Friday Links — June 13, 2008

• Hijab Style profiles Emirati designer Rabia Zargarpur. Who I was pretty sure is of Irani descent, because of her last name. In the clip below, you can hear her and her mother speaking Farsi! YES! I love being right at the “Is s/he Irani?” game!

  Anyway, the clip below is a profile of the designer as she gears up for a fashion show. Barikallah!

• AnonyMouse ponders the decisions of women who remove their headscarves for MuslimMatters. Sophister thinks about similar issues around headscarves and hejab on his blog, as does Brother Naeem.

• Middle East Online explains why African-American Muslim women have a unique perspective of being Muslim in the U.S.

• Zainab Mineeia describes the journey that took off her headscarf.

• The Charlotte Observer follows the Carolina Cyclones, a Muslim women’s basketball team.

• A Bahraini actress wins a two-year court battle against her ex-husband.

• A study conducted by Yemen’s Women and Development Study Centre says that over half of women who marry in Yemen are under 15. Whoa.

• The ban on headscarves in France keeps some female Saudi students from pursuing their studies there.

• Bangladesh’s former prime minister Hasina Wajed is released from her current corruption trial to seek medical treatment abroad.

• Turkish courts upheld the ban on headscarves. Here’s what happened next.

• The Egyptian parliament criminalizes female circumcision.

• Islam in China details Chinese Muslim wedding traditions.

• Watch three Muslim women talk about their experiences with the hejab. Via Islamify.

• Egyptian Gumbo talks about the experience of women who wear niqab in the Deep South.

• An Iranian company requires its single employees to get married or lose their jobs.

• Indigo Jo proposes introducing the niqab to Afghanistan.

• The New York Times looks at hymenoplasty and what hymen reconstruction is doing for Muslim women in Europe. Via TalkIslam. Ali Eteraz, Egyptian Gumbo, Feministing, Salon, and Slate weigh in, too. Also, a really interesting opinion piece in the NYT.

• Women train to be muftis in Syria!

• A Palestinian girl is killed during an attack on Gaza. May Allah give her peace.

• The wife of a man who plotted to bomb a train in London is convicted of failing to alert police to her husband’s plan.

• Daisy Khan calls for Muslim women around the world to form alliances and work things out.

• Iranian women visit the Baqi Cemetery in Medina, Saudi Arabia, for the first time. Ever. Women are banned from this cemetery.

• Saudi women who work in customer service complain about inappropriate calls from male customers.

• Iranian women in Italy mark the anniversary of the women’s solidarity protest on 2005, when several feminists were harassed, arrested, and sentenced to prison terms.

• The Los Angeles Times updates us on the story of Nujood, the Yemeni girl who got herself a divorce.

The following links are via Progressive Muslima News:

• InFocus describes the difficulty many American Muslim women have in finding life partners.

• Afghan Olympian Mahbooba Ahadgar kicks ass and takes names.
  

• British Muslim designer Sophia Kara designs updated versions of the jilbab.
  

• Iraqi women answer the questions of western readers.

• A Muslim woman is given the Medal of the Order of Australia for her work building bridges between Australian society and the Islamic faith.