Friday Links | May 25, 2012

May 25, 2012 By anneke Leave a Comment

At the upcoming June 19 elections in Libya, Libyan women hope to secure a good amount of seats in the national assembly.

The Saudi Gazette features a story about a Saudi woman, Alya Al-Ghamdi, whose ex-husband denies her the right to see her children, supposedly because he is afraid that her new British Muslim husband will molest their daughters.

Al Akhbar English features a piece on the “veiling policies” of Lebanese satellite channel Manar TV.

The Bangladeshi High Court has ordered officials to explain their failure to prevent a 12-year-old girl getting married to a 14-year-old boy last weekend. Bangladesh has one of the highest child marriage rates in the world.

Rural women in Morocco are benefiting from a literacy program, where they are being educated not only in reading and writing, but learn about civil rights and income generating activities as well, to break the circle of poverty in which many rural women find themselves. [Read More...]

Ilwad Elman - TEDxMogadishu

TEDx Mogadishu and the Symbolic Rebirth of a Torn Society

May 24, 2012 By samya Leave a Comment

During the past three decades, global perceptions of Somalia have for the most part been shaped by images of the country as a disaster area, ravaged by poverty and war. Somalia seems to appear in the news only in the context of humanitarian assistance appeals or of Al Qaeda-inspired militias carrying out their heinous acts across the country.

Since the outbreak of the civil war in 1991, there has been virtually no central government control in Somalia. The country has been characterized as a failed state, and as one of the poorest and most violent countries in the world. The situation for women in that country could not be worse, according to a 2011 global survey. Ninety five percent of girls, mostly between the ages of 4 and 11, suffer  genital mutilation; only 7% of parliamentary seats are held by women; and only 9% of women give birth in a health facility.

But recently, this image of a nation of despair and devastation is shifting to an image of hope and re-construction, thanks to a number of initiatives and projects by different individuals and NGOs. One of them is TEDxMogadishu, an event organized on Thursday May 17 that focused on bringing life to a dying nation long victimized by human evils and natural calamities. [Read More...]

Life in a Women’s Shelter in Palestine: Q & A with Samar Hazboun

May 23, 2012 By Guest Contributor Leave a Comment

This post was written by guest contributor Arwa Aburawa. Back in December 2011, gender-based violence hit the headlines in the Arab world when soldiers brutally attacked a hijab-wearing Egyptian protester. Following the incident, there was widespread outrage that a woman would be treated in such a violent manner. And rightly so. However, it got me [...]

Change Is Now? No, Not Yet: Manuel Valls as France’s New Interior Minister

May 22, 2012 By nicole Leave a Comment

I was rather excited about Francois Hollande winning the French elections this month.  I hoped that five years of hateful, fear mongering policy towards Muslims by Sarkozy and his minions would come to an end and that Hollande, for all his supposed blandness, would bring some low-key normalcy to the French presidency. There was one [...]

In the Name of the Caliphate: What the “Islamic State” Seems to Mean for Muslim Women

May 21, 2012 By eren 1 Comment

If you ever wondered about “Islamization” and the so-called return to the Caliphate, recent debates arising from a number of Muslim countries regarding the “Islamization” and the status of Muslim women bring important questions to the table. First of all, it raises the question of what really is the “Islamic state” and what describes it. [...]

Friday Links | May 18, 2012

May 18, 2012 By anneke 3 Comments

Twenty years after the war in Bosnia, there are still refugees living in makeshift camps that lack basic necessities, such as running water. Many of the refugees are elderly women, who are often widowed because of the war, and have nowhere else to go. A Filipino newspaper published a picture last week of a woman [...]

Book Review: The Good Muslim

May 17, 2012 By Guest Contributor Leave a Comment

This piece was written by Sarah Farrukh, and originally posted at altmuslimah. Written by Tahmima Anam, The Good Muslim is the story of an educated, “modern” woman who loses her brother to Islamic fundamentalism. And perhaps this storyline is why the book has garnered so many rave reviews and literary awards—because Western critics and audiences [...]

Maria Toor Pakay vs. the World

May 15, 2012 By merium Leave a Comment

In a 2010 television interview, quoted in a more recent article (I was not able to find an original recording of the interview), Pakistan’s highest-ranking female squash player, Maria Toor Pakay, spoke on the rights of women in Pakistan: “Girls don’t get any rights. They cannot go out of the house. They cannot do whatever [...]

Isabelle Eberhardt: Swiss Explorer, Sufi Adventurer

May 14, 2012 By tasnim 1 Comment

Isabelle Eberhardt’s extraordinary life is the stuff of legends – and movies, and operas. Song From the Uproar: The Lives and Deaths of Isabelle Eberhardt, Missy Mazzoli’s multi-media opera, which premiered this spring, explores the unconventional twists and turns of Eberhardt’s short, “operatic” life. You can see the trailer, the Kickstart video, some excerpts and a shorter [...]

Friday Links | May 11, 2012

May 11, 2012 By anneke

Victims of bride kidnapping in Kyrgyzstan cannot rely on the Kyrgyz legal system for help, even though the practice is legally forbidden. One reason for this is that many of these marriages are religious marriages only, and are not registered as civil marriages. According to Kyrgyz official up to 8,000 girls are bridenapped annually, based on [...]

Dead Muslim Women As Opportunities

May 10, 2012 By sana

In April of 2011, 20 year-old Jessica Mokdad was allegedly gunned down by her stepfather Rahim Alfetlawi. The media uproar over the murder was immediate and, unsurprisingly, cloaked under the sensationalized trope of “honor killing.” While Mokdad’s family, including her biological father, stressed that Alfetlawi had issues of control and was not acting out of [...]

Book Review: Rughum & Najda by Samar Habib

May 8, 2012 By nicole

Rughum & Najda by Samar Habib is a fictional love story set in ninth-century Baghdad. Rughum, a Muslim woman, meets Najda, a witch who was raised with a Manichean family. Rughum and Najda’s love story is the main story around the stories of several lesbian (or “tharifa”) women in the book. Besides Rughum and Najda, [...]