Last week as I perused through Twitter, an article in the Guardian caught my attention. It was on a young British-Somali woman in hijab playing soccer. The picture was captivating and I was eager to read the piece by Vivek Chaudhury. It was a story of a young woman who loves football, supports Chelsea FC […]

As is usually the case in France, any time anything happens where Muslims could even remotely be involved, it becomes a media circus – any time is a good time to talk about how “Muslims want it their way” or how “Muslims don’t want to integrate.” Last week, a 21 year old woman in a […]

Who doesn’t love stories and reports of young Muslims girls in Afghanistan, leaping through the air and landing on their skateboards? The agility and passion for skateboarding is juxtaposed with general tomboy badassery, which it is implied, is surprising to find in in their homeland. Their long colourful dresses heighten the wonder of their athleticism. […]

  Le Temps is the French part of Switzerland’s newspaper of record, and one of the newspapers I read daily. I am a huge fan of their literature section, I have acquaintances who work there, and (full disclosure) I have even had the honor of being citied in that paper. So in other words, I […]

  “Poetic Pilgrimage isn’t just a rap group — it’s a statement about Islam, women and what it means to belong,” writes Antonia Blumberg for The Huffington Post, in her article titled “Poetic Pilgrimage Is The Muslim Women’s Rap Duo The World Needs Right Now.” Canadian Conservative backbencher Larry Miller has apologized for saying Muslim […]

  So apparently Swiss politicians, lacking in creativity, have nothing better to do than copy what is going on in France. After the burqa ban in the Italian-speaking canton of Ticino and some local issues in the German-speaking cantons, the latest part of Switzerland to jump on the “policing women’s clothing” bandwagon is the Canton […]

This piece was written by guest contributor Amna Qureshi (@Amnamaq), and originally published at the Toronto Star. Judge Eliana Marengo has made a serious error by telling a Muslim woman that she must take off her hijab in court before her case would be heard. Her justification — that the woman was not “suitably dressed” — is wrong-headed […]

The optimism in my last post, at least for Switzerland, has been tempered with news coming out of Switzerland last week. In Switzerland (where niqab is already banned in Ticino since 2013), the German-speaking newspaper SonntagsBlick recently cited a survey saying that 62% of the Swiss population would be in favor of a burqa ban. […]

Women’s participation in the Jordanian political scene has always been a controversial one. Several women in Jordanian political history have made news because of their strong political opposition to their male counterparts’ dominance. The most famous one was Toujan Al-Faisal, who was Jordan’s first female member of parliament. In 2002, Al-Faisal made it to the […]

The Swiss federal government gives a lot of leeway to cantons, cities and even schools and professional associations (for those of you who remember the Sura al Shawk case, where the original decision of basketball association, Probasket, was allowed to stand by the courts) to decide their hijab policies on a case-by-case basis. So despite […]