In April of 2011, 20 year-old Jessica Mokdad was allegedly gunned down by her stepfather Rahim Alfetlawi. The media uproar over the murder was immediate and, unsurprisingly, cloaked under the sensationalized trope of “honor killing.” While Mokdad’s family, including her biological father, stressed that Alfetlawi had issues of control and was not acting out of some religious convictions, the use of “honor killing” continued and served, also, most poignantly as a source for protest against even attempted popular normalization of Muslims a la TLC. ()

Today is Mother’s Day and I have given serious thought to what I want as a present. I have pointed out things that I need and things that I don’t, but want anyway, to my progeny and their father. And I have a gorgeous white lace dress and a beautiful pair of five inch platform pumps hidden away in my laundry room - my Mother’s Day gift to myself. ()

I am someone who defies convention. I converted to Islam shortly after 9/11. But that didn’t mean I would become a conventional Muslim. I wanted to know God in a way that made sense to me. Every time I pick up the Quran, I’m in awe and feel even more sure that this revelation is how God wanted me to become closer to Him. But that epiphany is far from beautiful and inspiring for the majority of non-Muslims and Muslims I meet. There’s a simple explanation: I don’t wear the hijab (headscarf). My decision not to wear it is not out of defiance, but because it doesn’t work for me. ()

Two weeks ago news outlets began circling a story about the Egyptian parliament considering a law that would allow a husband to have sex with his deceased wife’s corpse up to six hours after her death. The news of this ‘Farewell Intercourse’ law was first reported by an Egyptian state-run newspaper, and soon after the international media jumped on the story, but news outlets retracted the story once it became clear that there was no evidence to confirm that a necrophilia law was ever even under discussion in the Egyptian parliament. Svend White writes: ()

Last week, Mona Eltahawy triggered a polemic firestorm with her blanket assertion that Arab men's hatred of women explains the abysmal gender inequities found in the Middle East. Many Arab women are perturbed that her article "Why Do They Hate Us?" in Foreign Policy has received so much attention while millions of women leaders throughout the Middle East are reduced to a footnote by Western media. These women are the unsung heroes in the trenches struggling to shed the yoke of patriarchy infiltrating the crevices of their lives. ()

Mona Eltahawy’s article, “Why Do They Hate Us?,” catalogues the abuses against women in the Middle East and demonstrates how Arab countries fall in the lowest levels of world’s standards. She awakens readers to one of many horrors; arguably, the most shocking of which is that 90 percent of married women in Egypt have had their genitals mutilated. Her sensational writing style goes right for the jugular, and it would have provoked a healthy dialogue in the Arab world had her article been published in an Arabic media outlet. ()

Written by Tahmima Anam, The Good Muslim is the story of an educated, “modern” woman who loses her brother to Islamic fundamentalism. And perhaps this storyline is why the book has garnered so many rave reviews and literary awards—because Western critics and audiences enjoy literature that confirms their worst suspicions about Muslims. Its premise, a young woman’s struggle to find meaning in a post-war, newly-independent Bangladesh that had emerged out of one of the darkest periods of the Indian subcontinent’s history, intrigued me. ()

“Gender is not the study of what is evident, it is an analysis of how what is evident came to be,” said Maya Mikdashi at her recent 10-point reminder on studying gender in the Middle East. Unfortunately, an influential strand of observers remains steadfastly deaf to her admonition, peddling Orientalist stereotypes as insight instead. Orientalism, the academic and literary depiction of Arabs and Muslims that sustains the West’s stereotypes of this region and its people, provides a ready framework to confer both heroism and blame to the Muslim world. ()

“Why Do They Hate Us,” asks Arab journalist, Mona Eltahawy, in her essay for Foreign Policy magazine. Eltahawy goes on to describe her perception of the treatment of women in the Arab world and ascribes all related mistreatment to systematic sociopolitical misogyny and patriarchy. The title of her essay is featured on the cover of the magazine with a photo of a nude woman painted in black with only her eyes showing, as if she were wearing a painted niqab and the caption under the title reads, “The real war on women is in the Middle East.” ()

She’s been called the “Ice Princess in the Hijab.” And I think she rocks. Zahra Lari is a 17-year-old Olympic figure-skating hopeful from the United Arab Emirates. And you can’t miss her because she wears a black hijab instead of sparkly hair clips and nylon pants instead of the characteristic shiny nude tights. I love seeing a Muslim woman as a competitive athlete. I just love it. I was crushed when the Iranian women’s soccer team was disqualified from the Olympics because of their headscarves. ()