Behind the Veil

I always enjoy different viewpoints. Here's an interesting lecture by an Egyptian journalist addressing an audience at the University of Delaware. She will give you a glimpse into her world view, a liberal Muslim who lives in Manhatten and sells articles to a number of leading newspapers.



Mona Eltahawy has a blog and describes herself:

Mona Eltahawy is an award-winning syndicated columnist and an international public speaker on Arab and Muslim issues. She is based in New York.

Before she moved to the U.S. in 2000, Ms Eltahawy was a news reporter in the Middle East for many years, including in Cairo and Jerusalem as a correspondent for Reuters and she reported from the region for The Guardian and U.S. News and World Report.

She is one of a few writers whose essays appear regularly in both the western and Arab press. Her opinion pieces have been published frequently in the International Herald Tribune, The Washington Post, the pan-Arab Asharq al-Awsat newspaper and Qatar’s Al-Arab.

In 2006, the Next Century Foundation awarded Ms Eltahawy its Cutting Edge Prize for distinguished contribution to the coverage of the Middle East and in recognition of her “continuing efforts to sustain standards of journalism that would help reduce levels of misunderstanding”.

As you can tell from the above talk, she is refreshingly straightforward.

Here's an interesting article about sex in Saudia Arabia.

Here's an article on head scarves and how she seems to always out of kilter with her times.