A couple of weeks ago I came across this BBC Panorama story on “Women at risk” which warns that “some Sharia councils in Britain may be putting Muslim women “at risk” by pressuring them to stay in abusive marriages.” The story presents a case of a couple going to one of the Sharia councils for the judge to decide if the woman can have a divorce, the wife accusing her husband of “refusing to work, ignoring the children and verbally... Read more
This post was written by guest contributor Maria Salman. Defiance. In light of a recent landmark election, this is the one word dominating the media’s rhetoric on the civic engagement of Pakistani women. On May 11, scores of Pakistanis came out to exercise their right to vote – many for the first time in their lives. As the world apprehensively eyes a crucial geopolitical region against the backdrop of what was once called the War on Terror, it was inevitable... Read more
The weeks following the Boston bombing have been filled with media reports with all-too-familiar suspicion of Islam and –as Nicole explored in a recent post— hijab-wearing Muslim women. However, both local and international media largely missed an act of activism from my part of the world that had taken place even before Ann Coulter appeared on TV with her infamous “ought to be in prison for wearing the hijab” comment. A friend of mine, Indonesian blogger Ninit Yunita, is an... Read more
Pakistan will vote on May 11, and women, both as voters and as candidates, are the subject of many articles in the news last week. First there is the question of women voters: IPS speaks with several Pakistani women and asks them what women voters really want. But not all women get a chance to vote in Pakistan: in the tribal areas leaflets have been spread urging men to not allow women to cast votes or to be influenced by any candidate... Read more
Sex and the Citadel is a collection of stories by Shereen El Feki, who spent five years traveling across Egypt and several other Arab countries asking people about sex: “what they do, what they don’t, what they think and why”. Why write about sex? Her choice of subject matter is partly stimulated by how sexual attitudes and behaviours are intimately (pun intended) linked to the regions religions, traditions, cultures, politics and economics. True to her mission to understand sex in... Read more
When I converted to Islam, before Love Inshallah (which Merium reviewed last year) and Sex and the Citadel, I was immersed in a religious culture that had an ambivalent relationship with sex and sexuality. While the women in my community occasionally discussed matters of “lawful” vs. “prohibited” when it came to sex, they were also making use of Alberta’s Bill 44 to take their daughters out of sexual education classes, which some of them considered immoral and dangerous. As a... Read more
“She ought to be in prison for wearing the hijab” said conservative political pundit Ann Coulter on Fox news two weeks ago. Then she added, seemingly baselessly, “Did she get a clitorectomy too?” Given that America’s impression of Muslim women as a whole is often still that of oppressed and childlike foreigners, remarks like Coulter’s are no shock. They do, however, raise the question of how a culture that views a group as so devoid of agency handles the power... Read more
This post was written by guest contributor Nur Laura Caskey. Ricki Lake. Jerry Springer. Judge Judy gone horribly wrong. In his lectures on how Europeans came to determine which things would be considered “abnormal,” Michel Foucault says “expert psychiatric opinion allows the offense, as defined by the law, to be doubled with a whole series of other things that are not the offense itself but a series of forms of conduct, of ways of being that are. . .presented in the... Read more
Last week a factory building collapsed in Bangladesh, and approximately 400 people were killed; most of them were female factory workers. About 150 people are still missing. The BBC spoke to Merina Khatun, who had spent four days trapped inside the rubble before she was rescued, and 14-year-old Halima Akhtar, who was employed as a sewing operator in one of the factories in the building and whose sister is still missing. On May 11th, Pakistan will hold its elections, and while millions of women are registered... Read more
When I was growing up in a small city on Canada’s East Coast, many of my classmates had no idea where Pakistan was located. It was the mid-eighties and I was unable to convince them I was NOT Indian just because both my parents were born in India. I decided to do an extensive geography project on my home country. I used pictures from my own travels and maps my father collected, and added a lot of details. I carefully... Read more
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