Elan magazine profiles Muslimah Media Watch founder Fatemeh Fakraie.
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johnpi
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johnpi
Muslim cartoonist tackles social and political issues.
Pakistan can be difficult terrain for a female Muslim cartoonist whose alter ego, Gogi, has comments in the bubble above her head on everything from male chauvinism to suicide bombers.
Gogi is a long-lashed, short-coiffed, polka dot-wearing, pixie-faced modern Pakistani woman. She is a bit like “Blondie” and a bit like Oprah — except devoutly Muslim.
Gogi creator Nigar Nazar, the first and, as far as she knows, “only woman cartoonist of Pakistan and very likely the entire Muslim world,” says Gogi represents the educated and self-confident urban Pakistani.
Gogi is mostly “on the receiving end of the joke that is life,” Nazar says. She deflects the onslaught with womanly humor.
“Gogi is that ray of hope in a male-dominated country where she has to brave it . . . with a tough exterior while not losing her feminine grace, charm and intelligence,” Nazar said.
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johnpi
Magazine puts spotlight on Muslim women.
A Montclair (NJ) State University senior has enlisted writers from around the world to contribute to a magazine she created for Muslim women.
Yasmin Essa, 20, launched Modest Beautiful Muslima in July. The magazine caters to Muslim women while tackling topics including beauty, fitness, health, family, food and religion. Since then, the bimonthly online magazine has attracted more than 800 readers from 30 countries, including the U.K., China and Egypt.
….The magazine’s unpaid contributors hail from across the globe — writers from Canada, Qatar, Germany, Nigeria, India and the U.S. have all been published in Modest Beautiful Muslima.
She met some through mutual friends and others through the Facebook social network, where the magazine has a page, and the Twitter micro-blogging Web site, where Modest Beautiful Muslima has 200 followers.
Essa, of Edison, said she is proud that some non-Muslims read Modest Beautiful Muslima as well. Some have told her they love the recipes (supplied by My Halal Kitchen blog), and one of her friends, a non-Muslim man, said he wants to write an article for the magazine about how non-Muslim men perceive Muslim women.
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johnpi
This writer reflects some of my concerns about what we (or I) create here at Talk Islam:
What prominent national figures have spoken out in the last nine years not in the name of rubberstamped strategies, buzzwords or mantras, but in the name of ordinary Muslims — the supposed beneficiaries of this gigantic war effort? Our television screens splash our retinas with images of young American soldiers killed in combat, and now, Iranian protesters brandishing a slain woman’s picture. Where on these screens are the images and names of the tens of thousands of ordinary women and children slain by our own bombs and bullets in the Middle East?
It is in this searing political context that I consider myself connected to Islam. I feel an inseparable link to those abroad, whose names I do not even know, who have suffered the impact of modern weapons unleashed on ancient pretexts. I insist on this connection precisely because the full weight of national propaganda is aimed at erasing, ignoring and discarding the memory of these victims, these invisibles.
The cost of this remembrance, however, is alienation from Muslims around me. Just as an Islamophobe’s mind may produce menacing images when he encounters a Muslim, I see Muslims through the lenses of war, occupation, invasion and torture.
If I see a woman in a hijab, my mind races to a recent surreal murder or questions about whether it reflects, for this particular person, a conscious choice of modesty, the inertia of tradition or the weight of oppression. If I see a man in chapals and shalwar-kameez, I immediately begin to speculate about his politics, what grievances occupy and animate his mind and his degree of reconciliation with modern life.
In this politicized projection, the actual human being at the other end of one’s tinted lenses never comes into focus. The Muslim greeting assalam-alaykum, “peace be upon you,” is shorn of meaning because peace is neither in me nor bestowed upon most Muslims in these times; a few have violently rejected the concept altogether and have instead embraced a mindless nihilism.