Awards for women and blogs: Nominations, please!

A lifetime in blog years

For the sixth year in a row, we’ve opened up nominations for the Brass Crescent Awards (BCA), a yearly poll that lets you choose your favorite blogs from the Muslim blogosphere. The Brass Crescent Awards, which we produce along with City of Brass, has grown in popularity year after year (about 1,000 of you voting the last two times), with good press coverage and some growing pains as well. This is the second year we have incorporated a judging panel of past winners to help us run the awards. This year, although we are saying farewell to a previous judge, Sunni Sister, we are pleased to introduce a new judge, Baraka from the BCA-winning blog Rickshaw Diaries. Together with our other judges, Svend White (Akram’s Razor), Laura Poyneer (veiled4allah), and Yahya Birt (Musings on the Britannic Crescent), Baraka will help us filter through the nominations you send us to make sure we have five eligible participants in the right categories. Neither of the judges blogs, nor works associated with altmuslim or City of Brass, will be eligible for winning a BCA – which is, strangely enough, starting to exclude a healthy subsection of the blogosphere. Nominations close October 21st. You can also follow the BCA on Twitter.

Along the same lines as the Brass Crescent awards, nominations are also open for European Muslim Women of Influence 2010 (EMWI), a groundbreaking new initiative that honours (you guessed it) noteworthy Muslim women in Europe. This is the first year for the list, sponsored by a new European Muslim professionals network called CEDAR (which stands for Connecting European Dynamic Achievers and Role Models) that I have been fortunate enough to be involved with since late last year when the group was formed in Salzburg, Austria. Already there are many women from across Muslim society in Europe who have been nominated, but many more are needed (and don’t be humble… you can even nominate yourself!). The deadline for EMWI nominations is 15 November, and the success of this initiative really depends on what kind and how many nominations are received. So, spread the word and tell your friends to submit nominations now at EMWI’s official website at www.cedar-emwi.com. The European Muslim Women of Influence List (EMWI) is a CEDAR initiative sponsored by the Vodafone Foundation and the Open Society Institute.

Zahed Amanullah is Executive Editor of altmuslim.com. He is based in London, England.