My toddler cousins, like all children their age, were born into a world of rattles, Legos, diapers, and TV. Now more than ever, kids programming is a dominant and formative force in young children’s lives. The average preschooler spend 32 hours a week latched onto the TV screen, and by high school graduation has clocked […]

Movie stars have always fascinated me. We follow their dressing sense, emulate them, secretly envy them and even the most polite among us feel obliged to pass snide remarks on them as if they belong to each one of us. In this email interview, Pakistani actress Saeeda Imtiaz, who portrays the role of Jemima Khan […]

This post was written by guest contributor Nur Laura Caskey. Ricki Lake. Jerry Springer. Judge Judy gone horribly wrong. In his lectures on how Europeans came to determine which things would be considered “abnormal,” Michel Foucault says “expert psychiatric opinion allows the offense, as defined by the law, to be doubled with a whole series of […]

This post was written by guest contributor Maria Salman. Marriage: The one word on the tip of the tongue for many young Muslims. The difficulties in searching for the elusive One experienced by the Muslim diaspora is a phenomenon that is well documented. Google the phrase “Muslim marriage crisis,” and a substantial number of hits […]

When I think of Britain, I don’t think of a society so “rife” with promiscuity and drunkenness that its very moral fibre is in need of repair. Call me naive, but I usually imagine red telephone boxes, Mister Darcy, imperialism, fish & chips, curry houses, and Doctor Who. But according to a mini-series from 2007 called “Make Me a Muslim,” Britain […]

 This post was written by guest contributor Emaan Majed.  On my grandmother’s dresser, there is a pink tube of cleverly marketed whitening cream. She applies it daily, despite being quite pale, despite claiming to hate the colonizers from whom it stems, despite being a health-freak and knowing that it contains hints of mercury. My grandmother […]

For many of us, television drama can be an enriching part of our living experience, defining many of our day-to-day conversations with family members, co-workers and social network friends.  But what happens if drama series go too far in fantasizing about our life situations by presenting us with unreal representations of events, issues and personalities […]

Now that Ramadan is over, I can get it out of my mind and scream hard on how women were portrayed in the Egyptian TV throughout the whole month. Women are seen as sex objects: there’s no better way to put it than this cliché; it is as simple, as shallow, and as degrading as […]

We are bombarded with images from Syria every day — flashing across our television screens and updating in our Facebook newsfeeds. They are horrific pictures of the carnage left in the aftermath of massacres. It has been over a year now since the beginning of the Syrian uprising and there seems to be no relief […]

After spending the past few weeks delving into President Obama’s foreign policy strategies, discussing the Rochdale case and surviving steamy temperatures of over 45 degrees Celsius, I was looking forward to covering something upbeat and inspiring. The appearance of Pakistani sous chef Fatima Ali on Chopped, a cooking competition on the Food Network, provided the […]