Islamophobia and anti-Muslim racism pose a unique experience, especially when one is readily identifiable as a Muslim through hijab, a head covering worn by some Muslim women. Although frequently conflated with racial identity, Muslim women are uniquely impacted by the intersection of race, gender, and religious identity. In this paper, I explore…

The Albanian language until it became a written and a spoken language to all of the Albanians, passed through a long and a difficult path. If you go back in time, you see how many efforts were made to preserve Albanian language and identity. Albanian intellectuals and patriots got their visionary aim of its preservation at all costs. Albanian…

On Saturday, January 21, 2017, the day after the inauguration of Donald Trump as the 45th President of the United States, there was an impressive Women's March in Washington, D.C., the nation's capital. The guiding vision and definition of principles of the Women's March equated Women's Rights with Human Rights and called for the liberation of…

We are four racialized diasporic Muslim women living on Turtle Island, with roots spanning India, Palestine, Panama, Trinidad, Malaysia, and beyond. We have been involved in activism and organizing, including with and for Muslim communities, for more than five decades combined. Our conversations and correspondence about Muslim pedagogies of…

By using autobiographical narrative inquiry (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000) and poetry (Leggo, 1998), we share the story of a Muslim Canadian female graduate student, as experienced by the student and her graduate supervisor. We unpack an email expressing concern, written by an Indigenous male student about the work of the Muslim female student…

Hem Borker performed field-based research in madrasa "Jamiatul Mominat," a residential girls' madrasa in Delhi, exploring the everyday lives of young girls studying in the madrasa. She interacted with a number of students and teachers in this madrasa. But there were few with whom she developed a bond during her journey from being a…

This article tells the story of a Muslim woman's visit to a kindergarten classroom in a Catholic school and describes lessons learned by the teacher and the students.

This article describes an exercise designed to introduce the topic of Islam and Muslims in a Sociology of Globalization course. The activity asks students to complete a sentence regarding Muslim women. Rather than provide any definitive answers regarding Islam or Muslims, the purpose of the exercise is for students to see the reductive nature of…

This is a narrative about my first year's principalship experience at a pre-service teachers' training college in Pakistan, a Muslim country with a patriarchal background. Here, I discuss challenges I faced upon assuming the principalship. Specifically, I focused on how I responded to these challenges. In my response to those challenges, I…

My article narrates and theorizes one educational moment of speaking 'across' the social and political margins in a peripheral college on the northern border of Israel. I recognize the academic space as what historian Louise Pratt titled a 'contact zone' where peoples geographically and historically separated meet within radically asymmetrical…

This essay addresses the challenges of teaching to myths and misperceptions through a discussion of two books that the author uses to frame her course on the history of women and gender in the modern Middle East: (1) Geraldine Brooks' "Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women" (1995); and (2) Heather Raffo's "9 Parts…

As a very controversial issue in Islam, polygamy allows Muslim men to marry up to four wives. It has been told that the Quran encourages polygamy; thus, it is a part of Islamic "Sharia." Many Muslim men practice it at their whim and they contend that they do so to follow the "Sunnah." Amongst Muslim countries, Malaysia is one…

In this article the author uses the term "conservative dancers" to describe dancers who live in communities or families that are socially, culturally, or religiously conservative with ideological consistency, adhering to traditional values that they deem to be moral (e.g., modest dress, clear gender roles and separation, purity, family…

"Cat's Eyes" is a novel about suffering and endurance, early marriage, spirituality and the sanctuary it provides, and Sufism in particular. It uses certain motifs to depict the psychological suffering of a young girl, caused by her conservative father and unsatisfactory marriage, which persists until she finally reaches a moment of…

In this paper I present the "everydayness" of a particular group of young Muslim women and their families as they dance between a range of contradictory and shifting discourses. Through an analysis situated between the social and the cultural, the paper argues that as an "in-between" generation these young women are now part of…