Quotes from Mona Eltahawy

This ISIS group, they attack Muslims more than they attack anyone else.

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

When Mubarak does die, he will be remembered as the most bland of those military men turned dictators: compare him with Gamal Abdel-Nasser and Anwar Sadat. The legacies most associated with him are a network of bridges and highways and 'stability.'

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.

Morality crusades unite military regimes and religious zealots alike.

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.

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 be "out of touch" with a society in which women have internalized their subjugation is an admirable thing.

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.

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.

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.

For years I looked at the Iranians with envy - not at the outcome of their 1979 revolution, but because it was a popular uprising, not a euphemism for a coup.

As Muslim women, we're not waiting for the president of the United States to open doors for us or to fight our fights.

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

I believe at the heart of any revolution for social justice and human dignity are consent and agency, the unequivocal belief that I own my body - not the state, not the church/mosque/temple, not the street and not the family.

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.

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.

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?

For years, despite my inner doubts, I represented to others my choice to veil as a feminist one.

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

I was never one for dolls.

I grew up looking at my parents as equals.

Muslim views are not a monolithic blob.