Shahnaz Taplin-Chinoy

"Democratic elections did not result in democratic actors who upheld women's rights," said Lina Abou-Habib, President of The Association for Women Rights in Development (AWID), encapsulating the Arab revolutions at the opening plenary of their 2012 conference. Two thousand women development activists participated in the Istanbul conference of AWID. The...

Currently checking out interesting NGOs empowering Muslim women in my home country. The world's largest democracy remains a paradox. Take Lucknow, the capitol of the largest state in the world, Uttar Pradesh, teeming with 200 million people. This state is part of the northern Indian swathe derisively referred to as...

9/11 killed 3,497 people, unalterably impacting their families. It created a paradigm shift in the world. It put terrorism on the world map -- whether one lives in Karachi, Mumbai, London or New York.

Since 9/11, Afghanistan and Pakistan have become dominated by war, with precarious futures at best. Ahmed...

What do Congressman Peter King, Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich have in common with British Prime Minister David Cameron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and President Nicolas Sarkozy of France?

Playing with Islamophobia!

In 2005, when David Cameron led the Tory Party, he was a moderate on immigration. But...

The Syria I visited with my husband five years ago was a politically complicated place, where the streets were tamped down. As tourists, we were a bit suspect, subjected to a two-hour baggage search at 2 a.m. as we drove across the immigration border.

Today Syria -- with escalating repression...

Pakistan -- the Road to Abbottabad

"So what did they know?" I asked a dear Pakistani friend in Washington DC, who a few years ago had been able to meet with senior Taliban officials in Karachi easily, if he also knew about Osama living in Abbottabad or knew somebody who...

"Bare Chests vs. Bullets," says Tawakul Karman, a Yemeni journalist and activist.

Last week, a friend from Jeddah emailed me about one of her heroines: Tawakul Karman, a firebrand journalist, founder and chair of Women Journalists Without Chains. Karman is an activist and a leader on the front...

9/11/01 -- a terrorist attack by al Qaeda kills 3,000 people in New York. Families reel from the loss of loved ones, trying to make sense of this senseless tragedy. 9/11 reshaped the world, resculpting our national and global psyches. But it's not finished. Nine years later, people heatedly contest...

Last Saturday afternoon, some Jewish friends who are fans of the Muslim Women's Fund came for tea at our home. They were eager to discuss the front page news story in the NYT on the Mosque at Ground Zero which has elicited high intensity emotions, passions and political machinations.

The...