Guest Post by Kawsar Hosseini (@kaw_sarr), who writes at the blog East-West Bridge.  The story of the lynching of Farkhunda, a woman accused of burning the Quran in Afghanistan, has been widely covered by media in recent days. Among those who have written about the lynching are many Afghans. In a Guardian article, Frozan Marofi, one […]

A group of Afghan men have marched through the capital Kabul in burkas to draw attention to women’s rights. A group of Afghan men have marched through the capital Kabul in burkas to draw attention to women’s rights. Pakistani group “No Guts, No Heart, No Glory” hopes to change the way some media outlets depict Muslim women as […]

Last month, I looked at Eliza Griswold and Seamus Murphy’s work profiling Afghan women poets particular form of poetry, the landay. Their work, as they presented it in an article on Slate, came across as nuanced and reflective (my own words) of Afghan women’s experiences. I was eager to review their book, I Am the […]

Earlier this month, Slate featured a photography-poetry project, “The Secret Lives of Afghanistan’s Female Poets.” The photography-poetry collaboration stems from the work of journalist Eliza Griswold and photographer Seamus Murphy, who reported “Why Afghan Women Risk Death to Write Poetry” for the New York Times magazine in 2012. Griswold and Murphy’s work will be published […]

After the almost 12-year American occupation, there has been a lot of speculation on the future of Afghanistan. While some have deemed the war “unwinnable”, others have talked about responsibility specifically in terms of Afghan women. Upon the close withdrawal of American forces (if they do not delay it again), Canadian and American media articles […]

In a short interview in The New Yorker this past September, American photographer Lynsey Addario, who has covered the Middle East and South Asia for over a decade, talks about her experience photographing Muslim women: “The more I photographed Muslim women, the more I was able to metaphorically strip away the burqas and hijabs, and […]

Women in Afghanistan tend to be depicted as enigmatic objects that defy human comprehension. Media sensationalism and selective reporting bear some of the blame. But thanks to projects like an Afghanistan-based Community Supported Film workshop that trained men and women on how to tell the stories on film, Afghan women are now also using media […]

We’re exploring a Friday Links format here at MMW. It’s different than our usual. Let us know what you think in the comments! And, as always, feel free to include links to news about Muslim women from the past week in the comments! News coverage of Muslim women in New Zealand is rare, but the […]

HBO is set to air “Love Crimes of Kabul” at 9pm tonight as part of their documentary films summer series. This intimate documentary goes inside Badam Bagh, a women’s prison in Kabul, Afghanistan, to tell the stories of three women who are being accused of committing “love crimes” or more commonly termed, “moral crimes”. Among […]

For me, Gayle Tzemach Lemmon’s The Dressmaker of Khair Khana is a journalistic field story masquerading as a feel good beach novel in the Oprah Book Club genre. That isn’t to say I didn’t enjoy reading it, but I felt it warranted something more. While Lemmon’s storytelling is her strength–the way the book is organized […]