Asma T. Uddin is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of altmuslimah.com. She is also an international law attorney with The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a non-profit, non-partisan, public interest law firm based in Washington, D.C. Prior to joining The Becket Fund, she practiced commercial litigation at Morgan, Lewis & Bockius in Philadelphia and corporate real estate at Greenberg Traurig in Miami.
Her editing experience includes, among other things, Dr. Umar F. Abd-Allah's A Muslim in Victorian America, which was published in 2007 by Oxford University Press. As Associate Editor and legal columnist for Islamica Magazine, Asma focused her writings on how American Muslims can rethink their social position within the American legal framework.
Asma has traveled throughout Europe and to various Muslim countries to meet with Muslim and other minority groups as well as politicians, journalists, and anti-discrimination organizations.
She is a 2005 graduate of The University of Chicago Law School, where she was a member The University of Chicago Law Review.
A full list of Asma's speaking engagements on behalf of Altmuslimah can be found here.
Altmuslimah.com has been featured at the United Nations, on National Public Radio and at universities across the United States. Your financial contribution supports our volunteer effort to bring forth gender equality by enabling our editors to represent Altmuslimah at key speaking engagements and scale up our efforts through key partnerships. It also helps ensure that you will continue to receive compelling commentary and expert analysis of critical issues with advanced and easy-to-use technological upgrades. (No comments)
In her poetic new novel, Elif Shafak explores two parallel journeys toward Love – one set in modern times and another in the thirteenth century, between Sufi masters Rumi and Shams of Tabriz. The intersection between these two narratives reveals important lessons about self, selflessness, and Divine submission. Altmuslimah’s Asma Uddin spoke with the author about the deeper messages behind her lyrical prose. (6 comments)
“One of the things that troubles me greatly, not just for women but for youth as well, is that they don’t have the kind of alternative narratives available to them online that offer them that a diversity of thought on particular issues. I’m not talking about the typical conversations... but to talk about the choices you make and why you make them and how you live them. It seems from the questions you’re asking that Altmuslimah is concerned with how Muslim women can lead.” (No comments)
It’s almost been a year since Farah Pandith was appointed Special Representative to Muslim Communities by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. The office, housed in the US State Department plays an important role in creating opportunities for people across varying opinions to engage in crucial dialogue. We sat down with Pandith to discuss the role she sees her office playing in connecting the Muslim community with each other and a broader audience, both aboard as well as in the US. (4 comments)
One of the many issues Altmuslimah covers is the Muslim marriage crisis—not just the difficulty many Muslim women encounter when trying to find suitable matches but also the rising divorce rate in the Muslim American community. Altmuslimah has featured several commentaries on these and related topics. In her article, When I Think About Marrying, Zeba Iqbal explored the sheer irony of being told throughout her life that one’s level of education and professional success defines success, only to later be labeled a failure because she hadn’t also been able to secure a husband. (9 comments)
By Asma T. Uddin and Sarah Rashid, October 21, 2009
Carolyn Baugh, a native of Indiana who is in her fourth year of the Ph.D. program in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania, writes in her new book The View from Garden City (Macmillan) about an unnamed American woman studying at the American University in Cairo who engages with several of Cairo's women, learning more about their heartbreaking, fascinating and inspiring stories. (No comments)
By Asma T. Uddin and Rahilla Zafar, October 2, 2009
Journalist Christina Asquith's new book Sisters in War: A Story of Love, Family, and Survival in the New Iraq tells the story of four women, their internal growth and external accomplishments, all of which give the reader a balanced, multifaceted look into the realities of post-war Iraq, including the failures, incompetency, oversights, and hubris involved but also the small successes and the opening of new opportunities. (1 comment)
In the years since 9/11, Muslim men and women have responded to nativist hate mongering by working within the American legal framework. Muslim women have made the hijab a civil rights issue; similarly, the fight for the human rights of detainees has been going strong for some time. An additional response – one that is more nuanced to the gendered aspects of the problem – is to use gender and Muslim notions of femininity and masculinity as the focal point of cross-cultural dialogue. (11 comments)
There are multiple levels of victimization expressed in Marie Claire’s coverage of Muslim women, ranging from self-victimization (Islam as the answer for desperate, lost souls and only those souls), to falling prey to female weaknesses (Islam as attractive to only stupid, career-barren women), to being the inevitable victim of the ominous Islam of one’s family, society, and government. All of this adds up to Marie Claire’s distorted view of Muslim women. (14 comments)
As Ayse Onal's intensely disturbing book Honour Killing: Stories of Men Who Killed shows, honor killings are not merely a feminist issue. They reflect a larger problem with human social values, where men and women collude to defend a family’s honor. And through her interviews, Onal finds that the killer is often just as much a victim as the female he killed. (3 comments)
Like Divine Love, love for your spouse requires some extent of extinguishment of your “self”. Indeed, the very search for a husband teaches Shelina Zahra Janmohamed in her new book, Love in a Headscarf, her smallness in the larger landscape of the world. Love - with a lower-case “l” - happens when you just know that your partner is the person who completes you. (16 comments)
The editors at Altmuslimah.com, a partner site to altmuslim.com, have embarked on an ambitious project: providing a space for compelling comment on gender in Islam, and building a platform for intra- and inter-community dialogue on a wide variety of gender-related issues (6 comments)
News briefs for week of August 23, 2010 - This week, A Bangladesh court ruled that people cannot be forced to wear religious clothing, a youth organization in Massachusetts urges officials for more comprehensive cultural sensitivity training of teachers, Emirati women frequent hair salons less during the month of Ramadan, and the Christian Science Monitor describes the pro-women's rights stance of one of the leaders behind the proposed Islamic center near ground zero. (August 24, 2010) (0 comments)
News briefs for week of August 16, 2010 - This week, the government of Afghanistan releases statistics on alarmingly high suicide attempt rates by Afghan women, and an Islamic theologian recounts his experience on a nudist beach that led to his conversion to Islam. (August 17, 2010) (0 comments)
Ramadan: A wife’s perspective (and a husband’s) - When my husband finally makes his way down the stairs, my frustration abates and he and I sit across from each other and share our early morning meal. We speak intermittently and keep one eye trained on the clock to ensure we finish our food by the time dawn prayers begin. Despite the sparse conversation and the hurried meal, I enjoy the feeling that we are both beginning our obligatory fasts together, as a unit. (August 13, 2010) (1 comment)
News briefs for week of August 9, 2010 - This week in the news, why pregnant women exempt from fasting still fast, Taliban responds to TIME's cover story on Aisha, Satirist claims he is not joking about his plans to open an Islamic gay bar next to Cordoba Mosque, and a young American Muslim man abstains from alcohol and dating for the month of Ramadan. (August 10, 2010) (0 comments)
News briefs for week of August 2, 2010 - Brazil offers asylum to Iranian women sentenced to death by stoning, veiled women pass through Canadian airport checkpoint without being checked, Malaysian reality show crowns its champion imam, and a few British gay Muslims find support from their local imams. (August 3, 2010) (0 comments)
News Briefs for the week of July 24, 2010 - This week, Saudi clerics seek more Muslim maids and say its okay for women to uncover their faces in the presence of burqa bans. Two French women in burqinis were refused entry into a pool, and two Muslim women in England are not allowed onto a public bus. (July 27, 2010) (0 comments)
