Nottinghamshire Muslim family suffers further harassment

Bingham graffitiOffensive graffiti attacking Allah and Islam has been painted outside a Muslim family’s home weeks after a cross wrapped in ham was left by their door.

The 31-year-old mother and two sons, eight and 10, say they have suffered five or six racist incidents since they moved to Bingham, Notts, in October.

The graffiti was painted on their path on Saturday morning.

Continue reading

Hijab handout clears US misconceptions

Fighting misconceptions associated with Muslim headscarf, Muslim students at California State University arranged a hijab handout to their colleagues to educate them about criticism and negative image drawn by media over the past decade.

“The goal was to teach what Islam really is because there’s so much negativity going around about Muslim people who are portrayed so negatively in the media,” Amina Hasan, organizer for the Muslim Student Association (MSA), told Daily 49ER, the university’s news website, on Sunday, December 2. “We’re regular people just like anyone else.”

The event, held last Thursday on a rainy afternoon, was sponsored by students of MSA at California State University Long Beach (CSULB).

Continue reading

Stavropol student barred from school for wearing headscarf

The parents of a schoolgirl living in the village of Privolny, Stavropol Territory, are complaining that their daughter has been barred from school for wearing a headscarf.

“Today we sent our daughter to school on the school bus. The senior teacher put her back on the bus and it took her home. She has been barred from classes over the headscarf for about two weeks now,” the girl’s father Rizak Rizakov told Interfax.

Continue reading

Feminist scholar’s book on hijab’s rise wins award

A Quiet RevolutionAt first, feminist religion scholar Leila Ahmed was alarmed by the growing visibility of young American Muslim women wearing headscarves. She feared that a politicized, male-dominated fundamentalism had migrated from her native Egypt to her adopted United States.

Instead, Ahmed reached what she admits was an “astonishing” conclusion: “Islamists and the children of Islamists … were now in the vanguard of those who were most fully and rapidly assimilating into the distinctively American tradition of activism in pursuit of justice,” Ahmed wrote in her book, A Quiet Revolution: The Veil’s Resurgence, from the Middle East to America.

Many women who wore the hijab, or headscarf, “now essentially made up the vanguard of those who are struggling for women’s rights in Islam,” Ahmed wrote.

For her 2011 book documenting a century of trends in the politically and socially loaded question of the hijab, Ahmed has received the 2013 Louisville Grawemeyer Award in Religion.

Courier-Journal, 30 November 2012

Welsh Muslims report widespread racist abuse

RCC reportThe Institute of Race Relations draws our attention to a Wales Online report on a new study of racism and race equality in Wales by Professor Heaven Crawley that was commissioned by Race Council Cymru.

It found people from minority ethnic backgrounds in Wales are still experiencing racism in health, education and housing services, as well as in employment. And in many cases when racism occurs, it found victims are not reporting or challenging it, but instead changing their behaviours, language and clothing to “fit in”.

Continue reading

Headscarfs and homosexuals – feminist ideals in xenophobic politics

Open Democracy has published an extract from a pamphlet by Johanne Mygind and Anders Rasmussen which explores the contradictions at the heart of the Islamophobic populism of the Danish People’s Party, whose packaging of their anti-Muslim politics as based on a concern for the rights of women and the LGBT community stands in sharp contrast to the party’s own record on these issues.