"If I'd never known a Muslim woman, I'd probably pity any female born into Islam. In America we've come to see these women as timid creatures, covered from head to toe, who scurry rather than walk. They have no voices, no rights and no place outside the home. But I grew up around secular Muslims (my father was an Iraqi Shiite) in Los Angeles, stayed with ultrareligious relatives in Baghdad and met dozens more Muslim women on travels through the Middle East. I've watched them argue politics with men at the dinner table in Baghdad, slap husbands on the back of the head for telling off-color jokes in Egypt and, at a recent Arab Women's Media Conference in Amman, fiercely debate their notions of democracy from under higabs and J. Lo-inspired hairdos."