A few weeks ago Musleh Khan, a chaplain working for the Toronto Police, was all over the media for his comments on women and obedience on a 2013 webinar for couples. In the webinar titled “The Heart of the Home: the Rights and Responsibilities of a Wife” (the video has been taken down), he asserts […]

Four years ago, I wrote about some school girls who refused to take communal swimming lessons in the Swiss city of Basel.  As a recap, from my previous article: In Basel, the families of five Muslim girls in elementary school were fined upon appeal to the Swiss Supreme Court for refusing that their daughters take […]

As many of you know by now, tragically, Pakistani social media star Qandeel Baloch was recently murdered by her brother. Inna lillahi wa inna illaihi rajaioon (to God we belong and to God we return). I hadn’t followed her but I had known of her. Even without following her I knew she was a big […]

I remember once when I was in third grade, I was assigned a worksheet to familiarize myself with the structure of an atlas. I found pages of maps of the world. Much like anyone else does when they stumble upon a map, I automatically looked for the city of Atlanta, where I lived and called […]

In Copenhagen, a swimming club has recently started offering female-only sessions to allow more girls the opportunity to swim. Since it began, the program has drawn around 246 girls of non-Danish origin (interestingly, it is much more difficult to find information on whether any girls of Danish ethnic origin also take part). The numbers are […]

So the French are talking about their enduring obsession, Muslim women and their clothing, again. I am a little late to the ball game on this one, but between a needed vacation and Handshake Gate in Switzerland, I had to walk away from the hate to keep my own sanity. Laurence Rossignol, the French Minister […]

I will never be surprised by the amount of discrimination and racist language used in state policy. From Canada’s Bill C-51 to America’s Patriot Act, proposed bills and enforced legislation say a lot about current atmospheres of tension. Most recently, a proposal has been made in Belgium to ask newly admitted immigrants to sign an […]

When I came to Canada almost ten years ago, multiculturalism was sold to me as the one and only policy that could guarantee the peaceful and productive mingling of cultures within a country. When I was enrolled in English as a Second Language (ESL) program, “integration” was one of the things we were taught. Thus, […]

The issue of violence against women in Pakistan has received some international press in the last week or so. First, with Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, a Pakistani-Canadian filmmaker, winning an Oscar for A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness, her documentary about Saba Qaiser, a survivor of an attempted “honour killing”. This was followed by […]

Saraswati, a make up artist from Malaysia, has captured the attention of thousands on Instagram, after using her hijab to help transform herself into popular Disney characters. Under the name Queen of Luna, Saraswati has shared over 300 posts with her 27,000 followers – each of them incredible and accurate recreations of different cartoons and […]