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Jailed activist writer Sarah Shourd filed this story in July, shortly before she was seized by Iranian border forces during a hiking trip in Iraqi Kurdistan. With the assistance of her mother, who reached out to Women's eNews, we are able to post the piece with staff updates: A year ago, this country was on the brink of passing a revision of the personal status law that some feared would be the most devastating blow to women's rights in Syrian modern history.

A Canadian author will become the first Muslim-born woman to lead a mixed-gender British congregation through Friday prayers tomorrow in a highly controversial move that will attempt to spark a debate about the role of female leadership within Islam. Raheel Raza, a rights activist and Toronto-based author, has been asked to lead prayers and deliver the khutbah at a small prayer session in Oxford. She has been invited by Dr Taj Hargey, a self-described imam who preaches an ultra-liberal interpretation of Islam which includes, among other things, that men and women should be allowed to pray together and that female imams should lead mixed congregations in prayer.

Armed only with the Camera, Iranian feminist and filmmaker, Mahboubeh Abbasgholizadeh, has documented the lives of women enmeshed in the country’s political issues such as the legitimacy of Almadinejad’s regime, women and the family law and stoning on grounds of adultery. She was once more arrested last 20 December 2009 while on her way to the funeral of Ayatollah Montazeri.

On a side street off Mogadishu's Wadnaha Road frontline a young officer is explaining the unwritten rules of the city's intractable civil war as his men exchange fire with an unseen enemy. The fighters shooting at him are from the Hizb al-Islam, he explains. He knows this because they fight longer than al-Shabab, the other main Islamist group besieging Somalia's tiny government-held enclave, but also because they told him. "We have friends there. They tell us before they leave their base that they are going to attack. When they want to fire mortars they tells us so we can take cover." If the conflict that has turned Mogadishu into a virtual no-go zone for 19 years occasionally resembles a grim farce, there is nothing farcical about the scene around us.