Always hold your head high when walking in the sea of hostility, I say to my grandson Djohar "Joe" Pierrot. Thanks grandma, the six-foot-tall, honey-colored young man says as he gently kissed my forehead. With a sigh, he pulled away from me. Tugging at his collar, he straps on his backpack and gets ready to leave. Enjoy your classes at U of T, I shout to him...
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is thought of by many as a forbidden place. To the billion plus men and women around the planet Earth who call themselves Muslims, Saudi Arabia is the Heartland of Islam. To Western feminists, Saudi Arabia is a backwards land and a veritable prison for the female sex. To the African, Filipino and Indian workers who come to Saudi A...
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is a mysterious nation, and it is shrouded in tradition and mystery. Even by Islamic standards, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is quite strict. It's known as the place ruled by strict Sharia Law, where women cannot drive, and people get their hands cut off for stealing. According to the West, that's the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in a v...
Holding hands while walking through the Saint Laurent Mall in the east end of the City of Ottawa, Ontario, my boo Tyrone Ferguson and I got a lot of stares. Oh, well. Let the haters stare. Yes, we're an interracial couple, an Arab woman with a black man. Guess what? We're of different hues and we're happy together and the world isn't ending. My name is Amina...
A lot of people have all kinds of misleading and misconstrued notions in their heads when they think of life inside the Kingdom. Saudi Arabia has long fascinated outsiders, from western feminists who ponder the fate of women inside this male-dominated nation to foreign oil prospectors, adventurers and rogues of all sorts. The Kingdom attracts its share of od...
My birth name is Bethany Parker, but I recently changed it to Anisah Amal to Anwar reflect a change in my identity. I am an English-born Caucasian woman and a former atheist and former feminist who converted to Islam. It shocked a lot of my friends and family members, especially since for many years I raged against the very idea of organized religion. Now I...
Exiled from my people, stuck living far from everything I've ever known, I am finally forced to start living. I thank the Most High for that, at least, for the trials and tribulations that I've endured have made me stronger, and shown me the way. Home is wherever the head is, I say. If I were still living in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, I would have been beh...
My name is Abdul Mohammed Akbar. I am a young man living in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. I was born into a wealthy family, though I am by no means Arabic royalty. My family was fortunate enough to send me to study overseas. I hold a bachelor's degree in sociology from Emerson College in the City of Boston, Massachusetts, and an MBA from Ottawa University in...
Once upon a time in the City of Khobar, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, there was a young woman named Afaf Ibrahim. Six feet tall and quite curvy, with almond-shaped golden brown eyes, dark bronze skin and long black hair ( which she always tucked away under her Hijab out of modesty ), Afaf was the apple of her elderly father Mahmoud Ibrahim's eye. Still, when time...
The first time Mouna Souleymane set foot in the City of Ottawa, Ontario, the young Saudi Arabian woman hated it. Boring, she thought. Born in the City of Riyadh, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, to a Saudi Arabian father and a half-Lebanese, half-Eritrean mother, she grew up the very definition of wealthy and powerful. Her father, Qasim Souleymane owned Souleymane &...