Tajik state television has aired a documentary that alleges that prostitutes in the country have been wearing Islamic veils to earn more money.   Once a month, Muslim women gather in a bright open space inside a brick building near downtown Los Angeles. They come for jumu’ah or Friday prayer. This “all women’s mosque” has […]

“How is your situation with attending the mosque?” begins a video by Kuwaiti preacher Mishary Al-Kharaz, before he introduces us to his “friend in Yemen”. The video shows Kamal, a young man with a “handicap”, as he enters a mosque, prays sitting on a chair and then goes up to the second floor after the […]

The daughter of a close friend recently turned 10, and I went to a children’s book and toy store to look for a gift.  I made my way past the picture books, marvelling at how fast the time has gone since I was buying her a Scaredy Squirrel book for her sixth birthday, and stood […]

In recent years, women-only taxi services offering convenient and safe transit have sprung up in major cities all over the globe. These “pink taxis,” driven by women for women, offer a variety of benefits — not only giving women the option of avoiding harassment by male drivers, but also offer employment opportunities, business ownership, and in some cases, empowered […]

The World Press Photo contest is a competition where the best professional photographers have a chance to showcase their work. The contest focuses on photojournalism and features photographers from all over the world. Last year the controversial photo of Bibi Aisha, taken by Jodi Bieber and featured in Time Magazine (which MMW covered here), won […]

This post was written by guest contributor Summar Shammakhi. For a long time, negative impressions have dominated world’s opinion of women in the Middle East and North Africa region. Media depictions of women as second-class citizens often deemphasises the root causes of the problem, which include the repressive, dictatorship-led countries of this region who sought […]

Google executive Wael Ghonim became one of the faces of the Egyptian revolution through the Facebook page “We are all Khalid Said,” which was a vital spark to the revolution. But another important spark was a video posted by 26-year-old Asmaa Mahfouz from the April 6 Youth Movement, where she declared that she was going […]

It’s hard not to judge a book by its cover, or in this case, an article by its headline, when the first words that scream out at you are: From bikinis to burkas: A Yemeni memoir. If your first thought is, “Not again. Haven’t we been down this cliché-littered road before?” then you’re not alone. […]