“Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.” -Toni Morrison, Beloved Awhile back, a friend and colleague said something about me I wasn’t sure how to take: “Heba,” she said, “in some ways you shatter everything that I thought I knew about Muslim women; in other ways, you absolutely embody stereotypes I have.” I smiled, […]

Afghanistan In Afghanistan, half of all deaths among women aged 15 to 49 are because of pregnancy and childbirth. A video by The Guardian titled, “The imams, the Taliban and the condoms” follows two imams’ project to raise awareness about birth control methods and women’s health. Australia Susan Carland, an Australian academic, who regularly receives […]

Emma Watson met with Malala Yousafzai in an interview posted online this week. I will let you draw your own conclusions (more sources here and here). Speaking of Malala, U.S. Presidential candidate Marco Rubio named her as someone he would like to have a beer with. The Republican Party, always with its fingers on the […]

This post was written by guest contributor Shereen Malherbe (@malherbegirl). Headline grabbing assertions made by British MP Baroness Cox regarding Muslim men having up to 20 children each have been condemned by the Muslim community. In search of the representation of women in the UK media, it didn’t take me long to come across the Telegraph article […]

This post originally appeared in New Canadian Media. The recent decision in Canada by the Federal Court of Appeal that ruled in favour of Zunera Ishaq, who challenged the ban on the niqab at Canadian citizenship ceremonies, has resurrected a non-issue into an election topic. During last week’s French language leaders’ debate and in the political commentary that […]

I write this post as an expression of solidarity, because as someone who lives in Turtle Island (Canada) and has close ties to Latin American immigrant and refugee communities, I find myself needing to speak out. I come from a country where the situation of violence and poverty since the mid-90s (and before) has driven […]

Palestinian rap group Dam’s latest song “Who You Are,” featuring newest member Maysa Daw tackles misogyny and “make believe feminism.” As one of the groups members, Tamer Nafer, puts it: we need to “criticize the hypocritical part of our society, which likes to play ‘make believe feminism’ from time to time.” This is not the […]

          Last month Canadian social media went wild with covering puns and jabs at the extraordinarily Islamophobic leader of the government, Prime Minister Harper. The Harper Government are challenging a ruling by the Supreme Court of Canada that allows Ms. Zunera Ishaq to wear her niqab at her Canadian Citizenship ceremony. […]

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 […]