Quotes from Mona Eltahawy

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

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.

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

Bashar al-Assad's henchmen stomped on the hands of famed Syrian cartoonist Ali Farzat. Our dictators tailor wounds to suit their victims' occupations.

What is satire if not a marriage of civil disobedience to a laugh track, a potent brew of derision and lack of respect that acts as a nettle sting on the thin skin of the humourless?

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.

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.

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?'

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

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.

Selling out Saudi women is an old-established tradition.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

There was always something sickening about tourists taking pictures of themselves posing in front of that big gaping hole called Ground Zero.

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.

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.

In the U.K., my mother had been the breadwinner. I'd seen my parents side by side. In Saudi Arabia, my mother was basically rendered disabled. She was unable to drive, dependent on my dad for everything. The religious zealotry was so suffocating.

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

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.

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.