By Mona Eltahawy NEW YORK — If justice really was a woman she would not survive long in Saudi Arabia. Between the Kafkaesque-sounding Committee to Promote Virtue and Prevent Vice and its infamous morality police, and the hardline Wahhabi clerics who serve as judges with wide-ranging powers run amok in the absence of a written [...]

By Mona Eltahawy  NEW YORK — When it comes to Islamic law, or Sharia, words certainly do come easy if you’re a man. You can marry four wives, receive double the inheritance a woman gets and you can end your marriage simply by saying “I divorce you” three times. So why not pontificate? Words are [...]

By Mona Eltahawy I am a Muslim. I wore a headscarf for nine years. And I am fed up with headscarves. I’m fed up that every conversation about Muslim women begins and ends with headscarves. I’m fed up that secularists and Islamists alike are obsessed with headscarves. I’m fed up that the fights between the [...]

By Mona Eltahawy CAIRO — After he scored a goal in a recent match against Sudan in the African Nations Cup, Egyptian soccer star Abou Trika lifted his jersey to show an undershirt inscribed with the message “Sympathize with Gaza”. His message earned him a yellow card for violating a no-politics rule but promptly crowned [...]