International development policies have been my bread and butter for the past two years, both academically and professionally. When I first entered this field, I wanted to understand why development programming was only guided towards non-white people. Didn’t the world overall need “development”? As I soon learned, the word “development” as it is used in […]

Growing up in Mexico, neither hijabs nor niqabs were a thing. On paper, we are still a very Catholic country with 83% of the population being identified as such in the national census. Muslims in Mexico are concentrated among Lebanese-Mexican communities and southern Indigenous communities in Chiapas, Mexico. Broadly speaking, twenty years ago we were […]

Upon learning about the Paris attacks and the #PrayforParis hashtag that emerged, I felt many things – but I was not shocked. Violence does not shock me. As a woman of colour and as an immigrant, it is part of my surroundings. I have become desensitized to violence. If you are like me and grew […]

For the longest time I have been pondering what, if anything, makes me Muslim. Is it the shahadah? Is it pure belief in the divine? Is it community acknowledgement? Is it the fasting and tarawih prayers during Ramadan? Or is it the fact that I have somehow forced myself in other Muslims’ lives by writing […]

Dear Mona, Some of my fellow Muslimah Media Watch writers put together a roundtable about their thoughts on your book, and as I read it, I decided to explore some of their ideas and thoughts further. This review in the form of a letter stems from the need to address not only the book itself, […]

In my humble (maybe not so much) opinion, Latin Americans feel a strong attachment to charismatic figures. Think for example, of Che Guevara. Che Guevara is drilled into our minds since an early age as a symbol of justice, leadership and true revolutionary Latin American spirit. In fact, even thinking about challenging the idea of what […]

I must admit, I can’t wait until the year is over. I have had a difficult year first dealing with my partner’s passing, and then trying to figure out what follows the grieving process. Right after Saad’s passing, I found that my Muslim community had a rather complex and unexplored relationship with death. Many of […]

A few years ago I wrote a piece on the media coverage of domestic violence issues in Spain and Latin America, and how Islam and the “other’s” culture are depicted as “worse.” The issue continues to be relevant today. A recent article in Reforma, a Mexican newspaper, reports on the incidence of “international romances” between Mexican […]

There is a lot of talk recently about “Latin” and Spanish-speaking converts to Islam, particularly women, which I have discussed in previous posts (here and here). Female converts to Islam, in general, give us a lot to talk about; thus, my question in a previous post on “Are converts news?” Some converts are treated as “cool” […]

For many years now, countries around the world have been faced with the question of minority rights and religious accommodation. In Canada, where I currently live, questions about niqabs in courtrooms, voting stations and citizenship ceremonies have been raised in the past five years. Part of the debate has been the meaning of religious accommodation, […]