For awhile there it looked as if Mali were going to have a new and better Family Code to improve the rights of women. Its provisions included raising the minimum legal age of marriage for girls, improving women’s inheritance and property rights and removing the clause demanding a wife’s obedience to her husband. The law [...]

Udate: note this is from the Washington Times, a very dubious source. Good old liberation struggles, like the liberation struggle of Chechnya from the brutal embrace of Russia. Chechnya’s government is openly approving of families that kill female relatives who violate their sense of honor, as this Russian republic embraces a fundamentalist interpretation of Islam [...]

I don’t understand. Eleven years ago, Farida Bano was circumcised had her genitals mutilated by an aunt on a bunk bed in her family home at the end of her 10th birthday party. The mutilation occurred not in Africa, where the practice is most prevalent, but in India where a small Muslim sub-sect known as [...]

There’s a new group in Tunisia, Equality and Parity, that is protesting the wearing of the niqab. Equality and Parity promised that they will plan manifestations and sit-ins if women’s rights are violated in Tunisia. The group lobbies against denigrating women’s representation in decision-making – whether it be in the political, social, cultural, or economic [...]

This little spat between the Inquisition and the slightly disobedient (but not disobedient enough) nuns reminds me of something that we generally don’t focus on sharply enough. It’s certainly obvious, yet it kind of fades into the background of the taken-for-granted. The something is: Women are the only category of people who can’t ever be [...]

Sooraya Graham is very confused. She wants to be liberal and free and provocative, and she also wants to be reactionary and veiled and submissive. She’s an art student, see. She wears hijab. She took a picture of a friend of hers who wears a niqab and abaya, holding a bra. She wanted to “humanize” [...]