Steal | this | Hijab

Through the quality their work and the passion of their artistic achievements, women filmmakers like Neshat and Abdollahyan have placed themselves at the forefront of the revolutionary changes rocking Iranian society.

It’s 2012 and close to four years after the Lilly ledbetter Fair Pay Act was signed into law. Surely, the gender wage gap has been closed, right? Wrong. Even with moves toward equalizing pay between men and women, men still make almost 20% more than women in nearly all industries. This is despite the fact […]

“My world is more meaningful now thanks to my work, giving me different perspectives about life as a whole. Earlier, I was unaware of the miseries that Afghan women had to endure for so long. We have been through several heart-wrenching blows in the last three decades. Now is the time to do what was never thought of.”

[I}f you insist upon fighting to protect me, or 'our' country, let it be understood, soberly and rationally between us, that you are fighting to gratify a sex instinct which I cannot share; to procure benefits which I have not shared and probably will not share..... [I]n fact, as a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.

  by Sima Shakhsari The recent issue of Foreign Policy on sex has instigated critical feedback from many who have rightly challenged racist and Orientalist representations of gender and sexuality in the Muslim and Arab worlds. Several critics have rightly pointed out that essentialist approaches to culture that rely on facile binaries of men/women, freedom/oppression, and West/East lack any meaningful analyses […]

For each woman that is imprisoned, another will take her place and swell the ranks of the women’s movement. -Shrine Ebadi, Iranian Noble Peace Prize winner, 2004. The stories of sweeping reform across the Middle East has captured the attention of many of us. In this week’s Weekly Rights Podcast, Minky Worden, Director of Global […]

  by Julia Meltzer and Laura Nix In 1982, when she was just 17 years old, Houda al-Habash opened the doors to her Qur’an school for women and girls at the Al-Zahra Mosque in Damascus, Syria. Houda is representative of a pioneering generation of women in the Middle East who have begun to study Islam within […]

In an in-depth and candid interview, academic and political commentator As’ad Abukhalil – a.k.a “The Angry Arab” – talks to Ceasefire columnist Asa Winstanley about Zionism, Hamas, Syria, Al Jazeera, BDS and much more.

In the interview, Maya discusses developments in Lebanon as they related to the uprising in Syria. She also discusses Lebanese politics more generally as well the workings of gender politics in the Middle East.

Dear Steal this Hijab Readers, Thanks for reading, listening, gazing, and opinionating! I started this blog for many reasons. I think the most important of which came from the need to respond intelligently to a question that was very often posed to me – “WHAT?!!! Islamic feminism?! Is there such a thing????” Well, as a […]