Happy new year to all our readers from all of us at Muslimah Media Watch!

This is the second, stand-alone, part of Decolonizing the Mosque. Part I is available here. “Mexican and Muslim? Does that mean Al-Qaeda is teaming up with El Chapo, now?” Border patrol officer in Canada, 2014. I am on edge. As Ramadan unfolds, I know images of Latinx Muslims will make it into the media again. […]

We have all heard of the male gaze, and some of us have heard of the contested female gaze where “the gaze” refers to the way images are created with a male (or female) subject in mind. I have been thinking about what “the gaze” might mean when the subject is Muslim. All this began […]

Christiane Amanpour talks to Nobel Prize Laureate Malala Yousafzai and Syrian Muzoon Almellehan, a Syrian refugee, about the importance of education for girls. Ahd is a Saudi Arabian actor, writer, director whose second short film in which she also acted, “Sanctity”/ “La sainteté”, financed by France’s CNC, won the 2012 Doha Tribeca Development Award, received […]

In Montreal, teenagers knocked a pregnant Mulslim woman to the ground by grabbing her hijab. Some have linked the attack to anti-Muslim bigotry fuelled by the federal debate over the place of the niqab in Canadian citizenship ceremonies. Statistics released by the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) points out that “Muslim female participation in the workforce is […]

I write a lot about France and its national psychosis over headscarves. I wrote my undergraduate thesis on the 2004 law on secularity and conspicuous religious symbols. I lived there as a hijabi for almost five years. So it is safe to say nothing really involving France and headscarves shocks me any more. Until recently. […]

A court in Burma/Myanmar has found two Muslim women guilty of sparking sectarian violence; both are sentenced to two years in prison with hard labor. One of the women bumped into a monk earlier this year, which resulted in Buddhist monks raiding shops and homes in the region. Many Tajik marriages are arranged, but the […]

Late last year, Aceng Fikri, a district chief in the West Java province, ignited public uproar when news leaked that he had divorced a 17-year-old teenager, Fany Octora, via text message. Aceng had married Fany for only four days in an unregistered ceremony as a second wife. According to his lawyer, Aceng complained that Fany […]

The Afghan parliament has failed to pass an important women’s law which would ban violence against women, as many members of parliament deem this particular law to be “un-Islamic.” Two women made the news this week conquering Mount Everest: Samina Baig is the first Pakistani woman to do so and Saudi Raha Moharrak was the first female […]

Pakistan will vote on May 11, and women, both as voters and as candidates, are the subject of many articles in the news last week. First there is the question of women voters: IPS speaks with several Pakistani women and asks them what women voters really want. But not all women get a chance to vote […]