Portrayal of Muslim female athletes in the media: Diversity in Sport

Much has been made of the participation of the first Saudi woman in Olympics, with discussions on the headscarf and its compatibility with international sport. While it is an important debate, the media has completely glossed over the participation of many other Muslim women in London 2012. Sertaç Sehlikoglu argues that this is because non-stereotypical images of Muslim women puzzle the male colonial gaze. In this post, she aims to propound a more comprehensive understanding of the debates on Muslim sportswomen

Using Web 2.0 for Research and Networking on Muslim Women in Sports: The Case of Muslim Women in Sports Blog (MWIS)

As stated on its description page, the blog Muslim Women in Sports [http://muslimwomeninsports.blogspot.ca/] (MWIS) consists of a collection of news and articles on Muslim women and sports around the world. I decided to create the blog due to a lacuna of a central repository of collected materials about Muslim women's involvement in physical activities. Since I was asked to share the background story of the blog for this book, I need to go back to May 2008, two months after the exciting yet innovative symposium on Sports and Muslim women, which took place at Concordia University in Montreal. Although the blog isn’t a by-product of the symposium, the idea was triggered after chains of events following the symposium

Rape in Turkey: Between Incitement, Complicity, and Silence

The debates triggered by a 14-fold increase in violent crimes against women in Turkey in the last seven years have pitted Islamic male scholars and journalists against Islamic women writers, reports Sertaç Sehlikoğl

Vaginal obsessions in Turkey: an Islamic perspective

Recent controversies over women's sexuality, abortion and reproductive rights in Turkey reveal unacceptable violations of women’s sexual privacy by male politicians, says Sertaç Sehlikogl

Beyond Headscarf Culture in Turkey's Retail Sector

Feyda Sayan-Cengiz’s first ethnography examines lower-class, headscarf-wearing women who work in the private sector and their precarity at work through the politics of visibility, class, and gender. The author takes issues with what she calls “culturalist lenses” that often carelessly divide women as either Islamist or secularist based on their headscarf (or lack of it). In Sayan Cengiz’s argument, such a lens not only fails to reflect the fluidity and diversity she witnesses in Turkish social life, but does so “at the expense of folding issues of social inequality into cultural difference-based social stratification” (p. 3). The scholarly discussion on the headscarf in Turkey is dominated by questions about Islamic revivalism in the 1990s, and how, during this period, religious women started demanding modern and Western values and access to spaces such as universities and the political arenas. This literature, often unavoidably, furthered the (mis)understanding that Islamic visibility (headscarf) is the immediate indicator of religiosity, Muslimhood, or Islamism. However, Sayan-Cengiz’s work ethnographically demonstrates how complex the picture is for many women, especially those from the lower class