I am apparently on a book review kick for MMW, with my last post being about the interfaith anthology Faithfully Feminist, and next week’s post on Michel Houllebecq’s Submission (stay tuned). This week’s book review is for a lovely little book in French, Des voix derrière le voile (Voices behind the Veil) by the French […]

As is usually the case in France, any time anything happens where Muslims could even remotely be involved, it becomes a media circus – any time is a good time to talk about how “Muslims want it their way” or how “Muslims don’t want to integrate.” Last week, a 21 year old woman in a […]

This article, co-authored by Laurent Dubois (@soccerpolitics) and MMW’s Shireen Ahmed, previously appeared in Sports Illustrated. A recent special issue of the French Surface Football Magazine includes this portrait of national team player Jessica Houara-d’Hommeaux. The photograph is an invitation, even an incitement. In contemporary France, the discussion about and policing of what Muslim women do and don’t wear is a […]

I write a lot about France and its national psychosis over headscarves. I wrote my undergraduate thesis on the 2004 law on secularity and conspicuous religious symbols. I lived there as a hijabi for almost five years. So it is safe to say nothing really involving France and headscarves shocks me any more. Until recently. […]

Nadia Manzoor is on a crusade to use humor and honesty to talk about the challenges she faced as a young Muslim immigrant coming of age in the US, through a web comedy series called “Shugs and Fats.”   The French government is under growing pressure to make a clear ruling on whether schoolgirls can […]

  Le Temps is the French part of Switzerland’s newspaper of record, and one of the newspapers I read daily. I am a huge fan of their literature section, I have acquaintances who work there, and (full disclosure) I have even had the honor of being citied in that paper. So in other words, I […]

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 […]

In an interview with the Huffington Post, Amani Al-Khatahtbeh, CEO of Muslimgirl.net, explains how Muslim women are ‘spoken over by the public’ and their voices ‘ignored.’ In a rare protest in Afghanistan’s male-dominated society, female rights activists in Kabul carry coffin of a woman beaten to death for allegedly burning Quran to graveyard. A Muslim […]

  So apparently Swiss politicians, lacking in creativity, have nothing better to do than copy what is going on in France. After the burqa ban in the Italian-speaking canton of Ticino and some local issues in the German-speaking cantons, the latest part of Switzerland to jump on the “policing women’s clothing” bandwagon is the Canton […]

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown’s Refusing the Veil, part of the Provocations series by Biteback publishing, is a very short, refreshingly honest book about why the author thinks Muslim women should give up wearing the veil, in all its various forms, so that they can be liberated women in the 21st century. The book begins with a list […]