Connection Point
Women and men express their viewpoints and share their perspectives in a weekly column. These columns form the groundwork for a discourse across cultural and religious boundaries.
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Sara Yasin
United Kingdom
“Questioning the distribution of labour in a household is not exclusive to Muslim households. In retrospect, I think that would have been a crucial time to re-negotiate how we distributed domestic work throughout the household. Not just during Ramadan, but for the whole year.”
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As a child, Ramadan was about competition, hunger, and sleepovers in the mosque. While my teachers at Al-Iman School, a private Islamic school in North Carolina, encouraged us to take advantage of some of the more spiritual components of Ramadan, I …
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Farah Salka
Editors Note: Farah Salka is a feminist based in Beirut, Lebanon. Below, she describes the work of the collective she is a part of, Nasawiya.
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Nasawiya is a feminist collective, based in Beirut. We started early January 2010, so we are basically new. But before Nasawiya, we had something called “The Feminist Collective” ; we have been trying to build this feminist space or movement for quite some time. And here it is now 2011; we have a really cool collective which is growing day by day and …
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Deena Adel
(Interview by Anna Therese Day)
“…international media should stop featuring successful, outspoken Arab women as an exception to the rule, rather than as examples of the many impressive women in the region.”
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To the world, the victorious 18 days in Tahrir earlier this year represent the unprecedented story of the Egyptian Revolution. For Egyptian activists, however, those glorious days were just the beginning of a continuous struggle to build the free and transparent country for which they fought so tirelessly just six months ago. In the month of July alone, for example, …
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Akhila Kolisetty
“Is Hirsi Ali’s Islam the same as Islam everywhere? I think not. There are different interpretations. I think there must be room for feminism, even in Islam.”
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I have almost finished reading Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Her provocative book describes her heartrending journey from childhood to adulthood. As a child, she lived in Somalia, Saudi Arabia, Kenya, and Ethiopia. She grew up Muslim, endured brutal beatings from her mother, did all the housework, and slowly pursued her education. As a child, she was forced to undergo female genital …
