Muslimah Media Watch
Many Egyptians have watched the YouTube video “Message From Iranian Women to Tunisian and Egyptian Women,” which warns Egyptian and Tunisian women about their position after the revolution; the resemblance with the Iranian revolution is called “uncanny.”
In Southern Lebanon, Al Akhbar visits Jamila Nasser, the mother of activist Anwar Yassine, eight years after he was released from prison. She played an important role campaigning for her son, while he was imprisoned.
After a 17-year old girl escaped from her hostage-keeping husband, whom she was forced to marry by her parents, more similar stories in New Zealand have come to light. Unicef New Zealand calls for laws on forced and child marriage in the country.
A female bomber has been arrested in Abuja, Nigeria, before she could actually complete her mission. She is suspected to be a Boko Haram member, the Islamist group that is responsible for many deadly attacks throughout the country.
The BBC looks into why “vigil aunty” Maya Khan caused such a storm in Pakistan, when she was hounding couples on air.
Urfi marriages (a type of religious marriage, often not legally registered) are on the rise among university students in post-revolution Tunisia.
According to a (Turkish) study among female PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party) members, most women join this organisation to seek freedom for themselves.
The Shafia trial in Canada has come to an end: three family members are found guilty of murdering the four Shafia women.
Trial in the UK started for the family of a Muslim teenager who was caught kissing with her “white’ boyfriend” by her siblings, and consequently was kidnapped, imprisoned and assaulted. The trial is expected to last six days, and the family members deny all charges.
Vanesa Glodjo, the Bosniak actor who plays the female lead in the movie In the Land of Blood and Honey says that having to play this role was truly cathartic.
Mariam Al Safar is the first female train driver of the Middle East.
The online petition, started by a young woman named Tasleem, to ban the practice of female circumcision in the Bohra community, is getting more signatures from within the Bohra community. Tasleem hopes that the petition will convince the religious leader Dr. Syedna Mohammad Burhanuddin to ban the practice.
Egyptian Yasmine El-Mehairy started a website on motherhood called SuperMama about 4 months ago, the first of its kind in the Arab world. It has earned several prizes and is expected to have annual turnover in the first year of over $1 million.
In Alwar town, India, Muslim women are trained to drive passenger vans to earn an extra income.
The “Obedient Wives Club” makes sure that it keeps getting media attention; at times stirring interesting debates, but other times the club is mainly something to “laugh at.”
Abortion is both illegal and taboo in Senegalese society; in this article, a young woman narrates her story and an abortionist weighs in. Each year 8.5 million women around the world need medical care after undergoing illegal abortions.
A new directive on “modest clothing” for Iraq’s female civil servants has created an outrage. “Women go out and work to take part in the development and reconstruction of the country, not to show off their beauty and garments,” activist Sundus Abbas says.
Cases of Sexual and Gender-Based Violence (SGBV) and domestic violence are on the rise in Hargeisa IDP camps, capital of the self-declared Republic of Somaliland. Hargeisa is home to approximately 85,000 displaced people from Somalia, mainly because of drought and increased violence.
2013 is the year that most likely The Netherlands will have its own burqa ban, the second EU country to do so after France.
A campaign group in Islington, UK, has documented the marriages of numerous underage girls by local imams, some as young as nine. In 2010 at least 30 girls were married off in the age of 16 and under, many of which were still attending (primary) school while performing their domestic and conjugal duties at the same time.
The Egyptian Feminist Union was first established in 1923, but only 30 years later had been shut down at the onset of military rule. Now the EFU is registered again as a nonprofit, and hopes to give a voice to women in post-revolutionary Egypt.
Almost 50 high school students in Nairobi, Kenya, went to court to claim their right to wear hijab to school.
In Saudi Arabia, women are increasingly becoming victims of drug abuse.
In the conservative Syrian town of Al-Maadamiya young women go door-to-door to recruit other women for the resistance.
In Bosnia-Herzegovina, victims of wartime rape and sexual violence do not get a lot of media attention, and services for the victims (mainly Muslim women) are and were very limited. Perpetrators, on the other hand, are often known, and many of them still enjoy impunity.
An Afghan woman has allegedly been killed for giving birth to another girl, by her mother-in-law and her husband. May Allah give her justice.
The Asian Football Confederation urges soccer’s rule-making body to approve a headscarf with safety features for female Muslim soccer players.
The Hindu features an article on Pakistani-English writer Qaisra Shahraz, an author who has written two novels on the lives of Muslim women.
The burqa/niqab and carnival do not mix easily. During orthodox carnival in Macedonia performed a local sketch in which some men were dressed like a Islamic leader with a following of women in burqa, tensions rose in the multi-ethnic community and the Macedonian president calls on religious leaders to ease the situation. The always attention seeking Dutch “artist” Johan Vlemmix did receive dead threats after his new carnival song “Do the burqa” was shown on youtube (warning: very ugly burqa).
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