As a feminist of Egyptian and Muslim descent, my life's work has been informed by the belief that religion and culture must never be used to justify the subjugation of women.
Mona EltahawyRead
My feminism does not demand that a woman have an equal opportunity to torture, alongside men. Torture is no less wrong because a woman, not a man, carries it out.
Interpretation
Feminism is about equality and justice, not about enabling harmful actions by women.
Mona Eltahawy's quote critiques a narrow understanding of feminism that merely seeks equal participation in power structures, even if those structures perpetuate harm. She emphasizes that true feminism should reject all forms of violence and oppression, regardless of the gender of the perpetrator, and argue for a moral stance against wrongdoings rather than merely seeking gender parity in committing them.
In practice
In a discussion about gender equality, this quote can emphasize the moral dimensions of feminism.
As a feminist of Egyptian and Muslim descent, my life's work has been informed by the belief that religion and culture must never be used to justify the subjugation of women.
I'm no fan of Sarkozy, but I support a ban on face veils because they erase women from society and are promoted by an ultra-conservative ideology that equates piety with the disappearance of women.
It is the harassers and assaulters who make us 'look bad,' not the women who have every right to expose crimes against them.
I can write about my culture and religion because I am a product of both. Even when I'm accused of giving ammunition to the Islamophobic right, in the struggle between 'community' and 'women,' I always choose the women.
I believe at the heart of any revolution for social justice and human dignity are consent and agency, the unequivocal belief that I own my body - not the state, not the church/mosque/temple, not the street and not the family.
I will never ally with Islamophobes and racists. But in the choice between 'community' and Muslim women, I will always choose my sisters.
Life is a corrupting process from the time a child learns to play his mother off against his father in the politics of when to go to bed; he who fears corruption fears life.
Despite the many iniquities that have found entrance into the practices of image-worship as it is in vogue now, I do not condemn it. Ay, where would I have been if I had not been blessed with the dust of the holy feet of that orthodox, image-worshipping Brahmin!
The fact that so many people choose to live in ways that narrow the community of fate to a very limited set of others and to define the rest as threatening to their way of life and values is deeply worrying because this contemporary form of tribalism, and the ideologies that support it, enable them to deny complex and more crosscutting mutual interdependencies-local, national, and international-and to elude their own role in creating long-term threats to their own wellbeing and that of others.
The death of a single human being is too heavy a price for the vindication of any principle, however sacred.
Poverty is not deprivation, it is isolation.
Experience demonstrates that there may be a wages of slavery only a little less galling and crushing in its effects than chattel slavery, and that this slavery of wages must go down with the other.
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