{"id":129586,"date":"2025-09-11T09:22:05","date_gmt":"2025-09-11T09:22:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/129586\/"},"modified":"2025-09-11T09:22:05","modified_gmt":"2025-09-11T09:22:05","slug":"the-muslim-women-who-defied-tradition-and-changed-lives-with-exercise","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/129586\/","title":{"rendered":"The Muslim women who defied tradition and changed lives with exercise"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">One of the fitness class participants, Habiba &#8211; not her real name &#8211; told the BBC she wanted to exercise, even though her husband told her not to. <\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">The 68-year-old exercises to help ease the pain of her arthritis, and has not stopped despite saying her husband&#8217;s priority was that she looks after him, the house and the children.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;My husband says &#8216;you don&#8217;t need to do this&#8217;,&#8221; she said.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;I make sure I cook, clean and everything is done in the house before I leave, so he can&#8217;t complain when I&#8217;m not there.&#8221; <\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Also struggling with joint pain, Habiba visited the centre in secret having heard about the sessions, wanting to learn how to swim in her late 60s despite never stepping foot in a pool before.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Habiba recalls there being a cultural &#8220;taboo&#8221; attached to women of a certain age in their community exercising.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">She wants to stay active and although her husband doesn&#8217;t agree, she said: &#8220;I&#8217;m lucky my son is supportive and backs me.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"One of the fitness class participants, Habiba &#8211; not her real name &#8211; told the BBC she wanted&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":129587,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[46],"tags":[6647,102,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-129586","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-fitness","8":"tag-fitness","9":"tag-health","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129586","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=129586"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129586\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/129587"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=129586"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=129586"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=129586"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}