ILLUME covered last week’s UC Berkeley panel, as well. Check it!

The UC Berkeley panel I was on last week was featured in The Huffington Post last week. The writer, Madhavi Bhasin, attended the event and gives Huffy readers a firsthand account.

I spoke with Voice of America as part of a focus story on female Muslim activists in honor of International Women’s Day.

I addressed the stereotypes of Muslim women in Western media outlets:

She is the editor of the Muslimah Media Watch website, where Muslim women discuss their image in media and popular culture.  Fakhraie points to one disturbing example from Switzerland.

“During the minaret ban campaign, there was a poster that had this scowling Muslim woman and she appeared in front of this field of minarets, that looked like nukes through the Swiss flag, a very menacing image,” she said.

Check out the rest at the Voice of America article.

At Jezebel, Latoya Peterson has a great takedown of Bill Maher’s But I’m Not Wrong, which aired on HBO last weekend. During his show, Maher staged a “Muslim Dior” fashion show, and Latoya quotes yours truly about the ridiculousness of all this (not to mention the horrific copyright infringement–Dior should sue!):

Maher opens his bit by expressing shock over a newspaper article reporting that Saudi Arabia has had its first fashion show. He then bases the rest of his routine on lampooning the abaya, featuring white models in bare feet and shortened coverings who twirl around the stage as Maher lobs barbs at Islam in the style of a fashion announcer, conflating specific regions, Islam at large, and Saudi Arabia into one huge Orientalist mass of fail.

Ali Shariati from the weekly U.K. magazine The Muslim Post interviewed me about Muslimah Media Watch and its recent success at the Brass Crescent Awards.

Their website is currently under construction, but Mr. Shariati was kind enough to float me some .pdfs of the published version. Here’s the story itself and then my interview.

Muslimah Media Watch cleaned up at the Brass Crescent Awards, winning Best Female Blog and receiving an honorable mention for Best Group Blog. That’s almost three for three, friends!

This is the third year we’ve been in the running, and the first time we’ve received something more than an honorable mention. Pretty exciting stuff!

More exciting is the fact that MMW will be getting a facelift soon. Stay tuned for important developments on our site and on Twitter.

Thank you to all of our readers and friends and fans for supporting us, today and every day.

elan magazine is “the guide to global Muslim culture” and they interviewed me about Muslimah Media Watch and other fun stuff:

Editor, writer, blogger, and now textbook author, Fatemeh Fakhraie is known for her smart critiques, keen analysis and unique perspective. But how did she get started as a writer? Where does she hope her career will go? elan steals a moment from the busy schedule of the woman behind Muslimah Media Watch to learn about her professional goals, the women she admires and her aspiration of becoming the next pleasant, pantsuit-wearing Wilhelmina Slater.

In JO magazine, Natalia Antonova and I discuss her experiences as a foreign woman who doesn’t wear hejab in a Muslim-majority country:

“I don’t like how the idea of hijab is fixed, as if once you take it on or off, there’s no going back,” she said, when I asked her about what it meant to put it on as a safety measure. “It doesn’t allow for the realities and differing circumstances of life.” We talked about how, beyond being a sign of religious expression, the hijab can function as a “do not approach” sign when one is surrounded by strangers.