[title maintitle=”” subtitle=”Harper’s campaign is embracing Islamophobia to make Monday’s parliamentary elections a referendum on the veil”] On Oct. 9, Zunaira Ishaq, an immigrant from Pakistan, finally took her citizenship oath and became a Canadian. Her refusal to take the oath without niqab, or a face veil, has been a…
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I spent Thursday night glued to my phone, refreshing Google News every five minutes. News of an active shooter on the Umpqua Community College campus in Oregon had hit Thursday afternoon, and by early evening, the shooter’s identity was still unclear. At the end of the workday, I shifted from…
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Last month, in a train station pizza shop, I sat somehow gulping down a slice while carrying on a professional phone call in between bites. I slowly began to feel stares. Confused ones. Curious ones. And could it be…hostile ones, too? I couldn’t be sure. So, I had to wonder…
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Is mainstream French feminism racist? … Even before the 2004 law meant scarf-wearing teenagers would be excluded from schools – thus violating their fundamental right to education – France’s established feminist groups did not accept scarf-wearing women in their meetings. They decided early on these women could not be feminist,…
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Dozens of women dressed in colorful hijabs and floral dresses gathered under gray skies recently in the garden of a four-star hotel here for a charity fashion bazaar. They tried on styles from local designers and sampled new cosmetics, posing for selfies and dropping sunny filters on the images before…
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Image: Powerhouse Museum This article was written in response to the “Why cover your head when you expose your body?” by Shahful Shaffiq. Today I read an article shared over 20,000 times on social media that shamed Muslim women for not wearing the hijab correctly. To me, this highlighted that thousands of…
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It was Tuesday morning. While I was getting ready for the day, I finally watched the devastating video of the now-infamous pool party in McKinney, Texas. I had been avoiding it but knew it was yet another devastating touch point in the ongoing conversation about race and living-while-black in America…
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“It doesn’t matter if it is DKNY, the bag itself is beautiful.” The comment sprung on me like an ambush of sorts, with the fragile veiling of a back-handed compliment. I’d rather buy a beautiful vintage street bag from Sunday Bazaar than an ugly one from Valentino, I silently responded…
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And Hassan Minhaj’s hilarious and brilliant, Muslim Makeover:
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When a French journalist posed online as a young woman interested in Isis [sic], she was soon contacted by a fighter in Syria. He proposed marriage – but could she maintain a double life? It was 10 o’clock on a Friday night in spring 2014 and I was sitting on the…
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