Last week, The New York Times published a Mona Eltahawy article with a sexy headline: Sex Talk for Muslim Women. The article chronicled the author’s journey to sexual freedom: growing up in a conservative household, Ms. Eltahawy always knew that sex outside of marriage was not an option, but the…
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Western and Eastern authors have historically painted a picture of the Muslim world as one in which the sexuality of Muslim women flourishes behind closed doors. It seems that in these secluded spaces a secret is passed from generation of women to generation of women about how to actively create a vibrant sexuality within the private sphere.
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Muslim women’s voices across the globe continue to rise up to call for change. The days of Muslim men or Western women defining the Muslimah agenda is over. For decades we have seen organizations and individuals rise that promote authentic Muslim women voices. Join us as that conversation continues –…
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Ask M answers your questions about online courtship and wedding night anxieties.
altMuslimah (“altM”) will be celebrating its 6th birthday this March, on International Women’s Day. For six years, we’ve been providing cutting edge commentary on a variety of issues pertinent to gender-and-Islam, starting and normalizing discussions the community was previously afraid to broach. As we begin our 7th year, we…
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In 2012, Ayesha Mattu and Nura Maznavi released Love, InshAllah – The Secret Love Lives of American Muslim Women, hoping to spur a “more compassionate and respectful intra-faith dialogue” about relationship complexities within the Muslim community.
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In today’s AskM column, M responds to two women: one who is struggling to with find a husband while having a sexual history, and one who feels overshadowed by her sister.
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It is a universal truth—although not universally acknowledged—that we all share the desire to love and be loved for who we are. We see ourselves reflected in love stories, regardless of how far removed in time and place they might be from our lives. The perennial popularity of period romances—“Downton Abbey” anyone?—shows that beneath the robes or corsets, the heart flutters in ways that we instinctively recognize even today.
Read MoreNewsflash! All-out uninhibited, unrestricted sexual freedom is so last decade. A recent Slate article, “Why Is a Former Sex Blogger ‘Rethinking Virginity’?,” reported a drop in young women’s self-exposure on social networking sites. A survey of women bloggers who were previously in the “show more and tell all” school of thought (such as Lena Chen of the “Sex and the Ivy” blog) indicates they have now pulled the blinds down on the blog windows into their sexual lives.
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AK Comics has potential to bring something new to the comic book industry, especially with its two female characters, Jalila and Aya. But the writers need to break away from imitating mainstream American comic books and give Jalila and Aya their own identities as Middle-Eastern/Muslim super-heroines.
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