Sex and the Citadel is a collection of stories by Shereen El Feki, who spent five years traveling across Egypt and several other Arab countries asking people about sex: “what they do, what they don’t, what they think and why”. Why write about sex? Her choice of subject matter is partly stimulated by how sexual […]

When Lebanese writer and poet Joumana Haddad’s I Killed Scheherazade: Confessions of An Angry Arab Woman was published in 2010, it was described as a bold treatise, intentionally designed to be revolutionary, written in manifesto style. Recently, a revived interest has situated it in more superficial terms as “a provocative new book which “lifts the veil” […]

A recent Gulf News article entitled “Feminism in the Arab World” aims to give a picture of, well, feminism in the Arab world.  It interviews professors and students about their experiences of feminism, female leadership, and the status of women in Arab countries. While the analysis and interviews are interesting (you can go read that […]

Salam MMW readers! My name is Malika and I’m an American journalist who recently moved to the Gulf (Persian to some, Arabian to others). It’s an incredibly interesting time to be living in a region that’s still trying to determine what kind of place it wants to be. In the meantime, there are lots of […]

Sex. Always an attention getter. So there’s no wonder why Jasad, or “Body,” a new quarterly Arabic magazine published in Lebanon, is making waves in the Arab world by promising to “deal with the forbidden,” the *gasp* human body. The magazine’s logo is ‘body’ spelled in Arabic and the first letter is a broken handcuff, […]