By Mona Eltahawy NEW YORK — Is the Pope playing hardball with Osama Bin Laden? In a March 19 audio recording, Bin Laden accused Pope Benedict XVI of leading a “new crusade” against Islam. The accusation was outlandish and no doubt aimed at giving the al-Qaeda leader a leg up onto the bandwagon of current [...]

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 [...]

Marketplace on American Public Radio broadcast a commentary I wrote on the conflicts of the expat.  By Mona Eltahawy I’m an Egyptian born journalist who moved to the U.S. in 2000. My brother and his wife, both physicians, arrived a year earlier. Whenever I travel from New York City, where I live, to their home in [...]

I was on CNN today talking about Saudi women’s rights activist Wajeha al-Huwaider. To mark International Women’s Day on March, 8, she got behind the wheel, had her sister-in-law film her driving and posted the clip on YouTube. Saudi Arabia is the only country on earth that prohibits women from driving, quite an irony considering that Saudi Arabia [...]

By Mona Eltahawy NEW YORK — Khaled Hamza Salam and I are on opposite ends of the political spectrum. He is a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s largest opposition movement, which wants to turn Egypt into an Islamic state. I am a secular, liberal Egyptian woman for whom nothing would be worse than a [...]

By Mona Eltahawy When I first moved from Egypt to the US in the summer of 2000, my then-husband – an American from whom I am now divorced – offered to drive me to the neighborhood mosque. He had looked it up so that he could take me there when I arrived in Seattle. As [...]