Middle East, Women | featured news

The memoir of 15-year-old Pakistani student Malala Yousafzai will be published this fall, publisher Weidenfeld & Nicolson announced Wednesday. The deal is reportedly worth about $3 million. Titled "I Am Malala," the book will tell the story of the young advocate for women's education who was shot in the face at point-blank range by Taliban gunmen on Oct. 9 in Pakistan’s Swat Valley.

"Listen to my story! Listen to my pain and suffering!" Afghanistan's first female rapper Sosan Firooz pleads into her microphone. With her first rap song, the outspoken 23-year-old singer is making history in her homeland where society frowns on women who take the stage. She is already shunned by some of her relatives.

A leading women's rights activist in Saudi Arabia writes an open letter to King Abdullah, urging him to lift a ban on women drivers.

President Hamid Karzai has pardoned a jailed rape victim, but only after she agreed to marry the man she says raped her. The 19-year-old woman, whose name is Gulnaz, was one of the subjects of a documentary recently produced by the European Union, highlighting the phenomenon of rape victims being imprisoned for the "moral crime" of having sex outside marriage, even against their will.

Saudi Arabia will allow women to stand for election and vote, the king announced on Sunday, in a significant policy shift in the conservative Islamic kingdom.

Afghanistan has the dubious distinction of being named the world's most dangerous country for women by an international poll of 213 gender experts from five continents.

A widow, accused of being pregnant, was executed by the Taliban in western Afghanistan, a provincial governor's spokesman said Monday.

For the shy Afghan girl who sat quietly in a detention center with a pale blue headscarf, teenage rebellion had come at a heavy price: seven years in prison.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said he would nominate three women for his new Cabinet, which could mean the first female Iranian ministers in over 30 years.