Deeyah Khan is a Norwegian documentary film director and human rights activist of Punjabi/Pashtun descent. Deeyah is a two-time Emmy Award winner, two time Peabody Award winner, a BAFTA winner and has received the Royal Television Society award for Best Factual Director. She has made seven documentaries to date, all have been shown on ITV in the UK as part of its Exposure series.
Mona Eltahawy is a freelance Egyptian-American journalist and social commentator based in New York City. She has written essays and op-eds for publications worldwide on Egypt and the Islamic world, on topics including women's rights, patriarchy, and Muslim political and social affairs. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Times, Christian Science Monitor, and the Miami Herald among others. Headscarves and Hymens, Eltahawy's first book, was published in May 2015. Eltahawy has been a guest analyst on U.S. radio and television news shows. She is among people who spearheaded the Mosque Me Too movement by using the hashtag #MosqueMeToo.
Islamic feminism is a form of feminism concerned with the role of women in Islam. It aims for the full equality of all Muslims, regardless of gender, in public and private life. Islamic feminists advocate for women's rights, gender equality, and social justice grounded in an Islamic framework. Although rooted in Islam, the movement's pioneers have also utilized secular, Western, or otherwise non-Muslim feminist discourses, and have recognized the role of Islamic feminism as part of an integrated global feminist movement.
Mahnaz Afkhami is an Iranian women's rights activist who served in the Cabinet of Iran from 1976 to 1978. She is founder and president of Women's Learning Partnership (WLP), executive director of the Foundation for Iranian Studies and former Minister of Women's Affairs in Iran's pre-Revolution government. She has lived in exile in the United States since 1979.
Sisterhood Online Mixtape is the first project of Sisterhood. This was an online mixtape. Deeyah Presents Sisterhood was launched in May 2008. The Mixtape was started through MySpace and placed online for free to remain true to its birth through the Internet. Deeyah Khan connected with young Muslim women online who were aspiring rappers, singers and poets. This Sisterhood collection became the first online mixtape of its kind. The reactions to this mixtape project were primarily positive and very supportive from the Western media and Muslim community.
Nawal Elsaadawi was an Egyptian feminist writer, activist and physician. She wrote numerous books on the subject of women in Islam, focusing on the practice of female genital mutilation in her society. She was described as "the Simone de Beauvoir of the Arab World", and as "Egypt's most radical woman".
Banaz: A Love Story is a 2012 documentary film directed and produced by Deeyah Khan. The film chronicles the life and death of Banaz Mahmod, a young British-Iraqi woman of Kurdish origin killed in 2006 in South London on the orders of her family in what is euphemistically called honour killing. The film received its UK premiere at the Raindance Film Festival in London September 2012.
Fuuse is an independent music, arts and film production company founded by Norwegian artist, Deeyah Khan. Fuuse is an Emmy and Peabody award winning company based in Norway and specialises in creating music and film projects rooted in art, culture and activism to encourage dialogue around social and political issues.
Women's Action Forum (WAF) is a women's rights organization in Pakistan.
WORLD WOMAN is a festival of art and activism in Oslo founded in 2015 by filmmaker and activist Deeyah Khan. The festival highlights the voices of artists and activists from around the world and promotes courage, creativity and compassion through human rights, freedom of expression, equality and peace. The event was produced by Fuuse and it took place on the 30th and 31 January 2015 in the Riksscenen with the support of Norway's Ministry of Foreign Affairs. WORLD WOMAN is planned as an annual event.
University of Oslo's Human Rights Award honours individuals who have made important contributions in different fields. The award was launched in 1986 and since then, it is awarded every year to notable people from different walks of life. Those years when the award was not distributed are 1997, 1999, 2003, and 2004.
Muslim women filmmakers represent a marginalized group of media makers and visual artists coming from countries where the dominant religion is Islam. Some of these nations include Iran, Afghanistan, Indonesia, Pakistan, Egypt, Mali, Palestine and Malaysia.
Islam's Non-Believers is a 2016 documentary produced by Fuuse Films, and filmed and directed by Deeyah Khan. The film documents the lives and experiences of ex-Muslims: people who have left Islam to become atheists, and who often face discrimination, harassment, ostracism and violence for leaving Islam, both in the UK and abroad. The documentary was first shown on the ITV's current affairs series Exposure.
Dina Ali Lasloom is a Saudi woman who attempted to seek asylum in Australia to escape Saudi guardianship laws, but was forcibly repatriated to Saudi Arabia from the Philippines. Her attempt to escape the oppressive Saudi law was frustrated when she was stopped in transit at Ninoy Aquino International Airport in Manila on 10 April 2017 and sent back to Saudi Arabia on 11 April 2017.
Feminism in Pakistan refers to the set of movements which aim to define, establish, and defend the rights of women in Pakistan.This may involve the pursuit of equal political, economic, and social rights, alongside equal opportunity. These movements have historically been shaped in response to national and global reconfiguration of power, including colonialism, nationalism, Islamization, dictatorship, democracy, and the War on Terror. The relationship between the women's movement and the Pakistani state has undergone significant shifts from mutual accommodation to confrontation and conflict.
Atiya Fyzee was an Indian author and the first woman from South Asia to attend the University of Cambridge.
Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan is a British spoken word poet, writer and speaker, known for her poem "This Is Not a Humanising Poem" and writing about life as a Muslim woman in England on her site, The Brown Hijabi.
I Live is the first novel by the Lebanese writer Laila Baalbakki. It was first published in 1958 and was chosen as number seventeen of the 105 best Arabic novels of the 20th century by the Arab Writers Union. Its publication marked the beginning of a period in which many novels by Lebanese women appeared, and it dealt with the lives of young Arab women finding new ways of living in defiance of traditional gender roles. The novel was banned for immorality in Lebanon in the same year that it was published, and together with Baalbekki's second novel A Spaceship of Tenderness to the Moon it led to the author going to court to defend herself against a charge of degrading public morals.
