On June 17th, women in Saudi Arabia plan to take to the streets—they’re going to get behind the wheel to protest a religious edict forbidding them to drive. As Eman wrote in a post about the Women2Drive campaign yesterday, Manal Al-Sharif posted a Youtube video of herself calling on all women to drive their automobiles […]

Amina Abdullah is being celebrated as the unlikely voice of Syria’s revolution. She is a 35-year-old Syrian-American woman living in Damascus. On her blog, she writes candidly about her life as a lesbian in Syria. She garnered international attention after a post describing how her father was in an altercation with the state police. Abdullah’s […]

Earlier this month, Ms. Magazine ran an article that looked at breast cancer stigma in Saudi Arabia.  The article provides breast cancer statistics in Saudi Arabia (without citation or link), breast cancer statistics in the United States, and American expat Carol Fleming’s experience with breast cancer in Saudi Arabia. Fleming suggests that promoting pink products […]

Though one expects a whopping media event like the death of Osama Bin Laden to produce speculative stories on an industrial scale, it is to be hoped that the speculation is at least based in reality. Blogs engage in wild speculation, but serious media blogs are still behooved to be based on facts; otherwise, we […]

Is it just me, or has this spring seen a lot of de-jabbing articles lately?   As a “dejabi” myself, I alternate between taking these articles with a grain of salt and hoping that something put forth by the journalist will resonate with me. One of the recent pieces is NPR’s “Lifting the Veil” (har har), […]

This was written by Lobna Hadji and originally appeared at OWNI.eu, Digital Journalism. I wasn’t meant to die so young… My name is Sohane Benziane. I was born in France to Algerian parents. On October 4th, 2002 my life came to a sudden end when my ex-boyfriend NoNo set me on fire. I remember the […]

Google executive Wael Ghonim became one of the faces of the Egyptian revolution through the Facebook page “We are all Khalid Said,” which was a vital spark to the revolution. But another important spark was a video posted by 26-year-old Asmaa Mahfouz from the April 6 Youth Movement, where she declared that she was going […]

Monday and Tuesday, we examined some Muslim matrimonial sites. Yesterday, we conducted an experiment looking at how these sites functioned and how our subjects fared. Today, I’ll digest all this information and figure out what it means for Muslim women. Something to keep in mind when joining this websites is the fact that men tend […]

Yesterday we finished introducing you to a few Muslim dating (or “matrimonial”) sites. Today, we introduce you to our “experiment:” I set up profiles and recorded the experiences of my different “subjects.” These websites and the expectations of the participants tell us something about the conceptions of femininity and masculinity that surround marriage. Some people, […]

Yesterday we introduced you to online Muslim matchmaking world and a few popular websites. Today we look at one more. Halfourdeen.com Halfourdeen.com is a site created by Baba Ali, founder of Ummah Films and a number of different resources and products for Muslims. Halfourdeen.com is new to the Muslim matchmaking scene, but it prides itself […]