This ISIS group, they attack Muslims more than they attack anyone else.

As Muslim women, we're not waiting for the president of the United States to open doors for us or to fight our fights.

When the only two sides fighting are conservative - even if one of them is just conservative in appearance - then everyone loses. And women don't just lose; they're also used as cheap ammunition.

To me, Egypt is a wonderful history, a wonderful people, and it's represented through artists like Om Kalthoum, who is considered the fourth pyramid of Egypt. She's a wonderful diva whose voice, for me, is really Egyptian.

As an Egyptian-American, I want both sides of that hyphen to enjoy the forms of freedom guaranteed by the First Amendment, as I want both sides of that hyphen to move beyond the deceptive simplicity of the question, 'Why do they hate us?'

I visited Libya in September 1996 for the 27th anniversary of the 'revolution' - a military coup that a 27-year-old Gadhafi led to topple the monarchy and since which he has ruled. Some were optimistic that Gadhafi's 'revolution' could herald a new Libya, but it didn't take long for his brutality to stamp out any such hopes.

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.

To write about the hijab is to step into a minefield. Even among those who share my cultural and faith background, opinions veer from those who despise it as a symbol of backwardness to those for whom religion begins and ends with that piece of cloth.

In 1993, I joined Reuters as a correspondent in its Cairo bureau.

The Tunisian revolution left every Arab dictator in fear; Egypt's toppling of Mubarak left them terrified - even one of the U.S.' best allies in the region could fall.

My parents' generation grew up high on the Arab nationalism that Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser brandished in the 1950s.

While the 2011 revolution did not remove the regime, it has shortened the seemingly endless patience that many Egyptians once had for military rule.

My family moved to Saudi Arabia from Glasgow when I was 15. Being a 15-year-old girl anywhere is difficult - all those hormones and everything - but being a 15-year-old girl in Saudi Arabia... it was like someone had turned the light off in my head. I could not get a grasp on why women were treated like this.

As a woman in Saudi Arabia, you have one of two options. You either lose your mind - which at first happened to me because I fell into a deep depression - or you become a feminist.

All religions, if you shrink them down, are all about controlling women's sexuality.

The religious fundamentalists of the Republican party are a mirror image of the religious fundamentalists of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood.

I like to call the Republicans the Christian Brotherhood of the U.S. so that my fellow Americans recognise the line that connects their mix of religion and politics with their Muslim equivalent in Egypt.

Too many on the Left are earnest about nothing at all, sadly. They've been rendered spineless by snarkiness - not least on Twitter.

The Right is incredibly deft at getting earnest about all the wrong things.

Mubarak was adept, as were many other U.S.-backed dictators, at playing the sane middle to the 'lunatics with beards' he so often used as bogeymen to guarantee the support of foreign allies.

Anti-U.S. sentiment has been born out of many grievances - support and weapons for such dictators as Mubarak, unquestionable support for Israel in its occupation of Palestine, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and drone attacks in Pakistan and Yemen that kill more civilians than intended targets.

Bashar al-Assad's henchmen stomped on the hands of famed Syrian cartoonist Ali Farzat. Our dictators tailor wounds to suit their victims' occupations.

For most of my life, the U.S. was never anything more than vacation memories.

That morning of 11 September 2001, as we watched the twin towers crumble on live television, America and I would develop a bond that has proven deeper and more enduring - for better or worse, through sickness and health - than the one I had with my now ex-husband.

I was born in Egypt, and my family moved to London when I was seven. I grew up mostly in Clapham, where I also went to school after a brief stint in Whitechapel.

It's one thing to be groped and harassed by passers-by, but when the state gropes you, it gives a green light that you are fair game.

There was always something sickening about tourists taking pictures of themselves posing in front of that big gaping hole called Ground Zero.

Good riddance, Bin Laden - an unwelcome squatter in the house of my religion who tore down all the walls and was prepared to throw them on a fire to keep himself warm.

Too many have rushed in to explain the Arab world to itself.

For years I looked at the Iranians with envy - not at the outcome of their 1979 revolution, but because it was a popular uprising, not a euphemism for a coup.

Until the Saudi authorities who administer the holy sites take concrete steps to protect female pilgrims, we must protect each other. Men must stop assaulting us, yes. But women the world over, regardless of faith, know that until that happens, we are each other's keepers.

We must make sure #MeToo breaks the race, class, gender, and faith lines that make it so hard for marginalized people to be heard.

Saudi authorities must launch a campaign about the safety of female pilgrims and the determination of the authorities to ensure every woman's safety.

I will never ally with Islamophobes and racists. But in the choice between 'community' and Muslim women, I will always choose my sisters.

Selling out Saudi women is an old-established tradition.

I was 15 when my family moved to Jidda from Britain in 1982. Living in Saudi Arabia was such a shock to my system that I like to say I was traumatized into feminism.

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

I'm a survivor. I'm a messenger.

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

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

We have been under military rule since 1952, when a group of army officers overthrew Egypt's monarchy and ended Britain's occupation of the country. But that only replaced an external occupation with an internal one, in which favored sons of the armed forces replaced their uniforms with suits, a move meant to create a semblance of civilian rule.

When we complain to Egypt's Western allies about whichever autocrat is in power, we are asked, 'But who is the alternative?' It is a question designed to frustrate.

The military belongs in its barracks, not our ballot boxes.

President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, like his most recent predecessors Mohamed Morsi and Hosni Mubarak, rarely mention the Sinai Peninsula other than to celebrate its liberation from Israeli occupation in 1982.

I know Obama knows better than George W. Bush.

The Bush administration and its 'we'll liberate you by invading your countries' doctrine is thankfully behind us. It is up to us to fight for our rights inside our communities.

Muslim views are not a monolithic blob.

Authenticity has never been Barbie's strong suit.

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.

I was never one for dolls.