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" Feminism, as I see it, is not about counting women in key jobs. "
Mona Eltahawy
Feminism
Women
See
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" 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. "
Mona Eltahawy
Family
Women
Why
" 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. "
Mona Eltahawy
You
Deep
Depression
" While the 2011 revolution did not remove the regime, it has shortened the seemingly endless patience that many Egyptians once had for military rule. "
Mona Eltahawy
Rule
Revolution
Patience
" 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. "
Mona Eltahawy
Thought
Price
Him
" 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
Like
" The Tunisian revolution left every Arab dictator in fear; Egypt's toppling of Mubarak left them terrified - even one of the U.S.' best allies in the region could fall. "
Mona Eltahawy
Fall
Revolution
Fear
" All religions, if you shrink them down, are all about controlling women's sexuality. "
Mona Eltahawy
Women
Religions
Sexuality
" I avoid continuously writing or tweeting about ISIS, as it centres them in the narrative and we end up reacting to them and reacting to the agenda they set. "
Mona Eltahawy
Up
Avoid
End
" It is the harassers and assaulters who make us 'look bad,' not the women who have every right to expose crimes against them. "
Mona Eltahawy
Right
Women
Against
" My parents' generation grew up high on the Arab nationalism that Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser brandished in the 1950s. "
Mona Eltahawy
Parents
Nationalism
High
" 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. "
Mona Eltahawy
Middle
Used
Support
" 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. "
Mona Eltahawy
Egyptians
Dictators
Days
" 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
" We have been under military rule since 1952, when a group of army officers overthrew Egypt's monarchy and ended Britain's occupation of the country. But that only replaced an external occupation with an internal one, in which favored sons of the armed forces replaced their uniforms with suits, a move meant to create a semblance of civilian rule. "
Mona Eltahawy
Army
Suits
Group
" 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. "
Mona Eltahawy
Me
Right
Support
" I grew up looking at my parents as equals. "
Mona Eltahawy
Up
Equals
Grew
" 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. "
Mona Eltahawy
God
Less
You
" 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. "
Mona Eltahawy
Together
Worst
Time
" 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. "
Mona Eltahawy
Perfection
Service
Women
" For years, successive Arab dictators have tried to keep discontent at bay by distracting people with the Israeli-Arab conflict. "
Mona Eltahawy
Conflict
People
Dictators
" 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. "
Mona Eltahawy
Living
System
Family
" The religious fundamentalists of the Republican party are a mirror image of the religious fundamentalists of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood. "
Mona Eltahawy
Party
Brotherhood
Republican
" 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. "
Mona Eltahawy
Women
Rights
Need
" Morality crusades unite military regimes and religious zealots alike. "
Mona Eltahawy
Alike
Morality
Unite
" 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. "
Mona Eltahawy
Fire
Down
Walls
" 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. "
Mona Eltahawy
Library
Day
Everything
" 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. "
Mona Eltahawy
Stop
Men
Know
" I started off at a local newspaper called 'The Middle East Times,' which is no longer in existence. I remember one of the earliest stories that I wrote for them was a study about domestic violence in Egypt from a government-run research institute think tank. "
Mona Eltahawy
Violence
Research
Think
" 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. "
Mona Eltahawy
Women
Community
Culture
" 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. "
Mona Eltahawy
Me
Child
Birth