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 […]

Salon’s “Feminists face off over the veil” is supposed to reflect a serious debate, not only related to feminism itself, but to the conception non-Muslim feminists have of Islam. Writer Tracy Clark-Flory depicts the feud in a very anti-feminist way, as some kind of wrestling game: “In one corner, we have Naomi Wolf […] In […]

If you’ve been following coverage of the fallout from the recent Iranian elections, you have been bound to see images of women in the streets as part of protests against the election results. In fact, the Western media has put a feminine face on much of its coverage of what is happening in Iran connecting […]

I am not an Islamic scholar, therefore my opinions on Islam do not count. Worse still,  I’m told that it’s not my place to have an opinion on Islam at all. This is the general climate of thought in Malaysia put forth in the recent proposal by the country’s main Islamic party, PAS, to investigate […]

Salam waleykum, readers! I’m back from the Women, Action & Media! conference in Boston. It was a great conference, with a convergence of female activists, filmmakers, bloggers, writers, and media makers of all kinds. It was positive, enlightening, and educational. Reflecting about the “Inside/Outside” theme past my previous thoughts, the conference as a whole was […]

With so much of American foreign policy being focused on various Muslim countries, it is no surprise that there is a “concern” among conservatives about the issues that Muslim women face in different parts of the Muslim world. I have a wish that their concern is sincere, but when I read essays like Zeyno Baran’s […]

Did any one go? I wasn’t able to, and am terribly sorry that I missed it. The theme of this year’s conference was Muslim women and issues of globalization. You can see many of the speakers at the conference’s website. If you went, SHARE! If you have thoughts (relevant to the discussion), SHARE. This is […]

I want to take a temporary (temporary, I promise!) break from our moratorium on headscarves to highlight this article, which actually deals with many of the points I brought up in a post a while ago, asking why people get so caught up in headscarves and burqas when there are so many bigger fish to […]