132 Quotes by Mona Eltahawy

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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