exploring muslim identities in europe & north america

BELGİN AKALTAN - belgin.akaltan@hdn.com.tr The new trend in Istanbul is throwing headscarf donning parties for young girls, as we have learned from a reader’s letter to a conservative daily. Is this some kind of a Turkish touch to the traditions that otherwise represent very little fun and offer very little to the modern woman? It is like the Muslim version of the Jewish coming of age ritual for girls, the Bat Mitzvah. I would not have known about it if columnist Fatma Barbarasoğlu had not written about it. I am quoting from her column dated Oct. 24, 2014, from daily Yeni Şafak. This is very new information for all of us, as I and my colleagues in the office had never heard of it before. Even the writer had not heard of it before.   The news comes from a letter from a reader, who is a career woman. She wrote that headscarf-donning ceremonies were being held in large wedding halls for young girls in rich, conservative neighborhoods of Istanbul. She wrote: “I live in a conse...

American journalist  Liz Smith once said very aptly that gossip is just news in a red satin dress. Although there is indeed an intimate relationship between rumour and news, it is important to note that rumour can often be a form of fiction that dones the cloak of veracity. Over the past couple of weeks a story has been featured in social media and email inboxes about a burqa-clad woman chastising a supermarket cashier for supporting Western bombing of Iraq. The most recent posting that came to my attention reached my facebook timeline from a user based in Israel and situated the alleged incident in a small Canadian town. The story sounded suspicious as, since the eviction of the Iraqi army from Kuwait in the first Iraq war, Canada has not been involved in military operations in Iraq and I therefore did some investigation only to find that the story must have been circulating in the internet since as early as 2003,  during the early days of the second Iraq war. This o...

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