Trigger and Content Warning: Colonial Violence, Racism, Anti-Blackness, Anti-Indigeneity, Gender-based Violence, Militarized Violence, Islamophobia, anti-Refugee Rhetoric. In the past year Rohingya Muslims have been constantly featured by Western media outlets, particularly as their persecution in Burma/Myanmar has been deemed to be “ethnic cleansing” by the United Nations. The Rohingya community, which is primarily Muslim but also […]

The International Rescue Committee recently sent photographer Meredith Hutchison to meet with young Syrian girls in two refugee camps in Jordan and ask them about their hopes and dreams. The project, called Vision Not Victim, saw the girls draw pictures of what they want to be when they grew up, now that they have escaped […]

The New Year’s Eve assaults and sexual assaults in Cologne (as well as in other European cities, including mine, Zurich) have been all over the news lately and people have been taking cultural relativism a little too far. Within the difficult context of the ongoing influx of refugees since last year in Germany, many see […]

Saba Ahmed, the founder of the Republican Muslim Coalition, appeared on Fox News in an American flag hijab. See the BBC news article here (as I refuse to link to anything going to Fox News) and if you want to buy her hijab, Forbes has let us know it is ten dollars and can be […]

It is a calm and cool afternoon in Nairobi, Kenya, when I catch up with Dr Hawa Abdi over Skype. After working hard in Mogadishu’s difficult circumstances with her two physician daughters Deqo and Amina Mohamed, she sometimes comes to Nairobi to rest and relax. Speaking over a passable internet connection, our conversation is peppered […]

On the 18th of December, the Syrian Trojan Women project staged a production of Euripides’ tragedy The Trojan Women with a cast of Syrian refugee actors and crew in Amman. Their reinterpretation of this 2000-year-old play traces the parallels between the fates of the women of Troy and contemporary Syrian women refugees fleeing the violence […]

“I can’t follow the news anymore, it’s too much.” Over the last two years, I’ve heard this sentence over and over again from friends and family who no longer live their lives to the soundtrack of Arab satellite channels, from local variants like Libya Al-Ahrar to the pan-Arab channels Al-Arabiya and Al-Jazeera. It has become […]

“Oh Canada […] The true north, strong and free.”  – Canadian National Anthem Her eyes met mine sporadically while we stood in the packed subway train in Toronto. It was the month of Ramadan, the month that encourages Muslims to put forth that much more effort – to show sisterhood and warmth to those that […]