Kurdish Women’s Stories is a collection of 25 short essays from Kurdish women, writing from their homelands in Iraq, Turkey, Syria, Iran as well as from the massive Kurdish diaspora. Too often, the popular conception of Kurdish women is drawn…

Women Leaving Islam follows six young women’s trajectories out of the faith of their parents. Despite often highly traumatic stories, these young women are composed and articulate, and despite facing pushback for leaving Islam, from ostracisation to violence, they all…

The discrimination against women in Muslim family law is well-established: from instant unilateral talaq divorces to polygamy, several harmful practices are often found justified by reference to Islam. Power, as always, tilts towards men. More than 45 countries have discriminatory…

Churails review Churails – Urdu for witches – is a Karachi-set fantasy drama available on Zee-TV, which was briefly unavailable in Pakistan for spurious reasons, but has now been restored to the service. Churails, features four main characters who found…

Riz Ahmed’s latest offering feels very apt for 2020, since its central theme dances around the fear intrinsic to the reality of our lives. Riz plays Zed, a British Pakistani rapper in New York. On the cusp of ‘making it’,…

Review What We Talk About When We Talk About Rape, Sohaila Abdulali The fear of rape is background noise for many women. It rises from a barely audible whisper to a screech when triggered. The stimuli can be as trivial…

Banaz Mahmod was born in Iraq in 1985. When she was just ten years old, her father fled Iraq, and sought asylum with his wife and five daughters in Mitcham, South London. Banaz was just four years older than me:…

‘Honour’ review The British detective procedural show is a tonally exact genre, and Honour, a two-part drama series written by Gwyneth Hughes, is a stunning display of a generic kind of perfection, marred only by a greatly important factor: the announcement…

Review The Netflix original film Cuties (2020), centres upon a group of eleven-year-old girls forging their nascent pubescent identities, and gaining validation from sources ranging from Instagram likes to the approval of dance judges in a competition. Cuties is not…

Review of Caroline Goode’s book “Honour: Achieving Justice for Banaz Mahmod“ When you think about the girls and young women you love – your daughter, your sister, your friend – take a moment to think about those girls growing up…

Review: Our Bodies, Their Battleground Rape, argues Christina Lamb, is a weapon of war as deadly as the Kalashnikov. Unlike the Kalashnikov, rape has the advantage of costing nothing. Rape serves as a reward for the troops and gang rape…