This post is related, but only slightly, to the Nouman Ali Khan (NAK) scandal (in which a religious leader used his power to harass and threaten women, as MMW explored in a recent roundtable). I don’t want to talk about NAK, but I do want to talk about the idea of spiritual abuse, a concern […]

Trigger warning: gender-based violence, spiritual abuse, victim-blaming, misogyny On September 23, 2017, Omer M. Mozaffar published a Facebook post in which he wrote about “predatory behavior” on the part of Nouman Ali Khan, a Texas-based Muslim scholar and founder of Bayyinah Institute with millions of online followers. Since then, much of the Muslim internet has […]

When 32-year-old divorcee Samar Al Badawi went to Jeddah court to challenge a “filial ingratitude” complaint filed by her father, the judge rejected her claims and ruled in favor of her father. And despite documented physical abuse, previous court rulings to lift her father’s guardianship, and even a royal order to send her to an […]

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 […]

Like last week’s article on Britain’s apparent condemnation of the entire system of Islamic law, it was the ridiculous headline of this article that got me first. “Al-Azhar backs women’s right to beat husbands“? Hardly. Scholars from al-Azhar University in Cairo have affirmed that a woman who is being abused has a right to fight […]