Born in Ukraine, Roxelana was taken as a by the Crimean Tartars and subsequently was shuttled to Istanbul where she was selected to become a member of Suleyman the Magnificent’s harem.
Renamed Hurrem, she soon ascended to become a favorite of Suleyman’s but also became victim to the jealousies of the other concubines, including the mother of the Crown Prince. Both were exiled and the Crown Prince was later strangled to death, some say at the instigation of Roxelana.
Roxelana’s influence on Suleyman became legendary and their affection was the prolific subject of Western artwork. She bore Suleyman five children and, in an unprecedented move, was elevated from slave to free wife. There is also evidence that Roxelana provided Suleyman with astute political advice. For example, she was a correspondent of King Sigismund II August of Poland, like her daughter Mihrimah would later be. During her lifetime, the Ottoman Empire experienced peaceful relations with Poland, no doubt partially due to Roxelana’s soothing hand on affairs. Some historians also believed that she may have intervened with Suleyman to control Crimean Tartar slave-trading in her native land—something, she doubtlessly, felt a deep tie with.
In addition to politics, Roxelana was a notable philanthropist who was perhaps the first woman to participate in notable building projects. She founded a number of mosques, dervish lodges, madrasas, a woman’s hospital near the slave market, and public bathhouses to serve worshippers close to the Aya Sofya. In 1552, she established a soup kitchen for the impoverished in Jerusalem.
Her son, Selim, became Sultan after the death of Suleyman the Magnificent and her daughter Mihrimah continued her role as a powerful woman of the harem whose word held considerable political clout.
The influence Roxelana continues on to the present day. A number of novels have been written about her. In 2007, Muslims in the Ukrainian town of Mariupol, opened a mosque in her honor.
Rabia Zargarpur is an Emirati designer who specializes in fashion for modern Muslim women. Her clothing line—Rabia Z—is “universal modest chic” and “conservative couture.”
Her designs are accessible to Muslim women wearing the hijab, yet they are far from being an exclusively Arab or Islamic. “Conservative couture is not necessarily for women who wear the hijab,” she explained. “Modern yet modest applies to all my labels.”
In 2008, Zargarpur won the British Council’s International Young Fashion Entrepreneur of the Year Award for the Mediterranean region. In 2009, her designs hit the runway of London Fashion Week.
Born in Marrakech, Morocco, in 1956, Lalla Essaydi was nearly 40 when she studied painting in Paris. She received her bachelors from Tufts University in 1999, and a Maters of Fine Arts from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, both in Boston. Between 2005 and 2009, Essaydi had 10 solo exhibits in the United States, Kuwait, Morocco, London and the Netherlands.
Essaydi uses photography as a political statement for contemporary Muslim women’s empowerment. Essaydi responds to 19th Century European and American painters who had depicted women in the Middle East as submissive, lazy and exotic. Essaydi re-stages famous paintings, and portrays women with more contemporary body language. All of her models are Arab women.
An Oxford graduate who grew up in North London, Shelina Zahra Janmohamed is a writer with many credits to her name, particularly as the author of Love in a Headscarf a memoir that concerns her life as a Muslim woman in England. Janmohamed has also written articles for British publications like The Times, The Guardian, The National, The Muslim News, and Emel Magazine. Her articles tend to focus on, like her other writing, Islam and current affairs, particularly Muslim women in the West.
Janmohamed is also behind Spirit21, an award-winning online blog where she explores the relationship between Muslim men, women, culture, and society.
Love in a Headscarf provides a humorous take on growing up a Muslim woman in England, including an amusing account of the process of proposals. She wrote the book in response to the numerous works concerning dejected Muslim women and her work crosses genres of memoir and “chick lit” to create a frothy but ultimately relevant work. Through her work, Janmohamed wishes to nudge Islamic culture away from the stigma that has coalesced around it, while offering insight into the daily lives of Muslim women in England.
Janmohamed was named one of the 100 most influential women in the United Kingdom.
Ayse Önal is a Turkish reporter who has dedicated herself to reporting on Turkish politics, culture, organized crime, and conflicts in the Middle East. She is the author of two books, winner of fourteen Turkish National Press Awards and the International Women’s Media Foundation Courage in Journalism Award.
While reporting on the Gulf War, she was arrested and detained in Iraq, threatened by Islamic fundamentalists and put on the revolutionary left’s death list. In 1994, Önal was shot and wounded by the Turkish mob because of articles she had written that linked the government to the mob. In response to this, Önal was forced to go into hiding for three months.
In 1995, Önal was targeted by a fundamentalist publication because of a report she wrote on peace in the Middle East. The following year, she was warned by the government censorship agency about her television interviews on the Kurdish conflict. In recent years, Önal has been unable to find full-time employment because of the opposition to her work.
Additionally, Önal’s work Honour Killing: Stories of Men Who Killed revolutionized the viewpoint the Turkish media takes on honor killings. The book stemmed from a TV special Önal worked on. While coverage tended to take the side of the killers and women’s rights groups demonized the matter entirely, Önal approached the matter from both ends of the spectrum, with an open ear for the stories of the perpetrators. In response to her work, she was flooded with phone calls from both men and women who were facing related dilemmas.
Former First Lady of Tunisia, Leila Ben Ali is also an active humanitarian who chaired Arab Women Organisation and was the head of the Basma Association for the Promotion of the Disabled Employment.
Ben Ali was not born into a position of privilege. She grew up among ten brothers and sisters in an impoverished neighborhood in Tunis and worked as a hairdresser before meeting Zine El Abidine Ben Ali.
Ben Ali seeks to reinforce the status of women in Tunisia and actively campaigned for her husband’s 5th reelection to a 5 year term to the Tunisian presidency.
During her tenure as chairwoman of the Arab Women Organisation ,Tunisia boosted Arab joint action in the legislative and political areas, to further enhance women’s status by grounding its action in a forward-looking and modernist vision that heeds the specifics of the Arab-Islamic identity and be open onto Humanity’s universal gains.
Although Ben Ali believes great strides have been made in improving the status of Tunisian women, she still believes that “More efforts are still needed to change attitudes and behaviours but the political will to promote them does exist.”
The Arab Women’s Organization, which Ben Ali chairs, brings together fifteen first ladies under the aegis of the Arab League and is now undergoing the prepator processes for a meeting in Tunis on “Promoting Arab Women in the Sustainable Development Process” in October 2010.
The AWO, according to Ben Ali, has also called for an observatory of social and political legislation on women’s condition and a convention on elimination of all forms of discrimination against them, in association with the Arab League and the United Nations.
Bina Bektiati, an Indonesian journalist, began reporting about politics for the independent newsweekly Tempo in 1991. When in 1994 the magazine was banned and its license revoked by the Suharto regime and government-controlled publication replaced Tempo, Bektiati refused to write for it. Instead, she challenged the government’s actions in the courts and helped found the Alliance of Independent Journalists, Indonesia’s only independent journalists association. Bektiati is a winner of the International Women’s Media Foundation Courage in Journalism Award. Unable to find work in Indonesia like many of her fellow journalists, Bekiati in 1995, moved to Australia. However, she returned to Jakarta in 1996 and helped found the Institute for the Study of Free Flow of Information, researching and writing books on current affairs. Bektiati continued writing about politics–often under a nom de plume–and covered the protests leading up to the fall of Suharto and installation of President Habibie in 1998. The new government instituted modest reforms and in late 1998, Tempo was re-established and Bektiati accordingly returned to her position with the magazine and is now an editor at the publication.
Bektiati co-edited Surat dari Rantau (Letters from Foreign Lands, 2015, Kreasi Mitramedia Utama), a book about the challenging experiences, lives, and stories of overseas Indonesians. Bina Bektiati is a regular contributor at The Jakarta Post, and a member of the Specialty Coffee Association of Indonesia (SCAI).
Amal Abbas is the only female editor-in-chief in the nation of Sudan and acts in the capacity for the Khartoum-based independent daily Al Raj al Akher. In response to her reporting about misappropriation of funds, Abbas was sent to prison and fined $6,000, but was later released.
In 2001, Abbas won the International Women’s Media Foundation Courage in Journalism Award.
Abbas directs her reporting primarily towards the fiscal behavior of Sudanese officials. In addition to Abbas’s imprisonment, Al Raj al Akher has faced suspension frequently by the government’s National Press Council.
A Khartoum court jailed Abbas, and Ibrahim Hassan, a reporter for the paper, for three months for failing to pay fines in a libel suit. The pair had been found guilty of libeling Khartoum governor Majzoub Khalifa in a 2000 article, accusing him of corruption and nepotism. They were ordered to pay fines of 15 million pounds (US$5,900) apiece and Al Rai al Akher was also hit with a 1 billion pound fine (US$390,000), allegedly the largest fine ever imposed in a libel suit in Sudan.
