Culture

We have all found ourselves to some degree comparing and judging our life experiences, appearances, relationships, professional and academic successes to those attained by others. There are two logical errors that lead to envy and covetousness which poison the soul: a) you can never know the totality of a person’s life and b) my happiness is not conditional upon your successes or failures.

I had a vision for 5 years to create a magazine for women that would cover women’s issues. But I didn’t want a magazine that just covered one type of woman’s issue, or one type of woman. I wanted a magazine that every woman in the world could relate to…any woman from a village in Africa, or Asia, or Latin America, or Europe… I wanted a magazine like that.

A recent “New York Times” article chronicles “Jenny” a 45-year-old woman who became pregnant with twins after years of fertility treatment and much disappointment– yet when she finally finds herself pregnant with twins, she elects to extinguish one of the fetuses, so that she can have a singleton pregnancy. Why?

Ahsen Nimet Cebeci is a Turkish-American Princeton University undergraduate and a member of the university’s Varsity Openweight Women’s Crew team. She is also an active member of the Princeton Muslim Student Association. She spoke with AltMuslimah to tell us about some of the social and spiritual challenges she has met on campus as a student, a varsity athlete, and a Muslim.

Leila Ahmed’s A Quiet Revolution is both an important and thought-provoking look at the rising visibility of veiling amongst Muslim women. What lies within is a history of the veil and it’s political meanings from the mid-twentieth century to the present. Ahmed consciously confronts some of her own preconceptions about what this phenomenon means, how wearing hijab rose to prominence amongst Muslim women in mid-century Egypt, and the ways in which this movement traveled and developed in the United States.

Like many Americans, Aizzah Fatima was disturbed by the negative portrayal of Muslims in the media. By creating the play, Dirty Paki Lingerie, which debuted in New York City this past weekend, she sought to shed light on the often misunderstood Muslim American woman.

When Muslim Marriage Fails: Divorce Chronicles and Commentaries by Suzy Ismail is a provocative compilation of five divorce cases, each told in the first person from the wife’s perspective, the husband’s perspective, and then wrapped up with a commentator’s analysis. Each story is based on a distinct theme – abuse, infidelity, culture clash, growing apart, and stress – yet the main threads that tie them together are poor communication of expectations and feelings between spouses and an unwillingness to cooperate and compromise.