Friday Links | July 12, 2013

Friday Links | July 12, 2013 July 12, 2013

It is Ramadan and many news items featuring Muslim women are focused on the Holy Month. Muslim women in Florida, USA are providing local Muslim families in need with Ramadan care packages. An Islamic conference in Tanzania on Ramadan called on educated Muslim women to help other women for social development. Women spend nearly double the normal time cooking during Ramadan, according to findings by a market research firm in Dubai.

The 18th anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre in Bosnia, included the reburial of over 400 newly identified victims. Over 6,000 identified bodies have been reburied at this memorial, but many others have yet to be identified. Image by Sadik Salimovic / RFE/RL.

Two female Saudi activists have been sentenced to prison for bringing a food parcel to a woman, who said she was imprisoned in her home with her children by her husband and was in need of food. The women face charges on basis of takhbib, which is the incitement of a wife to defy the authority of the husband. Today, Friday, they are planning to file an appeal.

In the Indian cities of Mumbai, Pune, Ahmedabad and Dindigul Shariah courts are said to be established for women, by women. Other cities are said to follow soon.

Female Jordanian filmmaker Maryam Jum’a is working on a film which depicts the story of a 32-year-old transgendered woman, Manal, who is battling sexual abuse in her past and a conservative society, among many other things.

Al Jazeera’s Inside Story discusses the current situation of women’s rights in Afghanistan.

As there is no age specified for marriage in Sudan, ten-years-old girls can be legally married and child marriage very common; activists are now calling on the Sudanese government to implement a legal age for marriage.

More young women are joining the labor exodus in Tajikistan and as many women are uneducated, their choices of employment are limited, and some are forced into prostitution.The BBC reports that more Pakistani families are sending their daughters to school, following the example of Malala Yousafzai.

The Russian Supreme Court upholds the ban on headscarves in schools in the Stavropol area.

Maryani, a transgender person from Indonesia, has successfully completed a small pilgrimage to Mecca as a woman, and encourages other transgender women to do the same.

Gay, lesbian and HIV-infected Somali refugees, who are currently in Kenya, say that they fear persecution and even death, if they would return to Somalia.

An anti-harassment group is crowd funding to start an Egyptian campaign to urge all Egyptians to stop ignoring the problem of sexual assault and start intervening in mob attacks.

A nationalist group in Sri Lanka is calling on the government to ban the hijab, citing security reasons.

Al Monitor features a review of the book A Most Masculine State by Madawi Al-Rasheed, on the topic of women in Saudi Arabia.

Child marriage persists in Georgia, particularly affecting girls in the Azerbaijani (Muslim) community in the country.

Women in Western Sahara play an important role in the country’s oft-forgotten and neglected struggle for independence.

Turkish president Erdogan used the alleged harassment of a woman in headscarf in a fiery speech to deflect attention from his own policies toward both the protestors and women.

Pakistan has banned the Indian movie Raanjhanaa, which depicts the love story between a Muslim girl and a Hindu man.

Al Jazeera’s The Stream tackles the question why so many Kurdish women are setting themselves on fire.

Shahzada Parveen is the first female Muslim superintendent police officer in Kashmir.

A group of 27 teenage girls from the Middle East were part of an international exchange program in the USA, which provided them with tech training, mentoring and cultural immersion.

SETimes.com looks at the different perceptions of (female) Muslim dress in south eastern Europe and Turkey, after the harassment of a Turkish woman with hijab made headlines recently.

A Saudi princess, Meshael Alayban, is being accused of enslaving maids in her home in California, USA.


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