I like her public voice: it's brassy and unapologetic, and when she wrote a wildly provocative article for Foreign Policy in 2012 called 'Why They Hate Us' (us being Arab women, on behalf of whom she presumed to speak, and they being all Arab men), I found it problematic but was glad to have a Muslim Arab woman making the argument that too often comes from racist Western conservatives, or, nearly as painful, earnest Western feminists (or Prime Minister Stephen Harper) who can see only oppression when they look at a woman who is visibly Muslim.īut the book suffers from a sense of haste – in its conception, or its writing, perhaps both – flipping between a somewhat breathless conversational style that is, at least, highly readable, and sudden expanses of arid statistics that read more like a first-year anthropology paper.Įltahawy's argument is scattered and reductivist, but when you can find it, it is that, in essence, Arab men have a fear that bleeds into loathing of women's sexuality and thus a compulsive need to control it. We are Twitter friends, that modern phenomenon, a connection spurred by our shared feminism. I have never met Eltahawy, although we overlapped as foreign correspondents in Israel and the Palestinian Territories. This book, she says, is born of concern that even as political space opens in the Arab countries experiencing revolutions and upheaval, the freedoms of women are not only not expanding but in fact may shrink.Īs I read along into Headscarves and Hymens, I realized I wanted it to be a good book. You may remember her as the woman who suddenly seemed to be everywhere at the start of the Egyptian revolution, explaining the country to Western media. She grew up in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and London, and carries the mark of all three. Eltahawy is an Egyptian writer and journalist who now divides her time between Cairo and New York.

Headscarves and hymens by mona eltahawy