Readers Room

As a special gift for my 42nd birthday I met two awe-inspiring women in Kuala Lumpur. We were in the Malaysian capital to attend the second gathering of WISE – Women’s Islamic Initiative in Spirituality and Equality, a program aimed at improving the status of Muslim women around the world.

Whenever I encounter Asra Nomani’s works or see her in an interview, I usually wonder,“What is her point?” I don’t say this derisively. Is she trying to speak about gender inequality among the ummah? Is she trying to deal with gender norms in her own South Asian community?

Shadi Sadr’s arrest represents a severe blow to the Iranian women’s movement, an important element of the pro-democracy cause in Iran and one of the leading tides in the overall reformist movement.

The same ideas of putting marriage before career are honed into the heads of each new generation of women by women of earlier generations. As long as women don’t speak out, the problem will not stop, and women will continue to follow the path defined for them by society.

High Fashion, Oscar Wilde once said, “is a form of ugliness so unbearable that we are compelled to alter it every six months.” Western women are slaves of fashion. Muslims, meanwhile, answer first to God.

We are citizens of this land and as a religious minority we need to figure out how the secular law accommodates our needs. If secular law fails to our religious requirements, then the effort should be focused towards modifying secular law to accommodate our needs and the needs of other religious minorities we are ethically, morally and socially aligned with.

Life lessons can be richly taken from the verite style documentary, The Mosque in Morgantown, but they go way beyond the subject matter of Muslim identity.

Is Michelle Obama a new brand marking every well-spoken woman in the world? Maybe those who are creating this brand assume Obama is an original Adidas, and these other women her Chinese copies.