described “Qatarican” (Qatari/American) which takes the reader on a zig-zagging journey from a farm in Washington State to a Bedouin town in Qatar, and on to a houseboat on the Nile and the hustle and bustle of Cairo. The result is something very […]

This post was written by guest contributor Rahela Choudhury, and contains spoilers about the book.  Alan Drew’s Gardens of Water focuses on how two families become forever intertwined after a devastating earthquake wreaks havoc upon their lives. The story takes place in a Turkish town on the outskirts of Istanbul. The two main families in […]

Amy Waldman’s The Submission is a novel that struggles to tell “a post-9/11 story” with a potentially implausible concept and a cast of characters lined up as representatives of certain types and injected with nuance with varying degrees of success. The title is a play on words, a speculation on ”what would happen if a […]

At Muslimah Media Watch, many of our posts are critical of the way Muslim women are portrayed in various films, literature, and news articles—Muslim women (and other racialised women) are not given the space and time to share their personal stories of struggle and triumph on their own terms. Women’s stories are often mired with […]