Yesterday, we introduced you to Telemundo’s El Clon, its premise, and two of its prominent female characters. Today, we’ll look at two more female characters, some of their male counterparts, and examine how the telenovela uses the Qur’an. Zoraida is the maid in Uncle Ali’s house. She is responsible for protecting Latiffa and Jade, and […]

Spanish soap operas (telenovelas) are just like any other serial dramas, with all the conventional characteristics: star -crossed lovers, dramatic music, a flair for the outrageous and a seemingly never-ending plot. This is exactly what can be expected from Telemundo’s telenovela, El Clon (The Clone). A remake of a Brazilian soap opera that aired in […]

This was written by Tasnim, and originally published at AltMuslimah. The post-9 /11 period has seen a proliferation of texts on the Muslim world which fall under the genre of the travel narrative. In recent years this has included a wave of personal accounts by journalists reporting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, such as […]

Sexy Girls. Arab Beauty that’ll rock your world. Sea, sex and sun. Let the funky Arabs turn you on! The new “Funky Arabs” single by Jad Choueiri, the Lebanese singer known for crooning love ballads, has had over 150,000 views on YouTube in one month. Choueiri spends four and a half minutes singing about how […]

This post was written by Farah Banihali and originally published at Nuseiba. For another perspective on Persson’s documentary, check out Alicia’s article from a few weeks ago. Iran has always been a country I’d love to sit down and read up on. When I first started university, I wrote a (terrible) essay on the causes […]

Reading Yasmin Alibhai-Brown’s commentary in The Independent reminded me a bit of a group of people that Khaled Abou El Fadl mentioned in his introduction to Amina Wadud’s Inside the Gender Jihad. The group of people I refer to are “self-hating Muslims” with “tormented soul(s)” who seem all too eager to assuage the bigoted view […]

As we all know, pop culture can’t get enough of the mysterious ‘Orient’ and its ubiquitous exotic women. The ’80s New Romanticism movement is a case in point. Known for its exaggerated and often outrageous attitudes to fashion and music, the movement inspired pop musicians to take on faraway locations to shoot their videos: Duran […]

Last summer saw the launch of ALO Hayati, “America’s Top Middle Eastern Lifestyle Magazine.” Thanks to a gracious donor, I finally got my hands on a copy of the July 2008 issue. All lifestyle magazines have an aspirational feel to them, and this one was no different. Chock full of advertisements for Dubai hotels and […]

When I started to read a recent NPR story about an Iraqi woman married to an American sergeant, I had to double check to make sure that I was actually reading a news story and not a piece of Orientalist fiction. “From The Iraq War, A Troubled Romance In America” is filled with so many […]

Muslimah Media Watch thanks Ali Eteraz for the tip! A few weeks ago, several Western outlets featured an exposé on Yasmin Fostok (pictured below), the daughter of infamous cleric Omar Bakri Mohammed. And when I say exposé, I’m not kidding: the majority of outlets that ran the story ran it with accompanying pictures of her […]