Questioning the veil, questioning the questioner

First published at Muslimah Media Watch. An edited version is published on altmuslimah.com
Today we witness postcolonial Orientalism coming to grips with its obsession with the hijab. While the white French elite seem fixed on debating its symbols, the British media are asking why women choose to wear it. Once, the obsession was an obvious desire [...]

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Jamie Oliver, food, and Eurocentrism

If you follow Jamie Oliver’s cooking programmes, alternatively known as The Naked Chef, you’ll notice that his cool and effortless boyish attitude to cooking strikes a chord with the young, mostly male, upwardly-mobile, and aspiring members of the British middle class; it’s about an obsession with fresh, locally-sourced or grow-your-own ingredients, and recipes firmly grounded [...]

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Film Review: The Mosque in Morgantown

First published at Feminist Review. Muslimah Media Watch has also the goods.

Reading the official synopsis of The Mosque in Morgantown, I quickly got the impression that it was a documentary film that revolved around the battle between journalist-activist Asra Nomani and “the extremists” in her hometown Morgantown, West Virginia. It is [...]

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Mild toxic waste: Malaysian Women’s TV Programmes

Cross-posted from Muslimah Media Watch

As I count the hours to the day I return to Malaysia, I’m compiling my notes and thoughts for a small research project on media images of women in the capital. But I’ve already started collecting preliminary data; my immense curiosity in the representation of Muslim Malay women in the current [...]

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See you in Malaysia!

Hi everybody,

Apologies for the long silence. Things have been rather hectic following my film workshop (which I’ve long been meaning to write about). Further, I’ve been spending a lot of time with friends and my boyfriend, to catch up and compensate for the loneliness when I’m back in Malaysia.
I’m flying tomorrow, so my mind’s stuck [...]

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Latter day Victoriana: Drawing similarities between Compulsion and Bride and Prejudice

Crossposted on Feminist Review.
The repressive, corseted Victorian culture of the novel found a perfect foil in the rigid caste strictures of Indian society. (The Times, 27 April 2009)
Nesrine Malik’s scathing review of the ITV drama Compulsion got me thinking a lot more about modern day adaptations of pre-20th century literary works featuring ethnic Indian actors. [...]

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The astonishing case of the shrinking Muslim woman

First published at Muslimah Media Watch
It’s become common belief that Muslim women, particularly those who wear the hijab, are liberated from the media-driven standards of beauty that values the thin and the willowy. But it’s a belief that couches on the idea that head-coverings and modest clothes provide little incentive for showing off a great [...]

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My daughter’s keeper: Nahid Persson’s Prostitution behind the veil

Crossposted at Muslimah Media Watch
For a relatively high-brow TV channel, BBC4 is known for providing top quality programs and dramas. So when the BBC commemorated the 30th anniversary of Islamic Revolution in Iran, I became glued to the channel’s string of intriguing documentaries on all things Iranian, post-1979. There were plenty on Iran-US nuclear politics [...]

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The masculine art of cooking

When celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay’s chain of eateries were snubbed from the world’s best restaurants list, I revelled in the joy of knowing that the British vanguard of hyper-macho  professional cooking will need a little humbling-up to do. Though the reign of men in the great kitchens of the world is far from over: somewhere [...]

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Polygamy: A woman’s right?

While digging out the image library on my hard drive, I found some pictures taken of an Indonesian ‘edutainment tabloid’ called Poligami. I found the line, Hak dan Kebutuhan Perempuan (the rights and needs of women) across the cover of the magazine interesting – mainly because here polygamy is pitched as pro-women rather than the [...]

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