Khadidje, Fadumah, Ruqaya, Fippan and Bettan are all characters created by blogger Gina Dirawi, a Palestinian Swede whose comic videos mocking racial and other stereotypes have become something of a sensation on the Swedish blogosphere. The following her blog has generated is large enough that she is currently blogging in affiliation with Swedish national television […]

While the front pages of newspapers feature Muslim women in flowing black abayas, burqas, and chadors, the often thrown-aside life and style sections are offering a very different picture of Muslim women: stylish! “Hijabistas,” trendy up-and-coming Muslim designers (predominantly from the U.K.), and fashion-forward hijabis are appearing on the covers of fashion and entertainment sections […]

When I watched Afshan Azad entering the Yule Ball as Padma Patil with Ron Weasley in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, I did not even think about whether or not she was a Muslim. Instead, like many Potter fans, I was thinking about Hermione, and how the two of them really just needed […]

The MMW Friday link lists often highlights the disparity between non-Muslim perception of Muslim women’s experiences and the lives Muslim women actually live. Hence the recent spate of incredulous articles about hijab fashion websites. For Muslim women, the concept of hijab fashion is nothing new, but for Western journalists, Muslim women having the inclination and […]

This was originally published at Migrant Rights. On April 10th, Kuwait’s Arab Times reported about the rape and kidnapping of an unnamed Indonesian maid by a police officer. This report is an appalling example of the regional papers’ disregard to migrant and women’s rights. Kuwaiti press in general (except for Ben Garcia, a staff reporter […]

This was written by Azmat Khan and originally published at AltMuslimah. After years of critique from local female activists, why did one of the most powerful media platforms for women’s empowerment, Tina Brown’s The Daily Beast, preclude the more meaningful ways to understand the complex lives of women in Afghanistan and Pakistan? Their recent summit […]

The BBC documentary Women, Weddings, War and Me follows 21-year-old British Afghan Nel Hedayat (pictured below) as she returns to Afghanistan 15 years after she and her family left. The accompanying article was my first exposure to Hedayat’s experience there, and it provides a different perspective than the documentary did. The article came across as […]

Who is She in Lebanon, an online database with profiles of notable contemporary Lebanese women, was launched by IWSAW (the Institute for Women’s Studies in the Arab World) on the 2nd of March. The project, which was created in partnership with KVINFO, aims to provide an easily accessible database of prominent Lebanese woman, documenting their […]

British novelist Martin Amis has expressed regret that his late sister did not embrace Islam to save herself from self-destruction. Everyone is understandably confused. To begin with, Amis is not a neutral figure on Islam and women: he thinks that Muslims should be masterminded into becoming “more like human beings.” He likes the idea of […]

Ayesha Nasir’s recent article on Slate about signing her religious marriage contract in Pakistan tells of the family pressures that she and many of her “well-educated female friends” faced that led them to sign marriage contracts without reading them fully. The article is generally well-written, and brings up some important points.  Nasir talks about the ways that the […]