Valentine’s Day used to be a big day for me when I was a teenager. While the original “cupid” is more than a little problematic and the capitalist, gendered and heteronormative nature of the holiday is absolutely real, in urban middle-class Mexican society it was often considered an “opportunity.” An opportunity to make your feelings […]

Writing (for Muslimah Media Watch and other platforms elsewhere) has opened up many opportunities to collaborate with other activists from around the world. In particular, some articles I wrote on female circumcision (and also male circumcision) a few years ago attracted a lot of attention from activists and filmmakers, and a fresh round of conversations […]

In a recent VICE News short documentary, The Kohistan Story: Killing for Honor, producers Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy and Saad Zuberi, along with host Hani Taha, tell the story of five young women and three young men who were killed in Kohistan, KPK, Pakistan in an apparent “honour killing.” As VICE explains: “In May 2012, a grainy […]

At first Soumaya Ghannoushi’s article “Muslim women and the militant atheists” caught my eye; later, it became part of my very entangled personal thoughts on the intersections of gender, religion and secularism. Ghannoushi presents a critique of liberal-atheists, who, very much like right-wing Westerners, have had much to say about hijab, Muslim women and Islam. […]

I am assuming David Cameron’s ‘plans to “help” more Muslim women to speak fluent English’ were supposed to come across as a positive move? How can this education programme be seen as anything but positive when learning the country’s language is such an important tool for empowerment and social inclusion? Several commentators have made this […]

I used to lie about being Muslim. I would pretend that I was any other minority. It depended on the friend group I was trying to impress. Sometimes I masked myself as a Mexican girl. Other times I decided that my father was Arab, while my mother was White. I’m mixed! I would say. I […]

The New Year’s Eve assaults and sexual assaults in Cologne (as well as in other European cities, including mine, Zurich) have been all over the news lately and people have been taking cultural relativism a little too far. Within the difficult context of the ongoing influx of refugees since last year in Germany, many see […]

I am incredibly proud of Iqbal Al Assaad. The news of her being possibly one of the youngest doctors in the world has been in and out of the media over the last few years. Her story is not a new one and it remains inspiring and yet tainted at the same time. Assad excelled […]

I recently became aware of rape threats made on social media towards Datuk Noor Farida Ariffin, a well-respected former Malaysian ambassador to the Netherlands. Also a lawyer, she was the co-founder of Sisters in Islam, a local non-governmental organisation for women’s rights, and is the spokesperson of a local group of prominent Malays called G25. […]

  I was shocked to read recently about evidence of women who were filmed giving two-hour lectures in London in secret closed women-only meetings in community centres ‘glorifying’ ISIS to women and children. Hannah Stuart, a counter-terrorism expert with the Henry Jackson society, labelled the presence of young girls and children “particularly worrying,” in regards […]