DC is brimming with conferences on vital issues with leading thinkers; opportunities abound to network and share and mingle. But I don’t think I’ve attended an event that has spoken to the core of who I am and what I wrestle with as a woman, mother, professional, and Muslim, quite…
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Whoa, that’s Renee Zellweger? The 45-year-old actress is literally unrecognizable in photographs from Monday’s Elle Women in Hollywood Awards. Zellweger told People magazine, “I’m glad folks think I look different! I’m living a different, happy, more fulfilling life, and I’m thrilled that perhaps it shows . . . Perhaps I…
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The government of Turkey lifted its decades-long hijab ban in middle and high schools yesterday, about a year after the nation lifted the hijab ban for women working in state and civil occupations. This loosening of restraints on the hijab ban demonstrates the Turkish government’s shifting attitude towards the hijab…
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The fall of my senior year in high school, my mother drove me up and down the state of California for college campus tours with little complaint. It wasn’t until my scheduled tour of UC Berkeley that Mama snapped. We’d made it to Telegraph Avenue. On one corner, dreadlocked men…
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As school begins and the weather becomes chilly, I just want to throw on some sweatpants and a comfy tee. But then again I also hate looking a bum. Thanks to fashion, there is a solution: graphic tees! These tees are perfect for fall and can be dressed up or…
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A journalist writing an article about Muslim feminism recently asked me what I thought about secular Egyptian Aliaa Magda Elmahdy and her performance art, which involved menstruating and defecating on an ISIS flag, and the broader tactics of FEMEN, whose mostly non-Muslim members have bared their breasts to protest the…
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Whenever the epidemic of rape in Egypt makes the news, I am destined to think of Joyce Carol Oates. Last summer, the author took to twitter to question whether Islam was responsible for the widespread incidence of sexual assault in Egypt, an argument people continue to make today. As…
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