Top 70 Mona Eltahawy Quotes

My family moved to Saudi Arabia from Glasgow when I was 15. Being a 15-year-old girl anywhere is difficult – all those hormones and everything – but being a 15-year-old girl in Saudi Arabia… it was like someone had turned the light off in my head. I could not get a grasp on why women were treated like this.

When we complain to Egypt’s Western allies about whichever autocrat is in power, we are asked, ‘But who is the alternative?’ It is a question designed to frustrate.

My feminism does not demand that a woman have an equal opportunity to torture, alongside men. Torture is no less wrong because a woman, not a man, carries it out.

Bashar al-Assad’s henchmen stomped on the hands of famed Syrian cartoonist Ali Farzat. Our dictators tailor wounds to suit their victims’ occupations.

Feminism, as I see it, is not about counting women in key jobs.

I joke that one of the rare times Egyptians identify as African is when the national soccer squad is playing in the African Cup of Nations – and preferably winning it.

I’m a survivor. I’m a messenger.

Anti-U.S. sentiment has been born out of many grievances – support and weapons for such dictators as Mubarak, unquestionable support for Israel in its occupation of Palestine, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and drone attacks in Pakistan and Yemen that kill more civilians than intended targets.

What is satire if not a marriage of civil disobedience to a laugh track, a potent brew of derision and lack of respect that acts as a nettle sting on the thin skin of the humourless?

When Tunisians overthrew Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in 29 days and Egyptians Hosni Mubarak in 18 days, it was an appropriate rebuke to dictators and Bin Laden.

As an Egyptian, I was glad to see the film ‘Black Panther’ embrace my country with its inclusion of the Ancient Egyptian goddess Bast as the deity of Wakandans. But considering the anti-black racism against the Nubian indigenous community and visitors in my country, I knew Egypt would not return the love.

I grew up looking at my parents as equals.

While the 2011 revolution did not remove the regime, it has shortened the seemingly endless patience that many Egyptians once had for military rule.

We left Egypt when I was seven, and we didn’t return until I was 21. My teen years were divided between the United Kingdom and Saudi Arabia. Up until we left the U.K., it was like your regular teenage years. The one thing I remember is that I couldn’t date. That was one thing my parents made very clear.

As a feminist of Egyptian and Muslim descent, my life’s work has been informed by the belief that religion and culture must never be used to justify the subjugation of women.

Saudi Arabia isn’t just a conservative country with different values we shouldn’t judge. It is a modern Gilead.

It was precisely my love of the First Amendment that made me join sidewalk activists in 2010 to support an Islamic community center’s right to open in Lower Manhattan.

I wore the hijab – a form of dress that comprises a head scarf and usually also clothing that covers the whole body except for the face and hands – for nine years. Put more honestly, I wore the hijab for nine years and spent eight of them trying to take it off.

Muslim views are not a monolithic blob.

That morning of 11 September 2001, as we watched the twin towers crumble on live television, America and I would develop a bond that has proven deeper and more enduring – for better or worse, through sickness and health – than the one I had with my now ex-husband.

As a U.S. citizen, I cherish the First Amendment.

It’s one thing to be groped and harassed by passers-by, but when the state gropes you, it gives a green light that you are fair game.

President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, like his most recent predecessors Mohamed Morsi and Hosni Mubarak, rarely mention the Sinai Peninsula other than to celebrate its liberation from Israeli occupation in 1982.

I can write about my culture and religion because I am a product of both. Even when I’m accused of giving ammunition to the Islamophobic right, in the struggle between ‘community’ and ‘women,’ I always choose the women.

Good riddance, Bin Laden – an unwelcome squatter in the house of my religion who tore down all the walls and was prepared to throw them on a fire to keep himself warm.

I’m no fan of Sarkozy, but I support a ban on face veils because they erase women from society and are promoted by an ultra-conservative ideology that equates piety with the disappearance of women.

My birth at the end of July 1967 makes me a child of the naksa, or setback, as the Arab defeat during the June 1967 war with Israel is euphemistically known in Arabic.

I am horrified by the moral amnesia that develops when a dictator dies.

I was born in Egypt, and my family moved to London when I was seven. I grew up mostly in Clapham, where I also went to school after a brief stint in Whitechapel.

The Right is incredibly deft at getting earnest about all the wrong things.

I was 15 when my family moved to Jidda from Britain in 1982. Living in Saudi Arabia was such a shock to my system that I like to say I was traumatized into feminism.

As a woman in Saudi Arabia, you have one of two options. You either lose your mind – which at first happened to me because I fell into a deep depression – or you become a feminist.

As Muslim women, we’re not waiting for the president of the United States to open doors for us or to fight our fights.

For years, successive Arab dictators have tried to keep discontent at bay by distracting people with the Israeli-Arab conflict.

To this day I have no idea what dissident professor or librarian placed feminist texts on the bookshelves at the university library in Jeddah, but I found them there. They filled me with terror. I understood they were pulling at a thread that would unravel everything.

In Saudi Arabia – recognized as one of the worst violators of women’s rights – women outnumber men on university campuses and yet are treated like minors who need a male guardian’s permission to do the most basic things.

Until the Saudi authorities who administer the holy sites take concrete steps to protect female pilgrims, we must protect each other. Men must stop assaulting us, yes. But women the world over, regardless of faith, know that until that happens, we are each other’s keepers.

It is the harassers and assaulters who make us ‘look bad,’ not the women who have every right to expose crimes against them.

To say that there is patriarchy in Arab culture is not denying women agency.

As an Egyptian-American, I want both sides of that hyphen to enjoy the forms of freedom guaranteed by the First Amendment, as I want both sides of that hyphen to move beyond the deceptive simplicity of the question, ‘Why do they hate us?’

My brother, a cardiologist, was among thousands of Muslims visited by the FBI in November 2001 and forced to submit to special registration fingerprinting, his photo and information forever in Homeland Security’s files.

My parents’ generation grew up high on the Arab nationalism that Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser brandished in the 1950s.

We must make sure #MeToo breaks the race, class, gender, and faith lines that make it so hard for marginalized people to be heard.

Anti-black racism is not just an Egyptian problem. It exists in many parts of the Arab world.

The military belongs in its barracks, not our ballot boxes.

In the U.K., my mother had been the breadwinner. I’d seen my parents side by side. In Saudi Arabia, my mother was basically rendered disabled. She was unable to drive, dependent on my dad for everything. The religious zealotry was so suffocating.

Women of color have always been kind of boxed in by the idea that the more you talk about the misogyny of your own community, the more you make that community look bad.

As a Muslim woman, I’m all too familiar with the media shorthand for ‘Muslim’ and ‘woman’ equaling Covered in Black Muslim Woman. She’s seen, never heard. Visible only in her invisibility under that black burka, niqab, chador, etc.

Too many on the Left are earnest about nothing at all, sadly. They’ve been rendered spineless by snarkiness – not least on Twitter.

Morality crusades unite military regimes and religious zealots alike.

The religious fundamentalists of the Republican party are a mirror image of the religious fundamentalists of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood.

The first time I wore a head scarf, I was 16. I looked and felt like a nun. I missed the wind in my hair. For me, it was not a comfortable thing to wear.

When Mubarak does die, he will be remembered as the most bland of those military men turned dictators: compare him with Gamal Abdel-Nasser and Anwar Sadat. The legacies most associated with him are a network of bridges and highways and ‘stability.’

When the only two sides fighting are conservative – even if one of them is just conservative in appearance – then everyone loses. And women don’t just lose; they’re also used as cheap ammunition.

I abhor the rightwing Muslim ideology behind the veils, but I equally abhor the political rightwing xenophobes of Europe.

To write about the hijab is to step into a minefield. Even among those who share my cultural and faith background, opinions veer from those who despise it as a symbol of backwardness to those for whom religion begins and ends with that piece of cloth.