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" 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. "

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" Some forms of veil are justified by the idea that you're not tempting men. Well how about men just behaving and keeping their hands to yourselves? How about, instead of criticizing how I dress, respecting me and my right to the public space? "

Mona Eltahawy

You

Space

Dress

" 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. "

" 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. "

Mona Eltahawy

Other

President

" In 1993, I joined Reuters as a correspondent in its Cairo bureau. "

" 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. "

" The price of toppling Gadhafi will be steep. But Libyans will topple him, and in doing so, they will bring down with him the castles of fear our dictators thought they had fortified. "

" Selling out Saudi women is an old-established tradition. "

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

" I grew up looking at my parents as equals. "

Mona Eltahawy

Equals

Grew

" 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. "

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

" I grew up in the U.K., and my parents are both doctors. "

" 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 U.S. citizen, I cherish the First Amendment. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

Mona Eltahawy

Waiting

Open

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

" Too often, when Muslim women speak out, some in our 'community' accuse us of 'making our men look bad' and of giving ammunition to right-wing Islamophobes. "

" 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. "

" Nothing protects women from the patriarchy of military regimes. "

" 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. "

" 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?' "

" To me, Egypt is a wonderful history, a wonderful people, and it's represented through artists like Om Kalthoum, who is considered the fourth pyramid of Egypt. She's a wonderful diva whose voice, for me, is really Egyptian. "

" Authoritarianism, religious fundamentalism and militarism are inherently patriarchal and hierarchical. "

" 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. "

" I left my husband a year after 9/11. Not because he was an American and I an Egyptian, nothing to do with culture or religion, nothing to do with 9/11. We brought out the worst in each other. But before we separated, we visited N.Y.C. one more time together for a friend's engagement, and we went to pay our respects at the site of the attacks. "