Recently, The Atlantic posted a short film produced by the Thomas Reuters Foundation (trust.org) about one Syrian woman’s new life, Starting Over in the Netherlands. It begins by showing a picturesque view of the city, Kessel-Eik, as the woman, Hanadi, bikes through it. As a tranquil melody plays, we see a church behind trees, a […]

*names changed to protect privacy I came across an uplifting piece by David Sim of the IB Times featuring gorgeous photographs of Syrian girls envisioning their future career goals. They pose as a radiologist examining X-Rays or as an architect holding building and project plans. The series is called “When I Grow Up” and was […]

This week’s Friday Links were compiled by Eren and Samya.  Australia Racism and sexism is creating a toxic mix for the hundreds of thousands of Muslim women living in Australia, says Dr. Mehreen Faruqi as they have become the most likely targets of those retaliating and venting their anger in the aftermath of terrorist incidents. Dr. […]

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 […]

Muslim women in Morocco are demanding a female-only beach so they can enjoy the summer weather without having to worry about keeping their bodies covered. A progressive Mumbai-based Muslim women’s group has published a survey whose findings are so stark that they should, finally, put an end to any further debate on the urgent need […]

Every year, the holy month of Ramadan brings lots of spiritual moments, as well as hours of continuous entertainment in the form of shows and soap operas. Every Ramadan, I pick a number of soap operas to watch and write about. This year, there was a large number of television series that discussed issues faced […]

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 […]

This piece was originally published at PolicyMic. By now you have probably already heard of the harem of Tunisian sex-warrior slaves heading to Syria in order to give up their young bodies to the appetites of deprived rebels to fulfill ‘jihad al-Nikkah’ — “Sexual Jihad” — and are coming back to the country with bellies […]

A couple of years ago, I heard a story about an Egyptian woman who decided that she would cook the Ramadan favourites she usually cooked for iftar, but she and her family would not eat the meals she prepared. Instead, the food was distributed among the poor and they broke their fast on flat bread […]