Yvonne Ridley

Something really wonderful happened outside the Tunisian Embassy in London the other day as a crowd of us gathered to continue the demand for justice in the people’s revolution. I was standing next to a woman, and, with tears in her eyes she revealed she had been inside the embassy that morning to get passports [...]

Political opportunist Nicolas Sarkozy forgot three fundamental lessons when he decided to denounce the burka. The first one is that men should stay well clear of becoming embroiled in expressing opinions on women’s clothes, unless of course you happen to be called Lacroix, Gaultier, Lagerfeld or Ghesquiere. This was a lesson learned the hard way by [...]

Long before I became a Muslim, the North African country of Tunisia used to evoke two images in my mind … a sunny holiday destination for drunken chavs* and a temporary home base for Palestinian leader-in-exile, Yassir Arafat. I don’t suppose you could imagine two more different images than soccer-mad, binge-drinking Westerners and the revolutionary PLO [...]

I used to look at veiled women as quiet, oppressed creatures — until I was captured by the Taliban. In September 2001, just 15 days after the terrorist attacks on the United States, I snuck into Afghanistan, clad in a head-to-toe blue burqa, intending to write a newspaper account of life under the repressive regime. [...]