During Ramadan, my bedside novel happened to be Mother of the Believers by Kamran Pasha. It’s a work of fiction about the youngest and most beloved wife of the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh). Pasha has brought to life the story of A’isha, one of Islam’s most controversial and enigmatic characters. Only the right amount of poetic license, […]

Sophie Ashraf, also known as The Burkha Rapper, is an Indian Muslim female rapper for whom Muslim identity seems central to her art. This comes across clearly in her following statement on the Blind Boys website: Its like when you really like a band, you wear T-shirts of that band, Well we really, really like […]

With much anticipation, I awaited the arrival of Tariq Ramadan’s new book, “Radical Reform”, in the mail. A few weeks ago, it finally got here. It is difficult to hide my obvious appreciation for the book, but I will attempt objectivity. Ramadan is known in the Muslim world, as a revolutionary, tolerant and forward-thinking scholar […]

Shahina Siddiqui’s article “True Muslim society protects women,” published this past weekend in the Winnipeg Free Press, presents one woman’s response to some of the sexism and misogyny within Muslim communities that has been in the media recently. Siddiqui condemns the murder of an Afghan women’s rights activist, the flogging of a young women in […]

The March 2009 issue of Time magazine carried an extensive article about Islam, called “A Quiet Revolution grows in the Muslim world” by Robin Wright. While the article speaks broadly about Islam, I will focus on those passages and statements which deal with Muslim women. This is how Time describes the “soft revolution”: Today’s revolution […]

Salam waleykum, readers! I have lots of announcements! altmuslimah, a kind of “sister” site to altmuslim, launched today. It’s a wonderful site that discusses gender and Islam in an intelligent, thoughtful way, and it’s put forth by many of the same people who are behind altmuslim, with one notable addition: me! I’m serving as associate […]

I wrote a few weeks ago about the effect of a fictional white character’s Muslim identity on possible constructions and understandings of Islam and Muslim; this week I want to look at a couple non-fictional women in similar positions. On Open Salon, a network of bloggers, this weekend’s top story was written by Sara O’Connell, […]

Disclaimer: Below is an analysis of a debate between Irshad Manji and Dalia Mogahed. This analysis will be about the way in which the women were represented, how they spoke, how they interacted with one another, as well as with the moderator and audience (and vice versa), and some of the comments they made, etc. […]

The Guardian’s Life and Style section has a biweekly series called This Muslim Life. The series consists mainly of vignettes of the experiences of its author, Noorjehan Barmania, who writes on “the life of an Asian immigrant in Britain.” The author brings in anecdotes about topics such as multiculturalism in Britain, her childhood in South […]