Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" 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. "

Related Quotes:

" 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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

Mona Eltahawy

Hair

Head

" I'm a survivor. I'm a messenger. "

Mona Eltahawy

Messenger

Survivor

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

Mona Eltahawy

Equals

Grew

" 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. "

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

" I have chosen not to have children. "

Mona Eltahawy

Chosen

Children

" 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. "

" I will never ally with Islamophobes and racists. But in the choice between 'community' and Muslim women, I will always choose my sisters. "

" I know Obama knows better than George W. Bush. "

" Morality crusades unite military regimes and religious zealots alike. "

" For most of my life, the U.S. was never anything more than vacation memories. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

Right

Support

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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 like to call the Republicans the Christian Brotherhood of the U.S. so that my fellow Americans recognise the line that connects their mix of religion and politics with their Muslim equivalent in Egypt. "

" Banning hate speech doesn't end racism or antisemitism. Social pressure does that. It becomes socially unacceptable. "