Review Girl with a Gun begins with a startling vignette of Iranian life in the 1960s. A wedding in the Kurdistan region unfolds over the traditional three days of festivities: hands are painted with henna, women visit the public baths,…

Review of the book: Sex and Lies by Leila Slimani Leila Slimani, advisor to Emmanuel Macron and the first Moroccan woman to win France’s highest literary honour for fiction, first published Sex and Lies in French in 2017. It was…

Review of A Virtue Of Disobedience by Asim Qureshi We are the disobedient and we have come not to claim what is yours but what is and was always ours: our humanity. But no – not claim for it was…

Review of Among the Women of ISIS by Azadeh Moaveni Guest House for Young Widows follows the trajectories of 13 women into – and in some cases, out of – the Islamic State. In this book, these women emerge, vulnerable…

The title of Nadia el Fani’s documentary Laïcité Inch’allah (previously Ni Dieu, Ni Maître!) roughly translates as ‘Secularism, god willing!’ – an ironic phrase taken from an Arab Spring graffito the director spotted in Tunisia. Filmed both before and during…

How can I walk away when my legs are not my own? And how do I pave my path back? Because my place within the family is my right. No Longer Without You (Niet Meer Zonder Jou) is a painfully…

The movement to criticise religion, particularly in the USA, has been male-dominated since the turn of the century at least. The so-called four horsemen of atheism are, naturally, all men; sexism based in pseudoscience is often tolerated. Sam Harris, for…

Writing from the frontline Review: Our Woman On The Ground Our Woman On the Ground is an essay collection featuring 16 sahafiyat (female journalists) each writing a chapter on their experiences, spanning the Arab world. With an introductory endorsement by…

Review: Freedom Fields Naziha Arebi’s debut film ‘Freedom Fields’ is an intimate, five-year exploration of the lives of the women of Libya’s national football team. Brought up in the UK with a Libyan father, Arebi travelled to Tripoli for the…

Kenza Saadi reviews Maha Zimmo’s debut poetry collection “rose-water syrup” released on June 1st. The scents of roses, of rose water, of pomegranate, of bread baking in the clay oven, and of salt in the air by the sea mix…

I have been following the work of actress and writer Ambreen Razia since she toured her one-woman show The Diary of a Hounslow Girl on stages across the UK. I managed to catch it at Tara Arts Theatre two years…