When I arrived for Eid-ul-Adha prayers at Noor Cultural Center in Toronto, my hopes were not high. I have been, over the years, to dozens of mosques, in half a dozen countries, on four continents. Sometimes, I’ve been looking for a mosque to call home, a source of intellectual and spiritual…
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Though there are women’s only mosques internationally, the Muslim Women’s Mosque of America appears to be the first of its kind in the States. As such, it is being lauded as a step forward in “empowering” American Muslim women by offering them a safe space to learn and find spiritual…
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I just want to start off by saying that my parents are pretty open-minded (relatively speaking, of course) for being Pakistani immigrants living in America. They always pushed my sisters and me towards attaining the highest education possible, not because it was something that they wanted, but because they knew we…
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“Women are the complementing halves of men,” said the Prophet Muhammed, who believed that a woman’s role as a daughter, wife and mother doesn’t presuppose her absence from the public sphere. The quest for strict gender segregation in many Muslim societies today is led by religious hardliners who view women only as a source of temptation, and who see no virtue in dignified male-female interaction. The Orientalists are often blamed for their sexualized depiction of Eastern women (especially in their portraits of harems), but some religious clerics go as far as to portray women as a source of temptation.
Read MoreIn laying the groundwork for productive discussion on dating, it is essential to pay close attention to how we communicate with one another. Four panelists kick start a discussion on the communication divide between Muslim men and women, and how it must change on both the individual and communal level (Anas Coburn’s recent article also takes an in-depth look at this issue). This is the beginning of a complex and multi-faceted conversation that will expand throughout the Dialogues, and so we encourage readers to sustain it by sharing their own perspectives and questions.
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