#conservative islam

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Yasmin Mohammed

Published: Sep 30, 2017

At the age of six, I bolted out the front doors of my elementary school and ran to give my first-grade teacher a goodbye hug. As I skipped towards my mother, my bubbly mood was snatched away by her stern voice and admonishing stare.

“Did you just hug your teacher?” my mother asked.

“Yah, I love Mrs. Roth!”

“You do not hug non-Muslims! That is disgusting,” she said.

She then marched me over to the principal’s office to demand that Mrs. Roth never touch her child again. I sat in the chair listening to them, confused and embarrassed. I didn’t understand what I did wrong.

The next day, as all the children filed out of class, some would wrap their arms around Mrs. Roth’s middle, but her arms remained at her sides. The children asked why she wasn’t hugging them back, but she didn’t expose me. She just told them that she couldn’t anymore. It was a new rule. I hung my head and avoided her gaze as I sheepishly walked out of the classroom. Such a positive, loving, comforting aspect of my day was not only snatched from me, but from all the children in the class — and from my teacher.

That was the first time that I learned that I was an ‘other’. That I was a Muslim, that I lived among non-Muslims and that I could never get too comfortable around the non-believers. Unlike my Egyptian-born mother, I was born in Canada. I didn’t accept that ‘non-believers’ were evil and deserved Allah’s wrath. I didn’t want to strike off their heads or their fingertips, as Allah commands.

‘Non-believers’ were nice to me. They were my friends. My teachers weren’t Muslim, but they were kind and loving. What I was being taught at home contradicted the reality I was witnessing.

But my mother and her husband (she was his second concurrent wife) were far-right, conservative Muslims. They forced me to abide by their beliefs. Fearing both the wrath of my mother and the wrath of Allah, I did as I was told.

When I was 19, I had to wear a niqab (burka) and was forced into an arranged marriage. He was an Egyptian man who entered Canada from Afghanistan using a fake Saudi Arabian passport. Pre-9/11, those red flags weren’t enough for authorities to keep him out. He was even offered refugee status.

Years later, after I had had given birth to a daughter, I was contacted by the Canadian CIA (CSIS) and I learned that my husband, Essam Marzouk, was an Al Qaeda operative serving as Osama bin Laden’s point of contact. Soon after, I escaped from him, my family, and eventually left the religion into which I was born.

I ran away from the religious far-right world in which I was raised, and I made my way left towards values that I embraced like gender equality, free speech and LGBT rights.

All these values felt correct to me. They fit with me. I finally felt comfortable. I no longer had a constant internal struggle between left and right brewing inside of me.

Now, try to imagine the shock, betrayal and sadness I feel seeing fellow liberals celebrating right-wing, conservative aspects of Islam. On February 1, I was so upset over World Hijab Day that I spent the day in bed with a migraine. Hijab Day? Would it make sense to have Wings Day to celebrate the garment that women in ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ are forced to wear? Is there a Mormon underwear day? What about a chastity belt day? I risked my life, and my daughter’s life, to escape from the darkness into the light — only to find the light celebrating and fetishising darkness.

When you celebrate the hijab by plastering it all over catwalks, and the Women’s March, Playboy, Elle, Vogue and Nike, you are celebrating a symbol of a far-right ideology, whether you know it or not. Muslims come from hundreds of different countries with hundreds of different cultures and hundreds of different traditional clothing styles.

The hijab is not worn by non-Muslim Egyptians, Iraqis, Indonesians, Pakistanis or Somalis. It is worn by conservative Muslims from those countries. If I want to celebrate Italians, I will not make a Pope Hat Day or a Nun’s Habit Day. These are religious symbols. The hijab confuses Americans. They seem to think that it is a ‘cultural’ clothing — no. It is religious. As religious as a kippah or an Amish bonnet.

Americans also seem to have trouble distinguishing Muslims as people from Islam as a religion. For liberals, celebrating and honouring people is to be applauded, celebrating and honouring religions is not. We do not celebrate and honour conservative Christianity or Orthodox Judaism. Why do we celebrate fundamentalist Islam?

When Palestinian-American activist Linda Sarsour drew criticism earlier this year for supporting Sharia, former Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders jumped to her support. Sharia, a barbaric and socially right-wing conservative set of laws, was defended by the most progressive political leader in the United States. That moment illustrated the absolute absurdity of this confusion.

Sanders supporting Sarsour made as much sense as him jumping to support disgraced Christian personality Josh Duggar or devout Mormon Mitt Romney. But it’s indicative of a broader problem among my fellow liberals. Their hearts may be in the right place, but their brains are not. ‘Intersectionalism’ has caused their brains to misfire. Many reflexively defend conservative theocrats like Sarsour because she has brown skin and a scarf on her head. But a person’s values cannot be identified by their skin color.

As a Sharia supporter who has expressed her to desire to inflict violence on women she disagrees with, Sarsour is much more right-wing than either Duggar or Romney. The left is engaging in the kind of bigotry it is supposed to oppose – judging people based on the color of their skin rather than the content of their character.

Liberal Americans come in every hue of skin and from every religious background. But we must choose our allies based on their ideas and not their identities. If liberals want to include Muslims, by all means, please do, but first ensure that those Muslims are actually liberals. Sarsour is not. She represents the minority of devout hijab-wearing conservative Muslim women in America.

How can a person who claims to be a liberal also support Sharia? Islamic law demands death for gays and lesbians, for people who leave Islam, forbids women from traveling without a male guardian’s permission. You want to know what life is like under Sharia? Look to Saudi Arabia and Iran, two of the most illiberal counties imaginable.

In the left’s zeal to support minorities, it inadvertently supports conservative religious values, but only those of one faith. Our alliances should be rooted in shared goals and values for society.

Too often, left-wing Americans make their decisions based on just doing the opposite of the right-wing. Right wing loves Christianity? We oppose it! Right wing hates Islam? We love it! This shallow reactive behaviour lacks any critical thought. As George Orwell said: “The truth becomes untruth if uttered by your enemy.” As opposed to just reacting, all Americans should take a step back and think about each situation critically. Sometimes the lunacy is glaring.

Can we imagine a liberal march that uses Mormon underwear as an icon? Or a nun’s habit? Of course not. But the Women’s March made a point of using the hijab as one of its images. That’s an example of glaring lunacy.

Walking from the religious right to the political left, I gave up the idea of judging people based on their identities. I was shocked to find that attitude thriving just as strongly on the American left as on the Islamic right. As much as I love liberal values, risking my life to live by them, I cannot abide by the identity politics that has possessed my fellow liberals.

Today, I fight back tears of joy as I watch my six-year-old daughter run to hug her teacher in the mornings. I escaped from the hate on the right and I will never join the hate on the left. My daughter will never hear words of hate from me, and she will never utter words of hate to her children. The cycle of hate ends here.

-

Yasmine Mohammed is a Canadian citizen of an Arab background. She has written a memoir about her journey out of Islam, ‘Some of my best friends are Jewish, and other confessions of an ex-Muslim’.

She endured decades of physical and mental torture. She was forced into a marriage with a member of Al Qaeda, after he was bailed out of prison by Osama bin Laden himself. She wore a niqab, and lived in a home/prison with paper covering all the windows. Yet, somehow, with nothing but a high school diploma and a baby in tow, she got out.

==

February 1 is No Hijab Day.

[1000cupcakes]

From the Washington Post;

As Muslim women, we actually ask you not to wear the hijab in the name of interfaith solidarity

By Asra Q. Nomani and Hala Arafa

Last week, three female religious leaders — a Jewish rabbi, an Episcopal vicar and a Unitarian reverend — and a male imam, or Muslim prayer leader, walked into the sacred space in front of the ornately-tiled minbar, or pulpit, at the Khadeeja Islamic Center in West Valley City, Utah. The women were smiling widely, their hair covered with swaths of bright scarves, to support “Wear a Hijab” day.

The Salt Lake Tribune published a photo of fresh-faced teenage girls, who were not Muslim, in the audience at the mosque, their hair covered with long scarves. KSL TV later reported: “The hijab — or headscarf — is a symbol of modesty and dignity. When Muslim women wear headscarves, they are readily identified as followers of Islam.”

For us, as mainstream Muslim women, born in Egypt and India, the spectacle at the mosque was a painful reminder of the well-financed effort by conservative Muslims to dominate modern Muslim societies. This modern-day movement spreads an ideology of political Islam, called “Islamism,” enlisting well-intentioned interfaith do-gooders and the media into promoting the idea that “hijab” is a virtual “sixth pillar” of Islam, after the traditional “five pillars” of the shahada (or proclamation of faith), prayer, fasting, charity and pilgrimage.

We reject this interpretation that the “hijab” is merely a symbol of modesty and dignity adopted by faithful female followers of Islam.

This modern-day movement, codified by Iran, Saudi Arabia, Taliban Afghanistan and the Islamic State, has erroneously made the Arabic word hijab synonymous with “headscarf.” This conflation of hijab with the secular word headscarf is misleading. “Hijab” literally means  “curtain” in Arabic. It also means “hiding,” ”obstructing” and “isolating” someone or something. It is never used in the Koran to mean headscarf.

In colloquial Arabic, the word for “headscarf” is tarha. In classical Arabic, “head” is al-ra’as and cover is gheta’a. No matter what formula you use, “hijab” never means headscarf.  The media must stop spreading this misleading interpretation.

Born in the 1960s into conservative but open-minded families (Hala in Egypt and Asra in India), we grew up without an edict that we had to cover our hair. But, starting in the 1980s, following the 1979 Iranian revolution of the minority Shiite sect and the rise of well-funded Saudi clerics from the majority Sunni sect, we have been bullied in an attempt to get us  to cover our hair from men and boys. Women and girls, who are sometimes called “enforce-hers” and “Muslim mean girls,” take it a step further by even making fun of women whom they perceive as wearing the hijab inappropriately, referring to “hijabis” in skinny jeans as “ho-jabis,” using the indelicate term for “whores.”

But in interpretations from the 7th century to today, theologians, from the late Moroccan scholar Fatima Mernissi to UCLA’s Khaled Abou El Fadl, and Harvard’s Leila Ahmed, Egypt’s Zaki Badawi, Iraq’s Abdullah al Judai and Pakistan’s Javaid Ghamidi, have clearly established that Muslim women are not required to cover their hair.

Challenging the hijab

To us, the “hijab”is a symbol of an interpretation of Islam we reject that believes that women are a sexual distraction to men, who are weak, and thus must not be tempted by the sight of our hair. We don’t buy it. This ideology promotes a social attitude that absolves men of sexually harassing women and puts the onus on the victim to protect herself by covering up.

The new Muslim Reform Movement, a global network of leaders, advocating for human rights, peace and secular governance, supports the right of Muslim women to wear — or not wear — the headscarf.

Unfortunately, the idea of “hijab” as a mandatory headscarf is promulgated by naïve efforts such as “World Hijab Day,” started in 2013 by Nazma Khan, the Bangladeshi American owner of a Brooklyn-based headscarf company, and Ahlul Bayt, a Shiite-proselytizing TV station, that the University of Calgary, in southwest Canada, promotes as a resource for its participation in “World Hijab Day.” The TV station argues that wearing a “hijab” is necessary for women to avoid “unwanted attention.” World Hijab Day, Ahlul Bayt and the University of Calgary didn’t respond to requests for comment.

In its “resources,” Ahluly Bayt includes a link to the notion that “the woman is awrah,” or forbidden, an idea that leads to the confinement, subordination, silencing and subjugation of women’s voices and presence in public society. It also includes an article, “The top 10 excuses of Muslim women who don’t wear hijab and their obvious weaknesses,” with the argument, “Get on the train of repentance, my sister, before it passes by your station.”

The rush to cover women’s hair has reached a fever pitch with ultraconservative Muslim websites and organizations pushing this interpretation, such as VirtualMosque.com and Al-Islam.org, which even published a feature, “Hijab Jokes,” mocking Muslim women who don’t cover their hair “Islamically.”

Last week, high school girls at Vernon Hills High School, outside Chicago, wore headscarves for an activity, “Walk a Mile in Her Hijab,” sponsored by the school’s conservative Muslim Students Association. It disturbed us to see the image of the girls in scarves.

Furthermore, Muslim special-interest groups are feeding articles about “Muslim women in hijab” under siege. Staff members at the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which has pressed legal and PR complaints against U.S. companies that have barred employees from wearing hijabs on the job, has even called their organization “the hijab legal defense fund.”

Today, in the 21st century, most mosques around the world, including in the United States, deny us, as Muslim women, our Islamic right to pray without a headscarf, discriminating against us by refusing us entry if we don’t cover our hair. Like the Catholic Church after the Vatican II reforms of 1965 removed a requirement that women enter churches with heads covers, mosques should become headscarf-optional, if they truly want to make their places of worship “women-friendly.”

Fortunately, we have those courageous enough to challenge these edicts. In early May 2014, an Iranian journalist, Masih Alinejad, started a brave new campaign, #MyStealthyFreedom, to protest laws requiring women to wear hijabs that Iran’s theocracy put in place after it won control in 1979. The campaign’s slogan: “The right for individual Iranian women to choose whether they want hijab.”

Important interpretations of the Koran

The mandate that women cover their hair relies on misinterpretations of Koranic verses.

In Arabic dictionaries, hijab refers to a “barrier,” not necessarily between men and women, but also between two men. Hijab appears in a Koranic verse (33:53), during the fifth year of the prophet Muhammad’s migration, or hijra, to Medina, when some wedding guests overstayed their welcome at the prophet’s home. It established some rules of etiquette for speaking to the wives of prophet Muhammad: “And when ye ask of them anything, ask it of them from behind a hijab. This is purer for your hearts and for their hearts.” Thus, hijab meant a partition.

The word hijab, or a derivative, appears only eight times in the Koran as an “obstacle” or “wall of separation” (7:46), a “curtain” (33:53), “hidden” (38:32), just a “wall of separation” (41:5, 42:52, 17:45), “hiding” (19:14) and “prevented” or “denied access to God” (83:15).

In the Koran, the word hijab never connotes any act of piety. Rather, it carries the negative connotation of being an actual or metaphorical obstacle separating the “non-believers” in a dark place, noting “our hearts are under hijab (41:5),” for example, a wall of separation between those in heaven and those in hell (7:46) or “Surely, they will be mahjaboon from seeing their Lord that day (83:15).” Mahjaboon is a derivate verb from hijab. The Saudi Koran translates it as “veiled.” Actually, in this usage, it means, “denied access.”

The most cited verse to defend the headscarf (33:59) states, “Oh, Prophet tell thy wives and thy daughters and the believer women to draw their jilbab close around them; this will be better so that they be recognized and not harmed and God is the most forgiving, most merciful.” According to Arabic dictionaries, jilbab means “long, overflowing gown” which was the traditional dress at the time. The verse does not instruct them to add a new garment but rather adjust an existing one. It also does not mean headscarf.

Disturbingly, the government of Saudi Arabia twists its translation of the verse to impose face veils on women, allowing them even to see with just “one eye.” The government’s translation reads: “O Prophet! Tell your wives and your daughters and the women of the believers to draw their cloaks (veils) all over their bodies (i.e. screen themselves completely except the eyes or one eye to see the way). That will be better, that they should be known (as free respectable women) so as not to be annoyed, and God is most forgiving, most merciful.”

Looked at in context, Islamic historians say this verse was revealed in the city of Medina, where the prophet Muhammad fled to escape persecution in Mecca, and was revealed to protect women from rampant sexual aggression they faced on the streets of Medina, where men often sexually harassed women, particularly slaves. Today, we have criminal codes that make such crimes illegal; countries that don’t have such laws need to pass them, rather than punishing women for the violent acts of others.

Another verse (24:31) is also widely used to justify a headscarf, stating, “… and tell the believing women to lower their gaze and guard their chastity, and do not reveal their adornment except what is already shown; and draw their khemar over their neck. . . .”

In old Arabic poetry, the khemar was a fancy silk scarf worn by affluent women. It was fixed on the middle of the head and thrown over their back, as a means of seducing men and flaunting their wealth. This verse was revealed at a time, too, when women faced harassment when they used open-air toilets. The verse also instructs how to wear an existing traditional garment. It doesn’t impose a new one.

Reclaiming our religion

In 1919, Egyptian women marched on the streets demanding the right to vote; they took off their veils, imported as a cultural tradition from the Ottoman Empire, not a religious edict. The veil then became a relic of the past.

Later, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel-Nasser said in a speech in the early 1960s that, when he sought reconciliation with members of the Muslim Brotherhood group for attempting to assassinate him in 1954, the Supreme Leader of the Brotherhood gave him a list of demands, including, “imposing hijab on Egyptian women.” The audience members didn’t understand what the word hijab meant. When Nasser explained that the Brotherhood wanted Egyptian women to wear a headscarf, the audience members burst out laughing.

As women who grew up in modern Muslim families with theologians, we are trying to reclaim our religion from the prongs of a strict interpretation. Like in our youth, we are witnessing attempts to make this strict ideology the one and only accepted face of Islam. We have seen what the resurgence of political Islam has done to our regions of origin and to our adoptive country.

As Americans, we believe in freedom of religion. But we need to clarify to those in universities, the media and discussion forums that in exploring the “hijab,” they are not exploring Islam, but rather the ideology of political Islam as practiced by the mullahs, or clerics, of Iran and Saudi Arabia, the Taliban in Afghanistan and the Islamic State.

In the name of “interfaith,” these well-intentioned Americans are getting duped by the agenda of Muslims who argue that a woman’s honor lies in her “chastity” and unwittingly pushing a platform to put a hijab on every woman.

Please do this instead: Do not wear a headscarf in “solidarity” with the ideology that most silences us, equating our bodies with “honor.” Stand with us instead with moral courage against the ideology of Islamism that demands we cover our hair.

Asra Q. Nomani is a former Wall Street Journal reporter and the author of “Standing Alone: An American Woman’s Struggle for the Soul of Islam.” She is a co-founder of the Muslim Reform Movement, a new initiative of Muslims and their allies, advocating peace, human rights and secular governance. She can be reached at [email protected]. Hala Arafa is a retired journalist who worked for 25 years at the International Bureau of Broadcasting as a program review analyst. She was a news editor at the Arabic branch of the Voice of America.

© 1996-2019 The Washington Post

[redshift-13]

https://twitter.com/76Crimes/status/1617752701995212800

[redshift-13]

https://twitter.com/AlinejadMasih/status/1587454278427213826

[eideard]

Malaysia investigates public dog petting

Malaysia investigates public dog petting

No one was struck down by lightning

Islamic authorities in Malaysia are conducting an investigation into a controversial “dog patting” event aimed at removing the stigma regarding the animal in the multi-ethnic Muslim-majority country.

The event, titled “I want to touch a dog” and held in a park on the outskirts of the capital Kuala Lumpur on Sunday, encouraged patting dogs, widely considered to…

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[muslimslobblog]

I was asked: "what is the difference between moderate and conservative islam?"

Before I give my definitions of the terms, I must make it clear that I believe labels are generalizations and should be taken that way. Also, others' definition of the terms may differ greatly or slightly from mine. And these labels describe definitions, perceptions and interpretations of Islam that its followers adhere to.

In my opinion, there is not a great difference between a Moderate and Conservative Muslim. But when most people talk about Moderate anything, they are talking about people that don't completely give into the Conservative definition of things. This could mean only for one or two things, or it could be a series of things.

I had never heard of the term "Moderate Muslim/Islam" before 9/11. And when I first heard it, it was being used to describe Liberal Islam as well as those that aren't extremists.

My definition of Moderate Islam comes from the opinion that Moderate Muslims pick and choose; Moderate Islam is just Conservative Islam Lite. A Moderate Muslim may not think a hijab is necessary, but may still believe it's okay to demand sex from your wife to the point of raping her. A Moderate Muslim may believe music is halal, but not during Maghrib time. Like a Conservative Muslim, a Moderate Muslim most likely believes that women cannot be Imams, dating is as haram as premarital sex, homosexuality is a sin, tattoos are haram etc.

This may seem a little dumb, but I like to describe Conservative Muslims as Muslims that can be convinced that anything and everything is haram. These are the Muslims (men and women) that blame victims of harassment and rape for "asking for it" because of the way they dress. These Muslims believe headscarf isn't an identity statement, it isn't optional, it is a minimal must.

Conservatism, all forms of Conservatism, function by limiting definitions of things. Where as my definition of what a "modest" way of dressing includes jeans and t-shirts, a Conservative Muslim's definition will define moderate clothing as traditional clothing from the Middle Eastern/Sub-continent Asian/North African regions. Conservative Islam has a problem with any other type of Islam that differs from their own version. These are the people that take their sects very seriously. They take their schools of thoughts very seriously.

Conservative Muslims hold on to traditions as if they were holy.

Conservative Muslims are Muslims that are one or two steps shy of becoming extremists. And by becoming extremists, I mean ideological, not by actions. Being extremists, but not militaristic.

Moderate Muslims are one or two steps shy of being Conservative Muslims.

Liberal Muslims, because of the stigmata attached to the term "Liberal", many times will call themselves "Moderate". But if you're a Muslim that believes homosexuality is not a transgression, that there can be female Imams, that a headscarf is not necessary at all, that tattoos and dogs are halal, then you're probably a Liberal Muslim.

[muslimslobblog]

Now let us inspect what Liberal Islam really denotes. One of the key hallmarks of liberalism is that individuals be accorded with absolute freedom of choice. In trying to apply this to Islam, its proponents call for a total reinterpretation of what Islam is and how an individual should practice it now. They call for a new exposition that breaks away from the system that is claimed to be too dogmatic, too literalistic. Then what it should be based on now, one may ask. The many answers to that question actually can be summarised as this- whatever that is desired by individuals in general, in the particular period of time and irrespective of what Allah has outlined in Quran or through the conducts of The Messenger. This is where the bemusement begins. While embracing Islam means Muslims must submit to Allah’s will and in so doing be freed from shackles of obedience to other human beings, the liberals somehow determinedly promote exactly the opposite- Islam, and by extension Allah’s ruling, must conform to what is currently desired by people. Putting it in another context, combining Islam and Liberal in a set of idea is a self-contradictory- an oxymoron. Rather unfortunately as we may see later, this is also where the amusement ends.

http://www.malaysia-today.net/mtcolumns/letterssurat/60587-liberal-muslims-have-to-liberate-themselves-not-islam?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter It annoys me to no end when people who don't know what "Liberal Islam" is define it and then ridicule it...and ultimately end up talking out of their ass. 1. The key hallmark of liberalism is the absolute freedom of choice: Yes. And it is also the hallmark of Islam. We are free to believe it or not. We are free to submit to Allah or not. We are free to fuck anything we want.

We are given free will and we can use it any which way we want.

But there are consequences for every action. So we have to choose wisely. In Islam and in liberalism. 2. Does Liberal Islam call for "total" reinterpretation: I'm going to assume here that when the author talks about "Liberal Islam" he's not talking about Quranists. So, NO, Liberal Islam does not call for a total reinterpretation. It calls for reforms and some reinterpretation. Because some of the shit Conservative Islam believe is utter bullshit.

3. Does Liberal Islam think interpretations of Islam should be "whatever that is desired by individuals"? Again the answer is NO. But it does say to ultimately respect the individual's interpretation of Islam whether it is in line with yours or not. That means if some Muslims think it is perfectly okay to be inclusive of the LGBT community...then there isn't shit you can do about it. And that's hard for Conservative Islam to do. Because they can't understand freedom. Their definition of freedom has a lot of restriction for others.

4. Does Liberal Islam's interpretation contradict the Quran and the Prophet? No, it just contradicts Conservative Islam's interpretation of the Quran and the actions of the Prophet. It also asks, when interpreting the Quran and the Prophet's Sunnah, to take into account the present real situations. For example, if a girl was not allowed to travel for more than three days with a mahram for her safety, does that really imply for the present. Back then, when someone left the village or city, no one back home knew what was happening to that person. Now we have phones, Skype and texting, so should something meant to keep girls safe be used to keep them locked up? 5. Does Liberal Islam mean you are bound to the will of Liberals and not Allah? Nope again. Liberal Islam says you will be judged by Allah and Allah alone, so fuck all these moron's Conservative Islamic interpretations, if you believe you are in the right, well do you boo and let these haters burn in hell for their bullshit Pseudo-Islam.

It's actually Conservative Islam that has you answering to Shariah courts, Imams and scholars, Liberal Islam is trying to set you free of these manmade contraptions.

That's what is meant by "liberal" and "liberalism"...you become freer.

[ponderbop]

"Does religious law allow a woman to be President? Yes!" -Houda al-Habash.

From the film's website: "Houda al-Habash, a conservative Muslim preacher, founded a Qur’an school for girls in Damascus 30 years ago. Every summer, her female students immerse themselves in a rigorous study of Islam. A surprising cultural shift is under way—women are claiming space within the mosque. Shot right before the uprising in Syria erupted, The Light in Her Eyes offers an extraordinary portrait of a leader who challenges the women of her community to live according to Islam, without giving up their dreams."

The Light In Her Eyes premieres on PBS's POV on July 19th.