On September 23, an American-led campaign was launched to attack different targets that belong to the Islamic State in Iraq and Levant, referred to as ISIL. A number of Arab countries announced their participation in the campaign, among them Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Jordan. Two days later, FOX News discussed the participation […]

A few years back, when shopping malls turned into major destination for shoppers and tourists in the United Arab Emirates, the issue of how men and women appear in public began to gain greater attention. Mall entrances have come to carry signs and instructions relating not only to pets, trash, bicycles and skaters, but dress […]

This was written by Sara Elghobashy and originally published at the elan blog. Whenever a story breaks that Muslim women are suffering somewhere in the world, the press foams at the mouth. Headlines with the words “unveiled” or “veiled” pop up everywhere and the world goes on to sing the song of “Muslim women are […]

For many of us, the last few weeks before the start of Ramadan mark a time to prepare ourselves mentally and spiritually for gaining the benefits of the month ahead. As such, the mass email forwards began arriving in my inbox in early August, with lists prepared by various Muslim institutions gently reminding the faithful […]

Fatemeh already pointed out the obviousness of the title in last week’s Friday Links, but Hamida Ghafour’s article “Lewd stares distressing for women,” published in the U.A.E.’s The National newspaper, is worth a closer look.  Although it seems to promote resistance to sexism and sexual harassment, it does so in a way that perpetuates – […]

The right to an education is one of the most basic rights that any person can have. Yet this right is often denied to women, including many women in various Muslim societies. We have examples of women in the formative era of Islam who benefited from education and who were scholars in their own right. […]

“Sexual Abuse in Islamic Society” is the title of a recently published BBC article.* Right away, I knew it wasn’t going to be a good story (and by “good”, I mean objective, balanced, etc.). “Islamic society,” says the title, not an Islamic society, whatever that is. There is so much wrong with this BBC story […]

Over 500 Arab women participated in the first ever Arab Women Leadership Forum, held in The United Arab Emirates last Tuesday. The two-day event focused on the status of women in the Arab world, and discussed ways of increasing their social, economic and political contributions. Themed, ‘Women and Leadership: Global Trends and Local Innovations’, the […]

MMW would like to thank Thabet for the tip! Katherine Zopf’s Sunday article in The New York Times about flight attendants in the Emirates set off quite a storm in the blogosphere. And rightly so: it’s often eye-rollingly essentializing when discussing Arab women and society. But why waste my breath when others said it better? […]