On July 1, 2017 the  e-book The Muslimah Sex Manual: A Halal Guide to Mindblowing Sex was released. The book, written by US-based Umm Muladhat, was picked up by different media outlets, which have described the book as the “first ever Muslim sex manual”. Media coverage of the guide resurfaced discussions on Muslim women’s sexuality […]

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, immersed in a culture that debated “Western” values and was skeptical of its imports, I spent my early years in a society that taught me from the beginning that my sexuality was not mine, but someone else’s. Even when the institution of marriage started to crumble and common-law unions became more […]

When I converted to Islam, before Love Inshallah (which Merium reviewed last year) and Sex and the Citadel, I was immersed in a religious culture that had an ambivalent relationship with sex and sexuality. While the women in my community occasionally discussed matters of “lawful” vs. “prohibited” when it came to sex, they were also […]