“She ought to be in prison for wearing the hijab” said conservative political pundit Ann Coulter on Fox news two weeks ago. Then she added, seemingly baselessly, “Did she get a clitorectomy too?” Given that America’s impression of Muslim women as a whole is often still that of oppressed and childlike foreigners, remarks like Coulter’s […]

This post was written by guest contributor Nur Laura Caskey. Ricki Lake. Jerry Springer. Judge Judy gone horribly wrong. In his lectures on how Europeans came to determine which things would be considered “abnormal,” Michel Foucault says “expert psychiatric opinion allows the offense, as defined by the law, to be doubled with a whole series of […]

Last week a factory building collapsed in Bangladesh, and approximately 400 people were killed; most of them were female factory workers. About 150 people are still missing. The BBC spoke to Merina Khatun, who had spent four days trapped inside the rubble before she was rescued, and 14-year-old Halima Akhtar, who was employed as a sewing operator in one […]

When I was growing up in a small city on Canada’s East Coast, many of my classmates had no idea where Pakistan was located. It was the mid-eighties and I was unable to convince them I was NOT Indian just because both my parents were born in India. I decided to do an extensive geography […]

For the past two years, sweeping political changes in parts of the Middle East have had a profound impact on socio-cultural and legal traditions. Arab women have been at the forefront of this change, exercising their rights as political citizens and raising their voices against injustices within their own countries and in support of others […]

Hello and salaams MMW friends, The MMW team is excited to announce that we’ve recently welcomed six new writers on board!  We are very happy that the following women (listed along with their recent guest posts, so you can get a sense of their writing if you haven’t already) have joined our team of regular […]

Cooking hasn’t been one of my strong points ever, and after getting married to a family whose cuisine was completely different to mine, I was lost. Since most of the dishes prepared in my husband’s home are unique, their recipes were pretty hard to find online as well. That’s when I found Thasneen Ansi’s blog […]

This post was written by guest contributor Hafsa, and originally published at Sisterhood. Last June, while visiting a north-western province in Sri Lanka, I had the chance of observing a community development initiative that focused on women’s empowerment and enhancing their role in participatory democracy. One of interesting prescripts that I observed was that most […]

There were, of course, a lot of news items related to the (female) relatives of the alleged “Boston bombers” this week: there were interviews with the mother and the aunt, and a lot of speculation about both the mother and the converted wife of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, Katherine Russell. One Muslim woman in the Boston area has reported […]

Moroccan novelist Mohammed Berrada’s Lu’bat al Nisyan (The Game of Forgetting, 1987) begins with “In the Beginning was the Mother.”   The main character in the novel, Hadi, is a leftist journalist suffering from a midlife crisis, disillusioned on the communal level by the deteriorating political situation in Morocco, and devastated on a personal level […]