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.

To this day I have no idea what dissident professor or librarian placed feminist texts on the bookshelves at the university library in Jeddah, but I found them there. They filled me with terror. I understood they were pulling at a thread that would unravel everything.

My birth at the end of July 1967 makes me a child of the naksa, or setback, as the Arab defeat during the June 1967 war with Israel is euphemistically known in Arabic.

I have chosen not to have children.

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 am horrified by the moral amnesia that develops when a dictator dies.

When Mubarak does die, he will be remembered as the most bland of those military men turned dictators: compare him with Gamal Abdel-Nasser and Anwar Sadat. The legacies most associated with him are a network of bridges and highways and 'stability.'

We are fighting misogynists in every culture. My solution is to listen to the women in each community and amplify their voices.

I started off at a local newspaper called 'The Middle East Times,' which is no longer in existence. I remember one of the earliest stories that I wrote for them was a study about domestic violence in Egypt from a government-run research institute think tank.

Authoritarianism, religious fundamentalism and militarism are inherently patriarchal and hierarchical.

To say that there is patriarchy in Arab culture is not denying women agency.

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.

When I first read Margaret Atwood's novel 'The Handmaid's Tale,' it was Saudi Arabia as I knew it that came to mind, not a dystopian future United States as in the new television adaptation.

When Tunisians overthrew Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in 29 days and Egyptians Hosni Mubarak in 18 days, it was an appropriate rebuke to dictators and Bin Laden.

For years, successive Arab dictators have tried to keep discontent at bay by distracting people with the Israeli-Arab conflict.

In Saudi Arabia - recognized as one of the worst violators of women's rights - women outnumber men on university campuses and yet are treated like minors who need a male guardian's permission to do the most basic things.

A source of embarrassment for Libyans, Gadhafi has never been a joke: disappearances, a police state, zero freedom of expression, and poverty for at least a third of the population of country tremendously wealthy thanks to oil.

For years, despite my inner doubts, I represented to others my choice to veil as a feminist one.

I joke that one of the rare times Egyptians identify as African is when the national soccer squad is playing in the African Cup of Nations - and preferably winning it.

I detest the niqab and the burka for their erasure of women and for dangerously equating piety with that disappearance - the less of you I can see, the closer you must be to God.

I wore the hijab - a form of dress that comprises a head scarf and usually also clothing that covers the whole body except for the face and hands - for nine years. Put more honestly, I wore the hijab for nine years and spent eight of them trying to take it off.

Some forms of veil are justified by the idea that you're not tempting men. Well how about men just behaving and keeping their hands to yourselves? How about, instead of criticizing how I dress, respecting me and my right to the public space?

In the U.K., my mother had been the breadwinner. I'd seen my parents side by side. In Saudi Arabia, my mother was basically rendered disabled. She was unable to drive, dependent on my dad for everything. The religious zealotry was so suffocating.

Banning hate speech doesn't end racism or antisemitism. Social pressure does that. It becomes socially unacceptable.