Veena Malik is a Pakistani actress with a special flair for controversy. She first made major headlines after confronting a Mullah who accused her of inappropriate and vulgar behavior while participating on the Indian reality show ‘Bigg Boss.’ Her confrontation was praised by many, as she took a stand against general double-standards thrown at men […]

This post was written by Aziz Poonawalla and originally appeared at City of Brass. I found this argument by Munawar Hassan of the political party Jamaat-i-Islami to be unbelievably disgusting and fundamentally blasphemous in the way he invokes the Qur’an to justify blatant misogyny: Here is the most disturbing part of Hassan’s comments: Anchor: The […]

The earthquake that shook Pakistan and Kashmir in 2005 killed thousands and left millions homeless. Pakistani-American Nausheen Dadabhoy felt it was her responsibility to give a voice to those affected by the earthquake. Through visits to hospitals and camps, Dadabhoy met Ruqiya and Khalida, two women whose lives had changed due to the disaster. In […]

Today’s film “captures the true essence of the protagonist’s feelings getting into an arrange marriage.” It was submitted by Sanaa Iftikar in Pakistan. What do you think, readers? You can watch the rest of the submissions at the Women’s Voices Now website.

When discussing prominent Pakistani women, references are usually made to former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, human rights activists Asma Jahangir and Hina Jilani, or even entertainers like Zeba Bakhtiar and Nazia Hassan.  Pakistani women like Mukhtaran Mai or Asia Bibi have also rightly garnered media attention for different reasons. Fatima Jinnah, sister and confidante of […]

After reading Nicholas Kristof and Sheryll WuDunn’s Half the Sky earlier this year, I began to frequent Kristof’s blog at the New York Times website, “On the Ground.”  While I found parts of his book lacking in portraying some of the women’s own voices (there are places where women from the developing world are portrayed […]

This is an edited version of an article published at Café Pyala. You can read the article in its entirety at their website. Oh, shoot. Here we go again with coverage of Fashion Week in Pakistan. Can we do anything in Pakistan without it being linked in some way to either appeasing the Taliban or […]

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 […]

I wrote a post last week on the flogging that took place in Pakistan’s Swat Valley and my thoughts on the video. This week, Randy Cohen, a columnist for The New York Times, wrote a piece on the ethics of what took place in Pakistan, as well as the recent law proposed in Afghanistan. While […]

The recent release of a video showing the flogging of a girl by the Taliban in Pakistan has created a stir across the web. Various articles have been published about it, both on mainstream news sites and blogs.  The reason for the whipping remains unclear: media outlets report intercourse before marriage, rejection of a marriage […]