Best 15 quotes of Mona Eltahawy on MyQuotes

Mona Eltahawy

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    Mona Eltahawy

    Being a woman anywhere is dangerous.

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    Mona Eltahawy

    I'm here to confuse you. Confusion is my right and left hook.

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    Mona Eltahawy

    I support freedom of speech - even Pamela Geller's right to her Islamophobic subway posters.

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    Mona Eltahawy

    My own feminist revolution evolved slowly, and traveled the world with me. To this day I have no idea what dissident professor or librarian placed feminist tests 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. Now that I am older, I can see that feeling terrified is how you recognize what you need. Terror encourages you to jump, even when you don't know if you will ever land.

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    Mona Eltahawy

    Slavish obedience to the clerics, who know how to squeeze every last drop of advantage out of religion, is killing our girls. We must speak-blaspheme, if necessary; be accused of being apostates, if that is what is required. Muslims are taught that Islam put an end to the Arabian practice of burying alive newborn baby girls because they were considered worthless and a burden, but as long as we stay quiet in the face of the abomination of child marriage, we are effectively burying our girls alive today.

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    Mona Eltahawy

    The most subversive thing a woman can do is talk about her life as if it really matters.

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    Mona Eltahawy

    If a woman had a right to wear a miniskirt, surely I had the right to choose my headscarf. My choice was a sign of independence of mind. Surely, to choose to wear what I wanted was an assertion of my feminism. I was a feminist, wasn't I? But I was to learn that choosing to wear the hijab is much easier than choosing to take it off. And that lesson was an important reminder of how truly "free" choice is.

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    Mona Eltahawy

    I understand the need to defend one's headscarf -- I did it for years, even as I was privately struggling with it. It's an important defence in the face of Islamophobes and racists. I get that. But if it's done without cognisance of the lived realities of women who do not have the privilege of choice, then my interlocutors end up doing exactly what they accuse me of doing with my support of a niqab ban: silencing other women. Why the silence, as some of our women fade into black, either owing to identity politics or out of acquiescence to Salafism?

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    Mona Eltahawy

    I was traumatised into feminism -- there's no other way to describe it

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    Mona Eltahawy

    Misogyny has not been completely wiped out anywhere. Rather, it resides on a spectrum, and our best hope for eradicating it globally is for each of us to expose and to fight against local versions of it, in the understanding that by doing so we advance the global struggle.

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    Mona Eltahawy

    The battles over women's bodies can be won only by a revolution of the mind

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    Mona Eltahawy

    The niqab represents a bizarre reverence for the disappearance of women. It puts on a pedestal a woman who covers her face, who erases herself, and it considers that erasure the pinnacle of piety.

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    Mona Eltahawy

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

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    Mona Eltahawy

    Western liberals who rightly condemn imperialism [are] yet are blind to the cultural imperialism they are performing when they silence my critiques of misogyny. They behave as if they want to save my culture and faith from me, and forget that they are immune to the violations about which I speak.

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    Mona Eltahawy

    When Westerners remain silent out of 'respect' for foreign cultures, they show support only for the most conservative elements of those cultures. Cultural relativism is as much my enemy as the oppression I fight within my culture and faith.