Marjane Satrapi?s graphic memoir Persepolis made waves in Europe. The English translations seem well received in USA too:

Here is the Guardian profile
The Time story
And the NYT review.

Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran is another memoir out of Iran that sounds interesting. Atlantic Monthly has an interview with Nafisi here. The Guardian story is also nice.

'The Storyteller's Daughter' by Saira Shah got reviewed in NYT recently and does sound like something I would like to lay my hands on (via Oxblog). I dont think there has been an insider's perspective (well, it is not quite that, but at least she has an Afghan ancestry) on Afghanistan in English language for quite some time. A very long time back, I read Syeed Mujtaba Ali's travelogue of Afghanistan in Bengali (I also talked about it here). Ali was in Kabul in the thirties right before a coup, during a time when coups in Afghanistan used to be family affairs. This was in the thirties, set approximate around the same time as Byron's celebrated travel history Road to Oxiana. It is extremely well written, but unfortunately not available in English.

Anyway, I don't think these women are representative of either the education or the freedom that is available to most Muslim women in Middle Eastern or Central Asian countries. They mostly come from the educated, city-based upper middle class families that have always been more Westernized, more liberal than the traditionalist rural folks in Asia. But they do go a long way towards demolishing the image of Muslim women that the Mullahs have been trying so hard to project.