Headscarves and Hymens

'Headscarves and Hymens is an impassioned, deeply felt and affecting memoir that confronts a very real problem.

THE TIMES

Brave and impassioned . . . A shocking book, and one that will make anyone who has seen veiling as a cultural issue think very hard about what is really going on

MAIL ON SUNDAY

Inequality, state brutality, resentment, sexual frustration, religious indoctrination, shame culture and struggle for power . . . Eltahawy holds a match to this combustible mix . . . A brave call for gender equality

GUARDIAN

(What are you currently reading?) Headscarves and Hymens by Mona Eltahawy. I was lucky enough to interview Mona recently and she is enormously inspiring and very, very funny.

THE INDEPENDENT

This is a fascinating, can't-look-away, whistle-stop tour of the Middle East through the eyes of an angry but lucid observer. Eltahawy is brave as well as perceptive: her reports cause outrage and controversy. She blames the West as much as Middle Eastern attitudes for the lack of change, especially Western liberals who criticise imperialism and yet turn a blind eye to the cultural imperialism that doesn't push misogyny to the fore, as if there might time to sort that out later when more important matters have been "fixed".

DAILY TELEGRAPH

This a call to arms against misogyny in the Arab world is furiously plain-speaking.

SUNDAY TELEGRAPH

To Eltahawy, the root of this inequality is clear: "a toxic mix of culture and religion", particularly Islam, and more particularly the spread of its ultra-conservative Saudi-style interpretation.

THE GUARDIAN

Overall, however, it is the oscillation between the personal and the political that makes Headscarves and Hymens a tour de force...Sometimes we need books that will make us angry enough to want to change things. This courageous book will certainly disturb you, and may make you very angry indeed. But you still must read it.

MSLEXIA

Headscarves and Hymens is less a call to arms and more a protracted bellow for equality, progress and common sense.

IRISH TIMES

This book should be made compulsory reading in all those schools where British Muslim girls are being groomed to go abroad to be Islamic State brides. Eltahawy is laceratingly honest about how hard it has been for her as an Arab Muslim woman to confront the institutional misogyny of her culture, to free herself of the "taboos and silence". Only when there has been a revolution in the relations between the sexes, she insists, will there ever be genuine political change in the Middle East.

MAIL ON SUNDAY

Headscarves and Hymens is useful for those who are new to the situation in the Middle East, as it's a good overview of the main social issues affecting the region.

NEW INTERNATIONALIST

This is a timely and provocative call to action for gender equality in the Middle East

PUBLISHER'S WEEKLY (USA)

Eltahawy's passionately argued case is irrefutable. But how to harness this rage to achieve real political change remains the unanswered question.

SYDNEY MORNING HERALD (Australia)

In her debut book, Egyptian-American journalist and commentator Eltahawy mounts an angry indictment of the treatment of women throughout the Arab world.

KIRKUS REVIEWS (USA)

This is a ground-shaping book that defines the edge of so many vital contemporary debates. Hers is a voice simultaneously behind and beyond the veil.

Colum McCann

This a powerful global feminist demand for equal rights.

BOOKLIST (USA)

Headscarves and Hymens is a call to arms by a woman who's plainly proud of her justified rage. She brings to mind those angry, outspoken women in the 1970s who were branded "strident" feminists - the ones who yelled, who offended, but who generated change. "It is the job of a revolution to shock, to provoke, and to upset," Eltahawy writes, "not to behave or be polite." Mission accomplished.

TORONTO STAR (Canada)

Mona Eltahawy brings a journalist's keen eye, a revolutionary's prophetic courage, and a feminist's incendiary intellect to this work, demolishing the last cultural relativist myths. And she writes so well that it's hard to put down this audacious, information-packed treasure about the half of the Arab world that's female. Miss this book-the real key to the Middle East-at your peril.

Robin Morgan

Headscarves and Hymens is timely, important and much needed. It should be translated into many languages, especially those spoken in the Middle East. Eltahawy encourages the girls of the Middle East and North Africa to be "immodest, rebel and disobey" and know they are entitled to be free. Her book deserves to be widely read, discussed and acclaimed.

LITERARY REVIEW

A passionate and brilliantly argued polemic....When I put down Eltahawy's deeply affecting book, I felt that a bit more Enlightenment universalism is in order. Instead of bellyaching when some idiotic man calls a woman "dear" or a hideous professor sends his student a creepy email, feminists should wake up and recognise the cruel, systematic violence that millions of women still face throughout the world.

THE TABLET

Informative and engaging, a brave and much needed insight into suffering which is rarely talked about openly.

THE F WORD