I received a free copy of the H.M. Hymas’s The Prayer Rug from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.   I really wanted to like this book. I love to hear lesser-told narratives, and this one checked all the boxes: it features a female protagonist and Muslim characters. More specifically, the characters are Iraqi, […]

Afghanistan Afghan rights activist Aziza Rahimzada has been nominated for the International Children’s Peace Prize – an award previously won by Malala Yousafzai – and, like her Pakistani counterpart, hopes to spread her message of universal education and fundamental rights for Afghanistan’s youth. Australia A man attacked a 21-year-old Muslim woman outside the State Library […]

Australia Monique Toohey, a Muslim psychologist, met with Australian Labor MPs on Wednesday to discuss the need to change Australia’s tone on the discussion about violent extremism and Muslims. Toohey, who has experienced online bullying for her activism, is calling for the government to consult with Muslim communities in order to develop well-rounded de-radicalization programs. […]

The issue of stereotyping Muslims has been controversial throughout Hollywood’s history, and looking at American films and TV in general, we can see that Muslim men (usually represented as dark skinned, bearded, and speaking broken English) have almost invariably placed the “bad people category.” Nick Recktenwald, from The Mic comments on this here: In general, […]

On April 30th the Jaafari Personal Status Law will be voted on in the Iraqi Parliament. The Jaafari Law, as it’s being referred to, has been controversial because it would enable Shia men to marry girls as young as 9 years old. Whereas the legal age for marriage in Iraq is 18 years of age, […]

Hayv Kahraman is an Iraqi artist whose work reflects on issues of gender, looking at the victimization of women during war, and the effects of practices such as honor killings and genital mutilation, as well as alienation, marginalization, and displacement. Kahraman addresses these contemporary issues through paintings which have a classical and timeless feel to […]

This article was written for Muslimah Media Watch by Anny Gaul. Yesterday, The New York Times ran an article about what Iraqi women are wearing these days. It paints a picture of a once-secular society’s pluralism run amok: “Vendors around the Kadhimiya mosque in northern Baghdad sell all manner of women’s clothing, from drape-like black […]

Few people would agree that pornography has hardly been an indicator of freedom or political stability. Some more would also agree that it is not a universal symbol of advancement or female empowerment. Nonetheless, this week Tarek El-Tablawy, an Associated Press writer, affirmed that pornography availability mirrors Iraq’s improvements in security and politics. More surprising, […]

When Margaret Atwood wrote The Handmaid’s Tale, a feminist dystopia set in a world run by a totalitarian theocracy, she said that she hadn’t “invented anything,” but taken her inspiration from fundamentalist Christianity in the United States, and the Islamic Revolution in Iran, among other things. In the context of the war on Afghanistan, Mary […]

I saw the movie Taken with my friend and her husband the other day and walked out of the theater feeling scared. It’s not a horror movie; the plot focuses on the sex trafficking of young women. The buyers are rich Arab men, of course. I wanted to be angry with the filmmakers for portraying […]