Book Review: It’s Not About the Burqa: Muslim Women on Faith, Feminism, Sexuality and Race

Mariam Khan’s It’s Not About the Burqa: Muslim Women on Faith, Feminism, Sexuality and Race is an anthology of seventeen British Muslim women speaking frankly about their lives, from the hijab and wavering faith, to love and divorce, feminism, queer identity, sex, and living in a hostile environment. Asim Qureshi reviews the book that showcases voices too often… Read More

“Muslim women” on trial; Western society the judge

Co-opting Narratives of the Other   by Yasmine Nagaty “There’s really no such thing as the ‘voiceless’. There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.” This is the famous assertion made by renowned author and political activist Arundhati Roy. The term, “giving voice to the voiceless”- with which we are now all too familiar… Read More

When Minorities Make The Front Page

This Week in Islamophobia by Yasin Bangee Two media items from the last week caught my eye and had me thinking of a brilliant @WritersofColour campaign #AllWhiteFrontPages to showcase the ubiquity of “white news”. Whilst it’s clear to all that white news is front page news (and prominent on visual and online media), under what… Read More

The Victims of Anti-Islamic Sentiments are Women

by Yasin Bangee A lot of discourse over the internet recently has focused on the supposed comparison made between Islamophobia and racism. Detractors of Islam have argued they should be free to criticise aspects of Islam without being called a racist. Racists on the other hand are excusing their own bigotry by gleefully pointing out… Read More

The Symbolic Use of Women

by Sara Salem There is nothing new in using women as a cultural battleground. Women have regularly been used symbolically to signify and reproduce nations, cultures and religions; and the norms and values that constitute these. When the French colonized Algeria, for example, they used the status of women (thus constructing this status as a… Read More