It has never been my nature to attract romantic love, or to stumble into it unawares. The men I studied and worked with rarely interested in me, and I don’t believe I interested them either. I was discreet, invisible, unseen, unheard. I was content with being a colleague, a classmate, an acquaintance – nothing more. It has also never been my nature to share myself with others. I have always written, but have been too shy to share it publically. ()

Recently I logged into my email to find a photo of a relative's baby posing with a furry little bunny looking back at me. The baby was beautiful and the bunny was...well, cute as a bunny. But the photo disturbed me because the baby sat smiling next to the Easter Bunny. The baby is Muslim and the Easter Bunny, well, not so much. But the Easter picture was a drop in the bucket compared to the ire Christmas brings to my heart. ()

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 abusing her.” ()

*The names in this article have been changed for privacy purposes. I recently received a disturbing call from a former client’s wife informing me that her husband had passed on a few months prior. My heart sank. While serving as Adam’s attorney, I had developed an unlikely friendship with this particular client. Although his documents gave no description of Adam other than “drug addict,” it did not take me long to discover that he was a floundering but pure soul whose shortcomings belied his innate goodness. ()

According to the count of the Election Commission of Pakistan; there are 84 million registered voters in the country. Of these hopeful voters, approximately 47 million are men and 36 million are women. The percentage does not translate to representation, in 2012 the last year of the previous Government only 60 of the 342 seats in the National Assembly of Pakistan were held by women. ()

Rikki 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 discourse of the psychiatric expert as the cause, origin, motivation, and starting point of the offense.” ()

Recently, Nausheena Ahmed wrote a piece entitled “Hard question, simple answer,” in which she claimed that if we wish for our children to find and marry Muslim spouses, we must integrate them into the local Muslim community from an early age. While I too would want my future children to marry partners who share their faith, and I understand that we tend to marry within the groups we are most entrenched in, I would argue that this end goal demands a more rigorous examination. ()

Saudi Arabia often makes US (and international) headlines for its laws (legal mishaps?) regarding women, sex and religious minorities. Some of these stories undoubtedly belong there, but a surprising number gain traction thanks to a small amount of research and suspension of critical engagement. It seems that when it comes to Saudi Arabia (and sometimes her theocratic counterpart Iran, albeit less so),  the more bizarre the story may seem – in that way only the Saudi Arabia of our perception could normalize – the more believable it is. ()

“Noni, Mami has a prayer shirt, and I have a prayer hat. Don't you have one?" That's how my mother discovered I had converted to Islam. I had been praying the five daily prayers for three months, and my four-year-old finally found a way to communicate my new habit. Certainly not my planned reveal, but it was fitting that he, an innocent child, had shared the news, perhaps softening the blow. ()

I often joke with my husband of three months that we are currently in transition into full matriarchal rule, and I would not mind being referred to as “Her Royal Highness.” To this he responds with amused laughter, but in truth we both know that we are equal partners in this journey. Marriage will always be a work in progress- there will be constant renewal of our intentions as we evolve and our maturity is tested. ()