Interview With Randa Abdel-Fattah author of
What inspired you to write Does My Head Look Big In This? It became apparent to me that the only time Muslim females appeared as heroines in books were as escapees of the Taliban, victims of an honour killing, or subjects of the Saudi royalty! I wrote Does My Head Look Big In This? because I wanted to fill that gap. I wanted to write a book which debunked the common misconceptions about Muslims and which allowed readers to enter the world of the average Muslim teenage girl and see past the headlines and stereotypes- to realise that she was experiencing the same dramas and challenges of adolescence as her non-Muslim peers- and have a giggle in the process!

A Must Read!
Michael Muhammad Knight has written today’s “On the Road,” a powerful picaresque tale about the sorrows of being a seeker in the days of endless simulation. I am certain that in addition to some of the most musically-pleasing prose of recent years, Knight has identified the work of his generation, which is spirit. His wrestling with Islam is pertinent and suspenseful, a mystery rendered in brilliant detail and gorgeous depth. --Andrei Codrescu, author of “New Orleans, Mon Amour”

God and New York
It was the first sweltering, humid, muggy day in New York, at least since I had moved in January. 84 degrees on a Monday, and Manhattanites everywhere emerged from their apartments in airy blouses, skirts, flip flops featuring colorfully painted toe nails and a variety of shoes and accessories, like hot pink sneakers and bright yellow feather earrings.

Justice Is a Process—Not an Event
We must courageously rectify our double standards and hypocrisies before they continue to be employed as ammunition by pernicious characters to further a cause towards our “liberation.”

They Changed My God
We roamed around together, holding hands. We collected colored feathers, glorious flowers and chased delicate butterflies.

Pure Predictability: Egypt and My Mother-in-Law
I know she will shout in English “hypocrite” to the young woman who walks by us wearing the hijab and a form-fitting shirt embossed with glittered English red letters LIPSTICK.

Green Tea With Imam of the Age
In Iran Peter practiced Islam like a Shia; “it made no sense not to,” he says. Then he tells me that in Java they used to play the adhan on drums because it traveled better through forests (“the voice is for the desert”), but the Wahhabis took over and now every mosque there has loudspeakers atop its minarets just like every mosque everywhere else in the world. But that’s how it always goes.

Of Lost Fathers and Broken Sons
My struggle to rediscover the past of Malaysia has as much to do with the desire to uncover the marginal aspects of our national imaginary as it has to do with piecing together the dispersed fragments of my own personal life. It has to be said that some of it was motivated by the need to re-discover the father I did not really have, much less know.

Blasphemy Before God: The Darkness of Racism In Muslim Culture
It is the duty of all conscientious Muslims to speak out against the hypocrisies and contradictions that exist, especially when the integrity of one’s religious tradition is at stake. Legions of Muslims attack the contradictions of Western society with no mind to looking in their own backyard to realize that it is probably even more disorderly and messy.

Going Where I Know I Belong: A Rebel in the Mosque
I had no intention of praying right next to the men, who were seated at the front of the cavernous hall. I just wanted a place in the main prayer space. As my mother, my niece and I sat about 20 feet behind the men, a loud voice broke the quiet. "Sister, please! Please leave!" one of the mosque's elders yelled at me.

The Magic Hijab
I have been ignorant of the truly miraculous ability of the 47-inch, square piece of fabric that is such an essential part of my wardrobe. Indeed, these 47 inches are imbued with mystical, magical properties. Over the years, the secrets of hijab’s magic have been revealed to me by well meaning people from all walks of life.

Little Mosque Poems
In my little mosque there is no room for me to pray. I am turned away faithfully five times a day. My little mosque: so meager in resources, yet so eager to turn away a woman or a stranger.

Khutbas for Dummies
Dear Brother Pimply, First of all, don’t feel intimidated by those “religious” sisters. You have something extremely important that they don’t. On top of that, you never get a period. They just have to make up for being girls. Be a man: look down on them.

Islam’s Invisible Frontier: The Muslims of Chinese-Occupied East Turkestan
If I were to announce that a Muslim country, slightly smaller than the size of Iran – but still three times the size of France – blessed with bountiful oil reserves, a rich culture and a long attachment to Islam, was suffering brutal torment, one would justly be disturbed. Perhaps all the more so because one might not know which country I refer to. That, indeed, is the greatest tragedy of Chinese-occupied East Turkestan, bounded to the east by China, the south by Tibet, and the west by Pakistan and the newly-independent Central Asian states, emerging from Russian domination.

Reciprocal Silence: Egypt’s Christians and America’s Muslims
I wonder, 21 dead, yet over 90 suspects were set free and only 2 were convicted, with only one receiving a sentence of over 10 years. It just does not add up. Could it be the local police force had colluded with the killings and refuses to self implicate?

Voiding the Palestinians: An Allegory
Perhaps this single rape-murder is significant. The voiding of a people necessarily involves suffering on a monumental scale. The Zionists built their Jewish state by destroying the lives of millions of Palestinians over three generations. The scale of this suffering has been documented in reports, in statistics of villages destroyed, houses demolished, and men, women and children evicted from their homes, robbed, incarcerated, bombed, shot at, tortured, killed. However, statistics do not tell stories; they will not grip the reader with the pain of the victims. As the Holocaust reveals its hellish intent in images and artifacts, so the narrative of Palestinian voiding must be conveyed in images, metaphors and allegories, each of which contains in miniature, in essence, the great pain that the Palestinians have endured for more than eighty years.

Boxed In by a Bit of Cloth
Ten years ago, at the age of 25, I took off my scarf in Cairo and went out in public with my hair showing for the first time since I had turned 16. It is difficult to overestimate the guilt I felt.

Loving and Leaving Hijab
I quit reading anything at all related to the topic of hijab quite some time ago. Let’s face it, Muslims are never going to agree on the issue. There are hundreds of touching and personal accounts on why women choose to don the headscarf. These “hijab stories” can be especially helpful to Muslim women considering adopting the hijab into their lives. With that said, I’m here to present you with another hijab story.

What Shirin Ebadi’s Nobel Means to Progressive Muslims
It is going to inspire the silent majority of Muslims worldwide who simply want to live lives of quiet dignity. Where there are oppressive forces from both inside Muslim society and outside of it now we have a paragon of resistance to look up to. And how I relish the fact that this Muslim recipient is a woman, a strong mother of two children, a judge, and an activist. How many stereotypes about being a Muslim and a woman, an Iranian and a woman, she shatters through the very grace of her being!

Sweet Home Lackawanna
We rose and made lines shoulder-to-shoulder, feet-to-feet. I could not identify the suras he recited after al-Fatiha, but they made me want to cry anyway. In the second after prayer, I began to get up but the brother on my left extended his hand. I greeted the man and sat an extra moment to make du’a for him. Sometimes I think I’m over Islam, but I’m never over Muslims or the feeling I can get at jum’a when the world just slows down for me in the nicest ways possible.

Mourning What Is Said: Memorable Encounters with a Mensch
“So what religion do you follow, Edward?” I asked unabashedly. “I am secular,” he replied. I remember retorting that he was dodging my question. Then he said something that startled me: “I am Muslim,” he said teasingly. For a moment I thought he was playing me, and perhaps he did, for he knew that Islam was an important aspect of my identity. “You mean Islam culturally, right?” I queried. “I am Arab and I am Muslim. I am also American, Brahim,” Edward replied and then went on to explain his complicated identity. As we talked, I got the sense that for him at least, Islam was not a religion, but that his Arab-Palestinian identity implied that his cultural formation was partly Islamic. Years later, I realize that what Edward said to me was a comment in an unguarded moment. He trusted me not to confuse or make any conclusions about his identity or reach any conclusions about his religiosity or the absence of it. I am glad I did neither. But I know he found Freud’s view of Moses, in Moses and Monotheism, as both insider and outsider, to be an extraordinarily fascinating and challenging idea.

Mulla Nasruddin Comes to America
Before returning to his home town in Bokhara, the Mulla asked if I could make his talks available to a wider American public. I did not have the heart to tell the Mulla that his talks, which were stories about his antics, had not gone well (he had not noticed), and it wasn’t very likely that they would be better appreciated by a wider American public.

What Is “Progressive Islam” Anyway?
Over much of the twentieth century, the term “progress” did not have a positive track record. Much of the tyranny and genocide that marked our last century was clothed in the dogma of “progress” by the ideologies in power. So will “Progressive Islam” bring the same notions of “progress” that led to the world wars and the various secular massacres that followed? Or is this “progress” different, representing a clean break, within the Islamic paradigm, from recent movements that have sought to restrict Islam to a phenomenon that took place in Arabia almost a millennium and a half ago?

Between Laughter and Tears: Remembering Wesley Willis
Despite Wesley’s pain in both his internal and external worlds, he filled everyone around him with absolute love and joy. Wes made hearts glow. He could say something as simple as “you’re a good person” and you wouldn’t know what to do with yourself.

Fast-Food-Islam: How Wahhabism Feeds Our Intellectual Retardation
This fast-food-Islam has already cost us a generation and a half of Muslims. The same health problems which afflict the American fast-food population afflict the intellectual progress of the Muslim fast-food-Islam population. In an age where Islam is facing humiliation after humiliation at the hands of fundamentalists with the intellects of cave-men, in an age where we think that stoning a poor woman in Nigeria constitutes our Islamic civilization, in an age where the most important features in Islam are hijabs and miswaks, it is in this age that we must strive to overcome this despotic element which has oppressed our minds and usurped our legacy.

Just Wear It: Because a Baseball Hat Covers As Much As a Kufi
Some enlightened brothers have discovered that a baseball cap covers their head just as well as a kufi, and a baggy Adidas shirt with matching track-pants is as modest as a shalwar kameez (not to mention a whole lot better for your game). They realize, perhaps, that were the Prophet to have dressed in the clothing of the French royal court rather than in traditional, Arabian attire, he would have been unlikely to persuade anyone in Arabia to embrace Islam. Similarly, if you go on the metro standing 7ft. tall with a belly-button-length beard, white shalwar kameez, and a matching brown kufi and vest set, don’t be disappointed if men and women in Western-style suits and teenagers in “Mecca Brand” t-shirts and velour Jay-Z sweat-suits don’t ask you to discuss the din (faith). It isn’t personal.

The Moral Maturity of Two-Year-Olds: The Reward and Punishment Mentality Among Muslims
No wonder the ummah is in the state it is in! We keep ourselves morally at the age of two-year-olds and destroy relationships between one another with legalism, literalism, and self-centeredness. And we wonder why our rulers are so bad? We wonder why we can't get ahead? We wonder why the world doesn’t look to Islam for guidance. It should be obvious.

Midnight All These Years: Anwar, Mahathir, and the Search for Daylight in Malaysia
Nearly five years after Anwar’s sacking and subsequent jailing, many things still look the same in this country. The ruling party and the opposition are still engaged in a project of mutual excoriation as infidels. The Malaysian government is still pursuing its aggressive and authoritarian policy of modernization. The Islamist opposition is still denouncing all of these efforts as “un-Islamic”. Public debate is still couched in language that appeases the country’s Malay and Muslim sensitivities. Some things have changed, though. But what, exactly?

God's Whores
But let me ask all you mullahs and mullettes this. Why do prostitutes exist? Why is there a plentiful supply of sex-on-tap? Simply because there is plentiful demand. And who are the clients? Usually the respectable people, the judges and politicians and businessmen and lawyers and doctors. And priests and rabbis and maulanas also.

Jum'a with the Punks: An Excerpt from The Taqwacores
"...back then she didn’t have patches on it or anything. Back then we prayed together, and we did it right. Right times, right ways. That was before Rabeya started demanding to lead salat, and before all these haram influences came in--khamr, zina, before all these parties.” More or less, Umar was saying before Jehangir Tabari. “Even me,” he said to my surprise. “Even me, brother.”

Rescue Us from This Town: Confronting the Oppression of Women in Muslim Society
There are too many unfortunate realities in Muslim communities and countries. It’s time to overcome our fear of facing those realities, and it’s time to work to change those realities. That work isn't only about getting poor men jobs and getting people to pray and fast more. A lot of that work is very uncomfortable work, which entails us feeling guilty, angry, and ashamed about our larger Muslim family.

The Islaam of Double Vowels
By Irfan Yusuf Do we all remember that really cool Palestinian American academic, the late Dr. Ismail Faruqi? And what about his cool wife, Lamya? One wrote on Islamic thought, the other on Islamic art.A whole generation of young Muslims...