Being a teenager isn't easy. All Sara wants to do is experiment with make-up and hang out with friends. It doesn't help when you have a super-strict Egyptian dad who tells you that everything is "e;haram"e; a.k.a. forbidden. But when her family move to the Arabian Gulf, it feels like every door is being closed on Sara's future. Can Sara find her voice again? Will she ever be free?

Until now the bulk of the literature about the veil has been written by outsiders who do not themselves veil. This literature often assumes a condescending tone about veiled women, assuming that they are making uninformed decisions choices about veiling makes them subservient to a patriarchal culture and religion. “Rethinking Muslim Women and the Veil” offers an alternative viewpoint, based on the thoughts and experiences of Muslim women themselves. This is the first time a clear and concise book-length argument has been made for the compatibility between veiling and modernity. Katherine Bullock uncovers positive aspects of the veil that are frequently not perceived by outsiders. “Rethinking Muslim Women and the Veil” looks at the colonial roots of the negative Western stereotype of the veil. It presents interviews with Muslim women to discover their thoughts and experiences with the veil in Canada. The book also offers a positive theory of veiling. The author argues that in consumer capitalist cultures, women can find wearing the veil a liberation from the stifling beauty game that promotes unsafe and unhealthy ideal body images for women. This book also includes an extensive bibliography on topics related to Muslim women and the veil.

This book compares how British and Spanish media have covered the French ban on hijab wearing in public schools. Using interdisciplinary approaches ranging from social psychology, semiology, cognitive linguistics and sociology, it seeks to explain how the hijab is interpreted as a sign by the mainstream culture, and hijab-wearing Muslim sub-culture. Based on an analysis of 108 articles published in the national newspaper from each context, this comparative study operates on two levels: a micro-level analysis of within-culture variations between mainstream culture and the hijab-wearing women; and a macro-level analysis of the cross-cultural variation between the British context and the Spanish one. The result is a profound insight into how each discourse reveals the different level of social integration of hijab-wearing women in these two different contexts. The Analysis methodology combines between Critical Discourse Analysis CDA, Conceptual Metaphor Theory CMT, and Cognitive Linguistics CL. The book introduces a novel analysis methodology for social and linguistic sciences. It is the Cognitive Critical Discourse Analysis methodology CCDA.

Why are liberal politicians banning our hijabs and niqabs? Under the presidency of Emmanuel Macron, France had the audacity to ban Muslim women and girls under the age of 18 from wearing the hijab in public. What was the response from the liberal progressive world? Shameful silence. So as Muslim women, how should we react to this attack on our Islamic dress code? Why do non-Muslims politicians and governments hate our hijab? How can Muslims individually and collectively support the challenges sisters are facing? These are the questions I will be tackling in Hands off our Hijab, and I believe we need to put liberal hypocrisy on trial. I sincerely want to help Muslimahs make sense of the challenging situation and take back control of the narrative but not on their own terms: on Allah's terms. Inshallah, I pray this book will help you make sense of the world right now so you can move forward confident and comfortable in your hijab. It may seem like our enemies have the upper hand, but we have Allah on our side: the creator of the universe. To read Farhat Amin's other books, please visit www.smartmuslima.com. Review Sister Farhat Amin is in the front line of many women’s issues of the day. She is also a student of knowledge and a researcher of history and Islamic rulings. I have read her material and listened to her podcasts. All this is to say that Sister Farhat is uniquely positioned to know and to respond to these issues in the most appropriate manner as a person of wisdom that is well-grounded in our religious tradition. Her contributions in this area are very important and urge everyone to purchase the book and listen to her work. Thank you Sister Farhat for all your work in helping us understand and navigate a path forward to helping our youth and young adults. Azmat Mukhtar, Ilmtree.org

A probing study of the veil's recent return—from one of the world's foremost authorities on Muslim women—that reaches surprising conclusions about contemporary Islam's place in the West todayIn Cairo in the 1940s, Leila Ahmed was raised by a generation of women who never dressed in the veils and headscarves their mothers and grandmothers had worn. To them, these coverings seemed irrelevant to both modern life and Islamic piety. Today, however, the majority of Muslim women throughout the Islamic world again wear the veil. Why, Ahmed asks, did this change take root so swiftly, and what does this shift mean for women, Islam, and the West?When she began her study, Ahmed assumed that the veil's return indicated a backward step for Muslim women worldwide. What she discovered, however, in the stories of British colonial officials, young Muslim feminists, Arab nationalists, pious Islamic daughters, American Muslim immigrants, violent jihadists, and peaceful Islamic activists, confounded her expectations. Ahmed observed that Islamism, with its commitments to activism in the service of the poor and in pursuit of social justice, is the strain of Islam most easily and naturally merging with western democracies' own tradition of activism in the cause of justice and social change. It is often Islamists, even more than secular Muslims, who are at the forefront of such contemporary activist struggles as civil rights and women's rights. Ahmed's surprising conclusions represent a near reversal of her thinking on this topic.Richly insightful, intricately drawn, and passionately argued, this absorbing story of the veil's resurgence, from Egypt through Saudi Arabia and into the West, suggests a dramatically new portrait of contemporary Islam.