One of the tragedies of our world is the distortion of the female identity (Genesis 3:16 refers to this as part of the consequence of the fall). Part of the…
As Christians our identity is influenced in part by the Bible and our Christian community. Muslim women have their identity shaped by the Quran, Hadith and Muslim community. The result…
Identity is an important issue for every person and hence, for every woman. Each woman is on a journey, whether they are aware of it or not, to be who…
‘We say that a woman has forty souls’, said Gulzira with a smile, a young Kazakh shopkeeper at a big modern shopping centre who grew up in a village and…
How do women living under Islam relate to God? As a Christian woman who views and understands her religious texts through her own modes of knowing, some would say (individualistic)…
(This blog is an excerpt from Vivienne Stacey’s book ‘Women in Islam’, published in 1995. It is used with permission from Interserve GBI.) Quoting from the unpublished manuscript of a…
In spiritual warfare you can sometimes consider the situation in detachment, because you know you are going to win. It is interesting to spend part of a year on a…
“Friendship is a real thing where people open their living to one another, allowing the paths of life to crisscross in journeys imagined as in some sense shared.” ‘Friendship First’,…
We had climbed to part of the area that had been devastated by the earthquake. Under a makeshift shelter an old lady sat rocking back and forward. She described the…
My Muslim friends have often challenged me about what it means to live my faith as an act of submission to God in the everyday of life. Where I struggle…
Mawlid an-nabi (the birthday of Muhammad) is celebrated around the Muslim world in different ways (except in the most Salafi of contexts), and in it popular veneration of Muhammad reaches…
There are a number of pictures of Hagar in western art. Some portray Sarah offering Hagar, her slave, to Abraham to get her pregnant, so she can have a child…
