I do not subscribe to a feminism that demands perfection or super heroic nobility of women. But I do insist that putting women at the service of patriarchy is no victory for us.
This ISIS group, they attack Muslims more than they attack anyone else.
I defend a woman’s right to cover her hair if she chooses, but the face is central to human interaction, and so the ideologues who promote its covering are simply misogynists.
We are fighting misogynists in every culture. My solution is to listen to the women in each community and amplify their voices.
I detest the niqab and the burka for their erasure of women and for dangerously equating piety with that disappearance – the less of you I can see, the closer you must be to God.
A source of embarrassment for Libyans, Gadhafi has never been a joke: disappearances, a police state, zero freedom of expression, and poverty for at least a third of the population of country tremendously wealthy thanks to oil.
I will never ally with Islamophobes and racists. But in the choice between ‘community’ and Muslim women, I will always choose my sisters.
When I first read Margaret Atwood’s novel ‘The Handmaid’s Tale,’ it was Saudi Arabia as I knew it that came to mind, not a dystopian future United States as in the new television adaptation.
In 1993, I joined Reuters as a correspondent in its Cairo bureau.
Mubarak was adept, as were many other U.S.-backed dictators, at playing the sane middle to the ‘lunatics with beards’ he so often used as bogeymen to guarantee the support of foreign allies.
Too many have rushed in to explain the Arab world to itself.
The fight against racism must be seen as a revolutionary one.
I chose to wear the hijab at age 16, soon after my family moved from Britain to Saudi Arabia.
Banning hate speech doesn’t end racism or antisemitism. Social pressure does that. It becomes socially unacceptable.
Pages: 1 2
