By Mona Eltahawy The Guardian May 3, 2011 I could hear the cheers as I got out of the taxi, two blocks away. I could hear them from right in front of Park 51, the site of a planned Islamic community centre and mosque that met ferocious opposition last year for being too close to [...]

CBS Sunday Morning broadcast my video essay on how Egypt’s revolution toppled both a dictator and stereotypes of Arabs I was part of a roundtable on Egypt along with Arianna Huffington, George Will and Robert Kagan on This Week with Christiane Amanpour. When was the last time you saw more women than men on a [...]

By Mona Eltahawy July 8, 2009 Huffingtonpost.com NEW YORK – Pity the Uighurs – the wrong kind of minority, the wrong kind of Muslims, fighting the wrong kind of enemy. For years, Uighurs – a Turkic people who are largely Muslim – complained of economic, cultural and religious discrimination under the harsh fist of Beijing. [...]

By Mona Eltahawy June 5, 2009 Patheos.com Do you remember the bit in Barack Obama’s 2004 Democratic National Convention when he said “If there’s an Arab American family being rounded up without benefit of an attorney or due process that threatens my civil liberties.”? Of course you do. Well, that was the start of what [...]

I was on KCRW’s To the Point talking about Obama’s speech and Muslim women’s rights. I start at 21:02 mins. Other guests were: * Alyse Nelson: President and CEO, Vital Voices Global Partnership * Haseeb Humayoon: co-author of a New York Times editorial * Nisha Varia: Deputy Director of the Women’s Rights Division, Human Rights [...]

I recorded my first video oped for Time.com The Happy Muslims Who Confuse you!

By Mona Eltahawy Published in Arabic in Qatar’s Al Arab and in English in Metro Canada There’s something wrong with the pictures coming out of Pakistan these days. Ever since Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari reinstated the country’s chief justice, I’ve been trying to figure out what it was. And then it hit me. Happiness. [...]

By Mona Eltahawy NEW YORK — As an Egyptian whose country’s military dictators are either taken by God or an assassin’s bullet, I envy the Pakistani people their ability to now use the term “former president.” As former Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf contemplates how his friends in the U.S. administration dropped him quicker than you [...]

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. [...]