I am incredibly proud of Iqbal Al Assaad. The news of her being possibly one of the youngest doctors in the world has been in and out of the media over the last few years. Her story is not a new one and it remains inspiring and yet tainted at the same time. Assad excelled […]

Crossposted on Arab Hyphen Dégradé, a film by Palestinian twin brothers Tarzan and Arab Abou Nasser, forces the viewer into a claustrophobic situation and cranks up the tension to an almost unbearable degree.  The title (which refers to a layered haircut but also evokes the word degradation) is an apt one, as the film uses the enclosed […]

When Lebanese writer and poet Joumana Haddad’s I Killed Scheherazade: Confessions of An Angry Arab Woman was published in 2010, it was described as a bold treatise, intentionally designed to be revolutionary, written in manifesto style. Recently, a revived interest has situated it in more superficial terms as “a provocative new book which “lifts the veil” […]

This was written by Nadine Moawad and originally published at Sawt al Niswa. Ya3ni, we all know that corporations get especially greedy around Mother’s Day trying to shove ads down our throats everywhere we look. And it’s hypocritical of Lebanon to celebrate mothers anyway when they are so blatantly inferior to fathers in almost every […]

Al Jazeera recently aired a piece titled Lebanon’s Women Warriors, which features the testimonies and stories of eight women who fought against occupying forces from 1975-1990 in Lebanon. The film offers a unique perspective: it shows the role women played in the war, the unconventional weapons they used, and ways they fought. Perhaps the most […]

When Doha had to jump out of her cab three times after being assaulted by the drivers in broad daylight, she knew she had to do something about it. So she has joined a growing number of women in Lebanon who speak out against sexual harassment. A local non-government organization, IndyACT, supported a national campaign […]

It is very rare to find a book that deals predominantly with Muslim women that does not have the words, “women”, “Muslim”, and most significantly “veil” in the title, especially when hijab is a recurring topic in the book. An Enchanted Modern by Lara Deeb immediately gets 10 points from me, for breaking the “behind/beyond/under/inside/uncovering […]

This was written by Alexandra Sandels and originally appeared on Menassat. A billboard advertisement calling on women to “Be Beautiful and Vote” in the upcoming Lebanese parliamentary elections has caused a fury among women’s rights activists in the country, who are denouncing the ad as sexist and offensive. In response, one group of activists launched […]

Sex. Always an attention getter. So there’s no wonder why Jasad, or “Body,” a new quarterly Arabic magazine published in Lebanon, is making waves in the Arab world by promising to “deal with the forbidden,” the *gasp* human body. The magazine’s logo is ‘body’ spelled in Arabic and the first letter is a broken handcuff, […]

How excited was I when our editor, Fatemeh, emailed out a link to a new online magazine called Bekhsoos!? Of course, I jumped at the chance to cover the first issue of the mag, which is called Bekhsoos il Homophobia (Concerning Homophobia) and is chock-full of editorials, personal stories, health articles, media analyses and more, […]