Mona Eltahawy

The first time I wore a head scarf, I was 16. I looked and felt like a nun. I missed the wind in my hair. For me, it was not a comfortable thing to wear.

I chose to wear the hijab at age 16, soon after my family moved from Britain to Saudi Arabia.

I left my husband a year after 9/11. Not because he was an American and I an Egyptian, nothing to do with culture or religion, nothing to do with 9/11. We brought out the worst in each other. But before we separated, we visited N.Y.C. one more time together for a friend's engagement, and we went to pay our respects at the site of the attacks.

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.'

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.

Saudi Arabia isn't just a conservative country with different values we shouldn't judge. It is a modern Gilead.

As a Muslim woman, I'm all too familiar with the media shorthand for 'Muslim' and 'woman' equaling Covered in Black Muslim Woman. She's seen, never heard. Visible only in her invisibility under that black burka, niqab, chador, etc.

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.