It has been 30 years since the Islamic Revolution in Iran and Western media has a slew of various features looking at Iran. The subject of many of these features is Iranian women and, the common themes in these stories are that Iranian women have made some progress, but that more progress has to be […]

Last week’s Iraqi elections received lots of media coverage, but at MMW we were mostly fascinated by women candidates, especially since election rules require 30% of the candidates be female. The Huffington Post defines Iraq’s exercise in democracy as rebellious, while the Gulf News qualified it as an act of political maturity. I’ll take a […]

Various news organizations have reported that a CIA officer stationed in Algeria, identified by CBS News as Andrew Warren, has been accused of drugging and raping two Algerian women. The women, according to CBS, came forward separately and “reported the incidents months after they occurred.”  This from ABC News: The CIA’s station chief at its […]

A Toronto judge has recently ruled that a complainant in a sexual assault trial – who happens to wear the niqab, a face-covering worn by a small percentage of Muslim women – will have to uncover her face in order to testify.  According to this article, The judge, Ontario Court Justice Norris Weisman, determined he […]

French politician Rachida Dati has been in and out of the headlines since taking office as France’s Minister of Justice.  MMW recently covered the hype around Dati’s pregnancy and her decision to return to work only five days after having a caesarian section.  Now, Dati is back in the news as we hear that she […]

NPR did a piece on the “honor killing” of Sandeela Kanwal on January 26, 2009. Kanwal was the daughter of Chaudry Rashid, a Pakistani immigrant who lives in a suburb of Atlanta. The police in Clayton County (where Kanwal and Rashid lived) say that Rashid killed his daughter because she wanted to divorce her husband and Rashid […]

* Asian and South Asian will be used interchangeably to refer to those of Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, etc., origin. Earlier this month, BBC News ran two stories online on young Asian (read South Asian in North America) women, and both stories exposed our dirty laundry. Or at least that was the way they seemed. The […]

Okay, good news first: Dr. Ingrid Mattson, president of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) and professor at Hartford Seminary, among other things, will be among those offering prayers at the National Prayer Service this Wednesday of (soon-to-be) President Barack Obama’s inauguration.  Dr. Mattson will be part of a multi-faith group of prayer leaders […]

Single Muslim mothers must be the new “it” topic for the Western media. There has been a lot of coverage of Rachida Dati, the French minister of Moroccan and Algerian heritage, who just recently had a baby while still being single. Now, the BBC has done a piece on single mothers in Morocco. The story […]

I’ve been doing some research lately on spaces where “Muslim” and “Canadian” are talked about as if the two identities are completely separate, so of course I rolled my eyes when I saw the headline about “American and Muslim Women Working Together” from an article on Media For Freedom.  (As it turns out, the article […]