In this week’s column writer Bina Shah reflects on the public execution of Najiba, a 22 year-old Afghan woman who was killed for allegedly having an affair with a Taliban commander. Shah draws parallels between Najiba’s story and that of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina.
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Iranian journalist Nazila Fathi has been living in exile since 2009. She sat down with Sampsonia Way to talk about having to leave her country, her work as a journalist, the challenges of reporting in exile, and her current project, a memoir.
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Bina Shah discusses the problem of acid attacks against women in Pakistan. The recent suicide of Fakhra Yunus, an acid attack survivor, has led to an open discussion of the crime in Pakistan, and many hope that Fakhra will be avenged.
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In this interview writer Easterine Kire discusses the psychological effects of the occupation of her native Nagaland (India), the important (and endangered) art of spoken word, and the power of folklore to preserve peace.
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At seventy-nine years old, acclaimed writer and long-time activist Nawal El Saadawi sees the revolution in Egypt as a chance for women to declare their rights.
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Earlier this year, ICORN’s Stavanger City of Refuge in Norway opened its doors to Norwan, a 27 year-old Afghan poet and a member of the Afghan Women’s Writing Project. Read Norwan’s poem, “Sack of Winds”.
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Q&A with writer and activist Taslima Nasrin, who has lived in exile since the early ’90s. Here, she speaks about women’s rights in relation to Islamic law. Nasrin has faced two fatwas in India and three in her home country, Bangladesh
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The Afghan Women’s Writing Project (AWWP) — a series of online writer’s workshops run remotely by women writers based in America — allows Afghan women a forum to express and record their experiences in poems, essays and commentary without “the filter of their men and media.”
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