Mona Eltahawy Quotes

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Mona Eltahawy

Profession : Journalist

Birth : August 1, 1967

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

Mona Eltahawy

Too many have rushed in to explain the Arab world to itself.

Mona Eltahawy

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

Mona Eltahawy

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.

Mona Eltahawy

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

Saudi authorities must launch a campaign about the safety of female pilgrims and the determination of the authorities to ensure every woman's safety.

Mona Eltahawy

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

Mona Eltahawy

Selling out Saudi women is an old-established tradition.

Mona Eltahawy

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

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

Mona Eltahawy

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

Mona Eltahawy

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.

Mona Eltahawy

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

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.

Mona Eltahawy

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

The military belongs in its barracks, not our ballot boxes.

Mona Eltahawy

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

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

Mona Eltahawy

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