Ilhan Omar, a 34-year-old, hijab-wearing Muslim-American woman, has become the United States’ first Somali-American legislator after winning a seat in the Minnesota House of Representatives. A group of women in Jordan are defying gender roles for a career on the road. While it’s not easy working in a male-dominated sector, the country’s female taxi drivers […]

Saudi Arabia announced it will be sending four female athletes to Rio Olympics. It follows separate release about male squad amid ongoing sensitivity about the issue in the Gulf kingdom. Indian Muslim women defy tradition and men to be judges. The year-long program aims to produce a steady stream of female “Qadis” across India. She […]

In a recent VICE News short documentary, The Kohistan Story: Killing for Honor, producers Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy and Saad Zuberi, along with host Hani Taha, tell the story of five young women and three young men who were killed in Kohistan, KPK, Pakistan in an apparent “honour killing.” As VICE explains: “In May 2012, a grainy […]

Izzat. It’s Old Rei, the language spoken by Scholars before the Martials invaded and forced everyone to speak Serran. Izzat means many things. Strength, honor, pride. But in the past century, it’s come to mean something specific: freedom. – Sabaa Tahir, An Ember in the Ashes  Recently, and in tandem, I read Sabaa Tahir’s An […]

Palestinian rap group Dam’s latest song “Who You Are,” featuring newest member Maysa Daw tackles misogyny and “make believe feminism.” As one of the groups members, Tamer Nafer, puts it: we need to “criticize the hypocritical part of our society, which likes to play ‘make believe feminism’ from time to time.” This is not the […]

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 […]

In April 2011, Faleh Hassan Almaleki, an Iraqi immigrant to the United States, was sentenced to 34.5 years in prison for killing his 20 year-old daughter for becoming “too westernized.” The case was deemed an “honor killing” because the daughter, according to the dad, dishonored the whole family. This story is one of many presented […]

In April of 2011, 20 year-old Jessica Mokdad was allegedly gunned down by her stepfather Rahim Alfetlawi. The media uproar over the murder was immediate and, unsurprisingly, cloaked under the sensationalized trope of “honor killing.” While Mokdad’s family, including her biological father, stressed that Alfetlawi had issues of control and was not acting out of […]

On the morning of June 30, 2009 a quadruple-murder case rocked the city of Kingston in Ontario, Canada. Four women were found dead, submerged in the Rideau Canal, in their Nissan Sentra. At first it seemed as though boaters had come across a teenage prank gone awry or the victims of a horrific car accident. […]

This was written by Farangis Najibullah and originally published at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. RFE/RL’s Ukraine Service correspondents Volodymyr Prytula in Crimea and Maryana Drach in Prague contributed to this report. The headlines were nothing short of chilling. “Aspiring ‘Miss Ukraine’ Killed Under Shari’a Laws In Crimea” warned Ukrainian online newspaper “Gazeta Po-Kievski.” “Radical Islamists […]