With Valentine’s Day coming up, I have found myself wondering about relationships, dating and marriage. As a woman that has been in a long distance relationship for numerous years, big heart-shaped balloons, teddy bears and red roses are not part of my life. However, after joining grad school I noticed that I am not the […]

Last week the current Syrian regime announced during the peace negotiations that women and children are free to leave the city of Homs and said it would provide all the necessities, so they would not need for anything. One woman relates her horrifying experiences in Homs, before she fled the city last year. The first […]

A number of initiatives have been launched in the last few years to engage Muslim women in public discussions of issues related to Islam in general. In her post “Reviving the Spirit Without Recognizing Half The Audience?“, Sumaya, a guest contributor to MMW, suggested a list of women who should be invited on such events. […]

The debate about whether or not “we” should have a debate about banning “veils” has returned – or maybe it would be more accurate to say that the volume has been raised, since this is a debate that seems to have been running in the background for most of the last decade. The amount of […]

Russian authorities are hunting for potential female suicide bombers in and around Sochi; security forces say that they have killed potential “black widow” Zaira Alieva during an operation on Saturday, which left seven dead. The Olympic Games are scheduled to start on February 7. It is estimated that one in nine Pakistani women will have […]

My mother belongs to the Zapotec region of Tehuantepec in Oaxaca, Mexico. She is one of the few among my relatives who identifies as “indigenous.” Colonialism in Mexico, and perhaps in many countries in Latin America, was different in that one of the successes of the colonial era was the creation of the caste system […]

Human Rights Watch has spoken out about the discriminatory rules imposed on women by certain Syrian armed opposition groups. After young Australian couple had been killed in Syria earlier this week, many stories have been coming up about Amira Karroum, the woman involved, stressing her “recent” shift to a more “radical” Islam and her alleged verbal abuse of the neighbours. […]

In a previous post, I talked a little about the 99 Hijab Stories book and why the idea of the book made me squirm. I don’t know how succesful the book has been, but it certainly has generated enough hype that a few months later an Indonesian TV channel announced that it would air (*drumroll*) […]

Last Wednesday, social media was abuzz with the published findings of a recent study conducted in the “Muslim world” (Tunisia, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Turkey). The initial study was done by University of Michigan and looked at religious tolerance and secularism in Tunisia in comparison with six other nations.  Although the initial […]

The beginning of December brought a season of joy and cheer. For Muslims in the United States and Canada, it also brought some of the most heated and intense debates on social media about Islam and identity, community, critique, critique of critiques, slut-shaming, and who may (not) speak for, to, about (un)veiled Muslim women regarding […]