On April 30th the Jaafari Personal Status Law will be voted on in the Iraqi Parliament. The Jaafari Law, as it’s being referred to, has been controversial because it would enable Shia men to marry girls as young as 9 years old. Whereas the legal age for marriage in Iraq is 18 years of age, […]

Last week I was invited to the Dutch embassy to celebrate the launching of the Nobel Women’s Initiative’s report on sexual violence against women in Sudan. The report is titled “Survivors Speak Out: Sexual Violence in Sudan,” and it is meant to address the situation of “mass rape” and other forms of sexual violence against […]

This last week has seen protests in Jakarta, Medan, Surabaya and Jogjakarta over the Miss World 2013 beauty pageant to be held in the next few weeks. Recently, I wrote a post about a similar debate in Malaysia where their Muslim participants were eventually dropped. The Miss World 2013 protests numbered in the thousands and […]

Beauty pageants have gotten a bad rap over the years for objectifying women by putting them on parade and privileging their looks over their personality or brains. Some pageants have actively tried to change this idea, by including a talent segment, and making charity work an increasingly bigger part of the winners’ duties. One such […]

Last Saturday, the city where I live in Western Canada held its annual Pride Parade. This year and against all odds, the first member of my mosque participated in the parade. Sister Sarah (a pseudonym) decided to participate in the parade after years of struggling with reconciling her faith with her sexuality. She decided “to try […]

The weeks following the Boston bombing have been filled with media reports with all-too-familiar suspicion of Islam and –as Nicole explored in a recent post— hijab-wearing Muslim women. However, both local and international media largely missed an act of activism from my part of the world that had taken place even before Ann Coulter appeared […]

After converting to Islam, I struggled with my community’s views on art, women and the combination of both. Having grown up in a society that prides itself on a variety of artistic movements, and being part of a very artistic family, I felt uncomfortable accepting my Muslim community’s idea that art is prohibited in Islam. […]

Queer Muslim. These two words appear to be incongruent terms in many contexts; however, there has been a real commitment recently to creating a discourse that allows for queer Muslim voices to be respected and validated. It is tiring to be caught in conversations when the various parties cannot accept each other simply for their […]

Editor’s Note: This post was written by Yasmin Ali.  I apologise for not including her name when this was originally posted. – Krista I recently attended a symposium on Islamophobia at American Islamic College titled “Facing Religious Intolerance: Islamophobia in the 21st Century .” Panel members included Nathan Lean as well as Ahmed Rehab and Dr. […]

In recent months, Indonesia has been appearing in the Asian media every time there is a non-Muslim celebration. I first noticed this with the debates on wishing “Merry Christmas” by Muslims to Christians, on Christians holding Christmas mass, and the accounts of violence done to churches in December 2012. A few weeks ago, the same debates were repeated on the […]