Muslim feminists have too much to worry about already to think about homophobia

Once a week I meet with people studying gender in the Middle East and we talk about the assigned articles we’ve read during the week. Last week, it was about sexuality and homophobia. Emerging from our discussion on homosexuality rights in the Middle East (particularly in Lebanon and Palestine) is the question why many Muslim [...]

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Marketing Muslim lifestyles and redefining modesty

This post was first published on Muslimah Media Watch
If a hijab in Pucci-designed print could speak, what would it say?
I attended a seminar presented by Professor Reina Lewis on Muslim women’s lifestyle magazines last night and was faced with this bizarre question. It all started with the actual seminar itself, which showcased the latest research [...]

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Looking at religion through white-tinted glasses

Looking back, I knew that I never wanted to be a student in religious studies, but oddly enough, here I am digging into it and taking apart the psyche of believers (and non-). If the case is still true in today’s terms, being a scholar in religious matters in Malaysia would really mean studying Islam, [...]

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Whose revolution? Critiquing Seyran Ates and her Islamic sexual revolution

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 [...]

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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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Big Love: Appropriating feminism in advocating polygamy

Originally posted at Muslimah Media Watch
Stories about polygamy tend to surge and ebb in the media, but they never fail to intrigue people. Recently in South Africa, a Zulu man married four women–all at once–making the most popular story on the BBC news website (you can watch the clip here). In the video, a male [...]

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Ramadhan book club: Our Stories, Our Lives

Originally published at Muslimah Media Watch, with thanks to The Policy Press.

Our Stories, Our Lives is an anthology of a diverse group of women in Bradford, England, offering a glimpse into their lives and their issues with reconciling their Muslim identities with being British. With the media’s daily onslaught on the image of Muslims and [...]

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Beer and the intoxicating effect of power

Malaysia has given the BBC news more ridiculousness to report. As of three days ago, the world can confirm that the religious right in Malaysia are obsessed with beer. Not long ago Kartika Sari Dewi’s postponed sentence for drinking beer in public made international headline news and now Malaysian Muslims will not be allowed to [...]

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Ramadhan Mubarak, people!

This is a somewhat delayed, but still very special (and delicious) message to every hungry Muslim out there.

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Purdah

When I was in school, congregations in the surau (small prayer halls or mini mosque) would be segregated by gender: women on one side, men on the other. We would enter the same door, pray next to each other but separated by a wispy thin, almost see-through curtain. I understood that women simply felt comfortable [...]

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