I recorded my iMuslims essay for Time.com

By Mona Eltahawy The Jerusalem Report Jan. 4, 2010 It was the end of a three-hour class I’d given on women and Islamist movements. Why do women join such movements, which often bar them from positions of power? Why would a woman who belonged to one such movement tell a researcher “We don’t want equality. [...]

This is a lecture I gave at the University of Delaware Feb. 25 to launch their lecture series Global Agenda 2009. Headsup: I mistakenly called Ali the prophet’s nephew. Ali is Prophet Mohammed’s cousin. I know I know! Speaking for an hour without notes!

By Mona Eltahawy I was born in Egypt during one war with Israel, have vivid memories of another war with Israel and I was the first Egyptian to live and work in Israel for a Western news agency when I moved there from Cairo at the end of 1997 as a Reuters correspondent. And here’s [...]

The Qatari daily Al Arab, for which I’m a columnist, has published my “Israel is the Opium of the People”. I am glad to see it in Arabic too. I’m waiting to see if Al Masry Al Youm in Egypt will also publish it.

The leftist Israeli paper Ha’aretz included my oped “Israel is the opium of the people and other taboos” in a roundup it published today on Muslims who criticise Hamas and call for peace. The article also quoted friends Tarek Fatah of the Muslim Canadian Congress and author of “Chasing a Mirage: The Tragic Illusion of [...]

I spent a week recently at the University for Peace in Costa Rica, lecturing on how blogs and Facebook give a voice to the voiceless in the Arab world and talking to classes about my work. UPEACE media centre interviewed me for the university’s website and posted it on YouTube: How do you define “media”? [...]

By Mona Eltahawy NEW YORK — Two women suicide bombers blew themselves up within a week in Iraq recently. The first pretended her husband had been kidnapped so that she could get an appointment with a Sunni tribal leader. When he agreed to see her, she detonated a suicide vest, killing him, two other men, [...]

by Mona Eltahawy NEW YORK — If I weren’t a Muslim and didn’t know better, I’d think Muslims really do come with a grenade at the end of their turbans — as portrayed in the infamous 2005 Danish cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed. Danish police arrested three Muslims earlier this year for allegedly plotting to [...]

In 1988, when Hilary Clinton was still just the wife of the governor of Arkansas, Benazir Bhutto became the first female prime minister in the Muslim world. She was just 35. Her election victory could not have come at a better time for this Muslim woman. I was 21, returning home to my country of [...]

By Mona Eltahawy Friday, December 28, 2007 VELEN, Germany: At a conference on radicalization in The Hague in October, a former Pakistani foreign minister told a small group of us that he had recently warned Benazir Bhutto in a phone conversation that her return to Pakistan after eight years of self-imposed exile could be greeted [...]

I don’t usually use phrases like “the work of the devil” and I rarely utter the word “evil” but there is no other way to describe the suicide attack on a mosque in Pakistan during Eid that killed at least 50 people. It was the work of the devil and it was most certainly evil. [...]