Watching Muslimah Olympic Athletes, Past and Present

Last updated on: February 27, 2012 at 7:18 pm By Azra

Recently, BBC’s Sporting Witness and NPR’s Tell Me More featured interviews with prominent Muslimah athletes. Sporting Witness profiled Hassiba Boulmerka— otherwise known as the “Constantine Gazelle”—an Algerian Olympic gold medal winner in the 1500m competition in 1992. In the United States, Tell Me More profiled American fencer Ibtihaj Muhammad, who’s currently training for the 2012 Summer Olympics in the saber competition (she is currently ranked second in the United States). What struck me, listening to both of the interviews, were... Read more

“Saving Face” May be a Saving Grace for Women Victims of Acid Attacks

Last updated on: February 27, 2012 at 8:44 am By diana

Update: This film won the Oscar for its category. Congratulations to those involved in its creation! For the first time in the history of the Academy Awards a Pakistani filmmaker has been nominated for an Oscar. The 2012 Oscar’s “Best Documentary Short” category features a 40 minute short film by journalist and investigative filmmaker Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy. Ms. Chinoy is known for making hard-hitting documentaries such as Transgenders: Pakistan’s Open Secret and Pakistan: The Taliban Generation. This year, her Oscar-contending... Read more

Friday Links | February 24, 2012

Last updated on: February 23, 2012 at 5:06 pm By anneke

Afghan female MP Fawzia Koofi targets Afghan presidency, even though she receives death threats for openly pursuing this goal. Her response: “We die anyway“. In Indonesia, children born either out of wedlock or out of unregistered marriages (such as temporary unions) can now claim legal ties to the father, which makes them eligible to inherit from the father and should improve the status of these children in society. Many Indonesian men enter polygamous marriages, without officially registering them, out of fear... Read more

Pre-Friday (aka Thursday) Links | February 23, 2012

Last updated on: February 22, 2012 at 10:15 pm By anneke

Editor’s Note: It’s been a hectic week for nearly everyone at MMW, so we apologise for not having a real post today. Thankfully, Anneke is on the ball, so we’ll be splitting her great list of links into two posts this week. We’ll be back to normal next week, insha’Allah. A proposed reform of the National Women’s Council by the ruling military council in Egypt is facing resistance from the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party. Mrs. Mariyatha from Kerala, India... Read more

Playing on Old Fears: Coverage of Iran’s Female Ninjas

Last updated on: February 21, 2012 at 12:42 am By diana

Amid speculations that Iran has made advances in nuclear technology for the purpose of making nuclear weapons, Iranian women have become inserted into the dicey conversation. Numerous news sources have made it their prerogative to discuss exactly how Iranian women fit into this hypothetically catastrophic situation. Oddly enough, they aren’t plugging the ancient and sad mantra of helpless brown women caught between the desires of brown men and white men. Instead, they are approaching amusing, but equally problematic, dialogues. During... Read more

Zenocrate and Zabina in Marlowe’s Tamburlaine

Last updated on: February 20, 2012 at 5:21 pm By tasnim

The two parts of Christopher Marlowe’s play Tamburlaine, loosely based on the life of the Central Asian emperor Timur the Lame, tell the story of the Scythian shepherd who becomes a conqueror of kings. Although this play was written in the 1588, it gives us an insight into representations of Muslim women at the time of writing, and has some relevance for today, as is evidenced by the proliferation of studies of early modern “Turk” and “Moor” plays. As one... Read more

Muhteşem Yüzyıl: Traditional Women Roles in the Age of Emancipation

Last updated on: February 19, 2012 at 11:07 am By samya

Living in an Arab country, I think anyone would find it rather difficult to overlook the feverish debates sparked by Arabic-dubbed Turkish soap operas featured on Arab television screens. Three years ago, it was the spectacular drama series Noor that captivated the region’s (and MMW’s) attention. But this time in 2012, it is the dazzling Turkish Muhteşem Yüzyıl, known in Arabic as “Hareem Sultan” (The Women of Sultan), that dominates personal conversations and public discussions within communities of women. This... Read more

Friday Links | February 17, 2012

Last updated on: February 17, 2012 at 1:18 am By anneke

Drug abuse among young women and girls in Kashmir is on the rise, but there actually is no addiction treatment program in the Valley that will actually admit female drug users. They are left on their own, often not returning to the consultations that are available to them. Two days before the one-year anniversary of the protests in Bahrain, activist Zainab al Khawaja was arrested once again. Al Akhbar managed to interview her on this year of protests and her own... Read more

Bad Girls Do It Well: MMW Responds to M.I.A.’s Latest Video

Last updated on: February 15, 2012 at 4:46 pm By Krista

The new “Bad Girls” music video by M.I.A. has been circulating over the past week or so. For those who haven’t seen it, it’s posted below, and here’s one description from a LA Times blog post: Set to M.I.A.’s Punjabi-laced chill-banger, “Bad Girls” is a lady gangsta fantasy but one that plays off very real ingredients from life in the Middle East. There’s crumbled architecture, sustained over years of attack; smouldering oil tankards; young men in kaffiyeh, standing around dangerously... Read more

Discussing LGBTQ Issues in Islam: Shifts, or More of the Same?

Last updated on: February 14, 2012 at 11:31 am By eren

Media coverage of LGTBQ issues in Islam is largely influenced by the political contexts in which it is discussed. LGTBQ Muslims are often categorized and talked about in all sorts of weird ways (as this post demonstrates). In the media, this gets expressed in different ways. Sometimes, coverage focuses on the theological debates surrounding homosexuality. In some other instances, Western media discusses LGTBQ rights in Islam as if they were a novelty and an import from the “LGTBQ-friendly West” that... Read more