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 […]

Israel’s war on the Palestinians may be over for now, but the conflict remains. About a week and a half ago, I received an email from a wonderful organization, Jewish Voice for Peace, asking me to sign onto a letter to President Obama asking him to create a just foreign policy regarding Israel and Palestine. […]

* 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 […]

With so much of American foreign policy being focused on various Muslim countries, it is no surprise that there is a “concern” among conservatives about the issues that Muslim women face in different parts of the Muslim world. I have a wish that their concern is sincere, but when I read essays like Zeyno Baran’s […]

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 […]

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 […]

Ms. Rachida Dati, France’s first female Muslim minister, has been criticized for returning to work only five days after giving birth to a baby girl. The media seems to favor the public view that Dati’s decision is a reckless political stunt that makes light of the responsibility of mothers everywhere. Dati, half-Algerian and half-Moroccan, is […]