Today is Pink Hijab Day, a day to encourage awareness of breast cancer in conjunction with National Breast Cancer Awareness Month in October.  Pink Hijab Day was founded in 2007 by a group of Muslim women from Missouri who wanted to promote Islam and breast cancer awareness at their high school.  In the couple of […]

A thin square of shiny polyester is the main player in Atiha Sen Gupta’s play, What Fatima Did. The plot focuses upon the sudden decision of a non-religious young woman to wear hijab. An insightful and funny look into the reaction of those around her, the play asked some very good questions about identity, religion, […]

Two constitutional court cases in Kuwait raise questions of a paradigm shift in women’s rights.

Politics Daily discusses the state of women’s rights in Afghanistan. Somalia’s hardline group al Shabaab has publicly whipped women for wearing bras. When does it end?! More from Al Arabiya and Improvisations. Via ProgressiveIslam. Time reports on the recent phenomenon of female suicide bombers in Pakistan. CAIR has asked state and federal officials to get […]

German-Turkish writer Seyran Ates thinks Islam needs a sexual revolution. This might seem a little tongue-in-cheek, given the countless political revolutions post-due in predominantly Muslim countries, yet Ates’ book couldn’t be timelier. Muslims, like everyone else, are exposed to sex at an earlier age, despite marrying later than past generations. It isn’t hard to prove […]

The calls of lawyer, activist, and writer Seyran Ates for a sexual revolution in the heterogeneous Muslim world may surprise many, particularly when the movement is commonly associated with free love, hippies, and public nudity. In a recent interview with German magazine Spiegel, Ates begins with discussing what she means by this and her experiences […]

This was written by Farah Banihali and originally published at Nuseiba. Last month a forum was held at the Adelaide Festival of Ideas focusing on Islam and feminism. Called “Beyond the Veil: Islam and Feminism”, it involved Dr. Gary Bouma, a sociology academic at Monash University; Zainah Anwar, founder of Malaysian group Sisters in Islam […]

Not to be outdone by Egypt’s Shaykh Tantawi, the Muslim Canadian Congress (MCC) released a statement two weeks ago that calls for the Canadian government “to introduce legislation to ban the wearing of masks, niqabs and the burka in public.”  Their rationale for this statement seems twofold: one one hand, the MCC is concerned that […]

Everybody freaks out when Dalia Mogahed says that “Shari’ah law is misunderstood.” A controversial program finds husbands for Iraqi widows, but many worry that it’s exploitative. More about the Egyptian burqa ban, people’s opinions on it, and the ripples it’s created: here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. A Norwegian court […]

The Glass House, directed by Hamid Rahmanian, is a documentary of the lives of a group of young women at the Omid e Mehr day center in Tehran. These women deal with a range of issues, including drug addiction and sexual, physical, and verbal abuse. Omid e Mehr’s staff provides these women with social services […]