Last month Canadian social media went wild with covering puns and jabs at the extraordinarily Islamophobic leader of the government, Prime Minister Harper. The Harper Government are challenging a ruling by the Supreme Court of Canada that allows Ms. Zunera Ishaq to wear her niqab at her Canadian Citizenship ceremony. […]

“This book is about what lies behind such deceptively simple responses to problems we think we already understand or believe that we should act on even before we understand.” – Lila Abu-Lughod When Muslimah Media Watch started out in 2007, one of the goals was to be able to create a platform for self-identified Muslim […]

My mother belongs to the Zapotec region of Tehuantepec in Oaxaca, Mexico. She is one of the few among my relatives who identifies as “indigenous.” Colonialism in Mexico, and perhaps in many countries in Latin America, was different in that one of the successes of the colonial era was the creation of the caste system […]

A few weeks ago, I went to a small, local cinema in my city to catch a film. I’ve always liked going to this particular cinema because they screen international and independent films – a fresh change from the standard Hollywood fare at the bigger cinema. The film was about to start, so I quickly […]

Editor’s note: Many of us at MMW have previously cited Lila Abu-Lughod’s 2002 article “Do Muslim Women Need Saving?” in some of our blog posts, and we were excited to see the recent release of her book of the same title.  This is the first of a series of responses to the book by a […]

I woke up one morning last week feeling betrayed. I couldn’t pinpoint the source of this overwhelming nausea of deception, but there it was, swimming in the pools of last night’s dinner mixed in with some proverbial bile. Luckily for my body and eternal salvation, I received a quick diagnosis for those feelings of betrayal […]

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 […]