But perhaps one day I will be entrusted with daughters of my own, and if so, I swear I will not see their minds molded into society's simpering ideal of womanhood. Oh how I would like to raise writers...
A scandal had traditionally been an easy way to dispose of an inconvenient woman.
The book has survived the same human disaster over and over again. Think about it. You've got a society where people tolerate difference, like Spain in the Convivencia, and everything's humming along:...
The women began traveling to remote villages, distributing articles that argued not just against honor killings but also against forced marriages and the pernicious way gossip is used in small communi...
Man will silence the voice of his conscience when it suits him to commit sin. But
Asked how, if he never had spoken before to women outside his family, he was able to serve as spiritual counselor to the village women. My friend looked at me strangely. They put their problems to him...
With this assertion, many mainstream Muslims wash their hands of the twin brutalities that shape the lives of perhaps a quarter of the women of Islam.
Who would have thought that a single suicide—or a double suicide, more properly—could put an entire city in a sour temper? Vienna valued its suicides, especially those that were dramatic, conducted wi...
When I looked at my hands and wrists, marred by the marks of small burns from cook pots and flying embers, every red weal or white pucker brings to my mind's eye that eternal fire, and the writhing ma...
We’re seeing a rise in the school dropout rate for girls because their families’ incomes are falling and girls’ schooling is the first place they economize, she sighed. The
Until Islam’s articulate spokeswomen such as Rana Kabbani target their misguided coreligionists with the fervor they expend on outside critics, the grave mistake of conflating Islam with clitoridectom...
To believe, to act, and to have events confound you—I grant you, that is hard to bear. But to believe, and not to act, or to act in a way that every fiber of your soul held was wrong—how can you not s...
They say the Lord's Day is a day of rest, but those who preach this generally are not women.
The island. As I tally my losses, it figures large there. If God takes a beloved one unto himself, we feel that loss in our heart. Yet we know well enough that nowt will quicken the dead, and so we mu...
The drill sergeants learned that lavishly praising recruits who got it right worked better than abusing those who got it wrong. The women had been raised to please, Tracy Borum discovered,
Other ayatollahs considered the female voice arousing and barred women from speaking in mixed gatherings unless they first put a stone in their mouths to distort the sound. Khomeini,
I wonder where he lies. Wedged under a rock, with a thousand small mouths already sucking on his spongy flesh. Or floating still, on and down, on and down, to wider, calmer reaches of the river. I see...
I simply ask you to see that there is only one thing to do when we fall, and that is to get up, and go on with the life that is set in front of us, and try and do the good of which our hands are capab...
How little we know, I thought, of the people we live amongst. It is not as if, had you asked me, I would have claimed to fathom the thoughts and sentiments of two whose station in life was so far dist...
Christian worship of Jesus is an idolatry much worse than the Israelites’ worship of the golden calf, for the Christians err in saying something holy entered into a woman in that stinking place…full o...