Recently, BBC’s Sporting Witness and NPR’s Tell Me More featured interviews with prominent Muslimah athletes.  Sporting Witness profiled Hassiba Boulmerka— otherwise known as the “Constantine Gazelle”—an Algerian Olympic gold medal winner in the 1500m competition in 1992. In the United States, Tell Me More profiled American fencer Ibtihaj Muhammad, who’s currently training for the 2012 […]

As 2011 draws to a close, we at MMW are looking back at our year of posts.  For those who missed posts earlier in the year, or for those who want to look back through some of the things we wrote about, we’ll be going through some of those through the rest of this week.  […]

Almost a year ago, for my very first MMW post, I wrote about Sura al-Shawk, a professional Swiss basketball player from Luzern who was forced to choose between wearing her headscarf and playing professional basketball due to the supposed “uniform” regulations of the local and national basketball associations, both affiliated with FIBA, the International Basketball […]

The world of hijabs and soccer (or football, if you prefer) has been making the news a lot lately.  As you might remember, FIFA recently banned the Iranian women’s team from playing, because of their headscarves.  Jordan’s team has also recently been banned for the same reason.  And in the Montreal area, 15-year-old Sarah Benkirane […]

Becca Swanson, bodybuilder, power-lifter, and pro-wrestler (who has been called “The Strongest Woman on the Planet”) writes on her site that she has “a burning desire to show the world my powerful physique laced with beauty and femininity.” This self-consciously anti-oxymoronic statement reflects the fact that female bodybuilders have often been subject to the most […]

Yet another Muslim woman has been denied the right to play sports while wearing a headscarf. Last summer, a young Swiss Muslimah from Luzern, Surah al Shawk (pictured left), attracted the attention of the Northeastern Swtizerland Basketball Association, ProBasket, when she started playing in second division games in Luzern. Unfortunately, it wasn’t her amazing skills […]

A couple of weeks of ago, the BBC featured a story on Kurdish women football teams. Two weeks later, the story is still on the front page of the Middle East section of the BBC News’s website. I kept flirting with the whether or not to cover the story, but since it covers two issues […]

One of the most common questions that the media, and maybe even non-Muslim in everyday life, have for women who wear hijab is “how do you do [insert whatever said activity here] in hijab?” It is probably also a question that Bilqis Abdul-Qaadir gets often, since she is a star high school basketball player in […]

MMW thanks HijabStyle for the links! With the Olympics in full swing, I thought I’d take a quick peek at the way in which media was presenting the participation Muslim women, if they were at all. Initially, while watching the opening ceremony, I heard tidbits of references to the women competitors from Muslim countries such […]

This originally appeared as part of a larger post at the blog Pedestrian. It has been edited for length, but you can read the entire version at the original website. I don’t know whether this is considered a virtue or a vice: Laleh Sedigh’s showing up for a sports race with a face full of […]