Muslimah Media Watch
Two constitutional court cases in Kuwait raise questions of a paradigm shift in women's rights. Read more
Two constitutional court cases in Kuwait raise questions of a paradigm shift in women's rights. Read more
Politics Daily discusses the state of women’s rights in Afghanistan. Somalia’s hardline group al Shabaab has publicly whipped women for wearing bras. When does it end?! More from Al Arabiya and Improvisations. Via ProgressiveIslam. Time reports on the recent phenomenon of female suicide bombers in Pakistan. CAIR has asked state and federal officials to get involved in an investigation of a recent home vandalism because the home owner is a Muslim woman who is running for a public office. Al... Read more
German-Turkish writer Seyran Ates thinks Islam needs a sexual revolution. This might seem a little tongue-in-cheek, given the countless political revolutions post-due in predominantly Muslim countries, yet Ates’ book couldn’t be timelier. Muslims, like everyone else, are exposed to sex at an earlier age, despite marrying later than past generations. It isn’t hard to prove that the Muslim world needs more open discourse on sex. However, it is challenging to lay out some concrete reasoning and exact plans for how... Read more
The calls of lawyer, activist, and writer Seyran Ates for a sexual revolution in the heterogeneous Muslim world may surprise many, particularly when the movement is commonly associated with free love, hippies, and public nudity. In a recent interview with German magazine Spiegel, Ates begins with discussing what she means by this and her experiences that inspired her new book, Islam Needs a Sexual Revolution. Things went downhill immediately, when Ates said that she based the term “sexual revolution” on... Read more
This was written by Farah Banihali and originally published at Nuseiba. Last month a forum was held at the Adelaide Festival of Ideas focusing on Islam and feminism. Called “Beyond the Veil: Islam and Feminism”, it involved Dr. Gary Bouma, a sociology academic at Monash University; Zainah Anwar, founder of Malaysian group Sisters in Islam (SIS) and a founding director of Musawah; and Dr. Shakira Hussein, an academic at ANU. So with big expectations about the forum and the issues... Read more
Not to be outdone by Egypt’s Shaykh Tantawi, the Muslim Canadian Congress (MCC) released a statement two weeks ago that calls for the Canadian government “to introduce legislation to ban the wearing of masks, niqabs and the burka in public.” Their rationale for this statement seems twofold: one one hand, the MCC is concerned that “the wearing of a face-mask [is] a security hazard and has led to a number of bank heists in Canada and overseas,” and on the... Read more
Everybody freaks out when Dalia Mogahed says that “Shari’ah law is misunderstood.” A controversial program finds husbands for Iraqi widows, but many worry that it’s exploitative. More about the Egyptian burqa ban, people’s opinions on it, and the ripples it’s created: here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. A Norwegian court sentenced a Muslim girl to pay fines and court costs for having hit a fellow student for something she said about the Qur’an. Clerics in... Read more
The Glass House, directed by Hamid Rahmanian, is a documentary of the lives of a group of young women at the Omid e Mehr day center in Tehran. These women deal with a range of issues, including drug addiction and sexual, physical, and verbal abuse. Omid e Mehr’s staff provides these women with social services and vocational training so that they can become self-sufficient. The Glass House played at the 2009 Sundance Festival and the 2009 BAMcinemaFEST. The film focuses... Read more
There’s a new government-sponsored comedy channel in Egypt, Nile Comedy TV, which has created a humorous series of “non-commercial breaks.” One memorable example that made me laugh went like this: Buy the Chinese sheep! It weighs 12 kg when alive, and 55 kg after being slaughtered. It’s fed on a diet of chips, so you can control the taste of the sheep by controlling the types of chips it eats. It comes in three colors: green, red and blue! It... Read more
As Muslims, we are asked about the details of our personal lives, and our relationship to what happens on the global stage. Because Islam does not have an official spokesperson, there is a relentless curiosity about our voices. Almost like a horrible reality show, many scramble for the role of spokesperson. Therefore, when a prominent Muslim scholar or figure makes a statement, it is not only interesting for non-Muslims to watch, but also for Muslims themselves. Imam Tantawi, a prominent... Read more
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