Friday Love: Muslima
Posted: March 8, 2013 Filed under: Friday Love | Tags: ayesha mattu, cretivity, IMoW, International Museum of Women, International Women's Day, IWD2013, Love InshAllah, Muslim art, Muslim love, Muslim men, Muslim relationships, Muslim women, Muslima, Nura Maznavi Leave a comment »
Check out the International Museum of Women’s phenomenal new exhibition Muslima featuring art, voices and stories from Muslim women around the globe.
And here’s Love InshAllah‘s op-ed commemorating International Women’s Day:
Muslim Women Take Back the Mic
Everyone has an opinion about Muslim women, even those – especially those – who have never met one.
As Muslim women born and raised in America, we are tired of hearing everyone — politicians, pundits, men and women of other faiths (or those not adhering to any faith) — talk about Muslim women without ever stopping to listen to what we have to say about our lives.
The narrative about Muslim women spun by others — and propagated in the media and popular culture — as silent, submissive and oppressed, is one that neither of us recognize in ourselves, the women in our families, or the women we have met over the years through our work within the Muslim community both in the United States and abroad. (Ayesha as a development consultant and Nura as an attorney.)
When we raise our voices to tell our own stories, we are silenced. We are either dismissed as outliers — educated and upper class Western-raised Muslim women with no grasp of the reality of “real” Muslim women — or brainwashed, because how could any intelligent woman defend Islam or call herself Muslim? In many cases, our experiences are negated or dismissed as inauthentic by virtue of comparison to the circumstances of some women in other countries, e.g., burqa-clad women in Afghanistan or child brides in Yemen.
What about child brides in Yemen?
Read the rest of this entry »
Love, Withheld
Posted: September 12, 2012 Filed under: Editors | Tags: ayesha mattu, Discord, estrangement, family, love, Love InshAllah, Mother-daughter, motherhood, Muslim love, Muslim relationships, Muslim women 4 Comments »
Every mother has two birthing tales:
One, that of giving birth to her child, is shared. The other, of giving birth to herself, of becoming a mother and all the ways that smashes into and fractures everything else she is, of being broken open and made anew, is one that takes a lifetime to understand.
Read the rest of this entry »
I went down to the river to pray
Posted: July 26, 2012 Filed under: Editors | Tags: ayesha mattu, disown, estrangement, family, healing, love, Love InshAllah, Muslim women, relationships 9 Comments »Ed. note: This post won a Brass Crescent Award for being the ‘single most original and important post in the Islamsphere’ in 2012.
O sisters let’s go down,
Let’s go down, come on down.
O sisters let’s go down,
Down in the river to pray.
- Alison Krause, Down to the River to Pray
It’s hard for me to admit that light and darkness, love and rage, need and pain are entangled in my relationship with my mother. Every Mother’s Day, we go for brunch and pretend that love is pure and simple, that we’ve never been wounded or made each other miserable, that our hearts aren’t fists covered in each other’s blood.
I gave my mother an advance copy of my book on Muslim women’s search for love about a month before the release date. Although she knew the love story I was going to share, and had been a strong supporter of the book over the five years it took from conception to publication, after she read it in print, she disowned me.
Ayesha and Zahra in Writerland
Posted: July 23, 2012 Filed under: Editors, Media, Writers | Tags: ayesha mattu, Love InshAllah, Meghan Ward, memoir, Muslim women, relationships, Writerland, writing, Zahra Noorbakhsh Leave a comment »
Meghan Ward
Love InshAllah editor Ayesha Mattu and contributor Zahra Noorbakhsh had a wonderful conversation with writer, editor and Writerland blogger Meghan Ward when they visited the SF Writers’ Grotto last week.
MW: Ayesha, do you have a favorite story?
ZN: Mine. You don’t have a favorite one besides mine, right?
AM: Each one holds a sacred space. You are all my children. You are all equal. (laughter)
Read the rest of the interview, here.
Father’s Day: A Love Letter to Muslim Fathers
Posted: June 17, 2012 Filed under: Editors | Tags: ayesha mattu, Father's day, joy, love, love letter, love letters, muslim fathers, relationships Leave a comment »
‘Love InshAllah‘ editor Ayesha Mattu writes a love letter to Muslim fathers on Father’s Day at The Huffington Post:
‘All of my life, Muslim men — from my father to my uncles, from my cousins to my friends — are the ones who have nurtured, supported and protected me. They’ve cheered every success, inspired me to push higher with my personal and professional ambitions, and believed in me even when — especially when — I did not believe in myself.
I’m married to an utterly irresistible Muslim man who makes me laugh, respects and cherishes me as an equal partner. I’m the mother of a Muslim son whom we are raising with the Islamic values that will make him a strong advocate of women’s rights, just like his father and the other Muslim men in my life.
So this Father’s Day, I’m writing a love letter to Muslim fathers.’
Your voices