With an accolade of awards and recognition for her screenwriting, including her work in progress film, Jinn which has already received several high ratings on the industry script database, Shereen Malherbe speaks to filmmaker Nijla Mu’min about her new highly anticipated first feature film. SM: Tells us about your film Jinn in a snapshot. NM: […]

Kashif Pasta is the founder of Dunya, a communications agency that aims to bring relatable narratives to South Asian and Muslim communities in North America. He and his team recently produced Zoya, a short film following a high school girl who doesn’t quite expect her peers’ reactions when she decides to experiment with hijab.   […]

Tajik state television has aired a documentary that alleges that prostitutes in the country have been wearing Islamic veils to earn more money.   Once a month, Muslim women gather in a bright open space inside a brick building near downtown Los Angeles. They come for jumu’ah or Friday prayer. This “all women’s mosque” has […]

As an American Muslimah who graduated from an American university in 2004, I was very interested to read Shabana Mir’s new book Muslim American Women on Campus: Undergraduate Social Life and Identity, to see how her conclusions lined up with my experiences. In this book, Mir looks at how Muslim women students forge their social […]

Can a young American, Muslim woman who discovers her superpowers change the way Muslim women are perceived in the United States? My knowledge of comics is limited to what is presented in mainstream film incarnations—who among us hasn’t seen one of the many films that portray superheroes onscreen? Those cosmic tales where protagonists (predominantly male, […]

I didn’t know what to expect when I first picked up Jennifer Zobair’s debut novel, Painted Hands. Chicklit isn’t really my thing — and it was sold to me as a “Muslim chicklit” — even though highly appraising endorsements found on the back cover call this novel, “a positive portrait of Muslim women” and an […]

After reading the synopsis of Torn , a film written by Michael Richter and directed by Jeremiah Birnbaum, I thought: Oooh, this might be yet another film on the post 9/11 era, blaming the Muslim community for all evil things that happened, and echoing  all sorts of stereotypes that have defined America’s perceptions of Muslims […]

As many of our loyal and long-time readers are well aware of, we’ve often covered the issue of women’s space and place in mosques. Whether we were looking at Chinese female imams and all-women mosques or the effect of mosque space on women’s love lives and, well, humanity, we’ve explored the various issues of gender, […]

Finding black Muslim women in mainstream media circuits can be like finding a needle in a haystack. Most of the representations of Muslim people are confined to Arab and South Asian people, which are both the faults of mainstream producers and Muslim-owned media makers. However, it leaves other communities within the broader Muslim community to […]

At the beginning of September, I attended the annual Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) convention in Washington, D.C.  The event brings many well-known speakers, a bazaar, art exhibits, the always popular “speed marriage interviews a.k.a. the matrimonials,” and various entertainment acts from across the ISNA, Muslim Students Association (MSA), and Muslim Youth of North […]