We left Egypt when I was seven, and we didn't return until I was 21. My teen years were divided between the United Kingdom and Saudi Arabia. Up until we left the U.K., it was like your regular teenage years. The one thing I remember is that I couldn't date. That was one thing my parents made very clear.

I do not subscribe to a feminism that demands perfection or super heroic nobility of women. But I do insist that putting women at the service of patriarchy is no victory for us.

Across the globe, fundamentalists of all religions are on one side, and their attitudes towards women and towards female sexuality are almost identical.

Feminism, as I see it, is not about counting women in key jobs.

I grew up in an era where the record companies just sold records to everybody, and the whole family bought songs. Today, record companies are failing because they are putting their accent just on the young, and I think that's rather silly.

She was trusted and valued by her father, loved and courted by all dogs, cats, children, and poor people, and slighted and neglected by everybody else.

When my father finished his Ph.D., my mother went back for another bachelor's degree, this time in environmental science.

My family didn't push me into the music industry; they just wanted me to do something I loved.