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I have nothing against the veil. And I think that, wrongly, many in the West look at the veil as a symbol of oppression. Now, as long as a woman chooses to wear the veil, because that's her belief and because of her own - that's a personal relationship with God, so she should be free to dress in whichever way she wants.

Although I come from a family who are Muslim - my mother is Egyptian, my father is Palestinian - my mother only puts a veil on her head when she has a bad hair day.

I discovered that wearing the veil is not suitable for a woman who wants to work in activism and the public domain. People need to see you, to associate and relate to you. It is not stated in my religion to wear the veil; it is a traditional practice, so I took it off.

I think the veil is a way of taking power away from women.

Religion was used as an ideology, as a system of control. When they forced the veil upon women, they were using it as an instrument of control in the same way that in Mao's China people were wearing Mao jackets and women were not supposed to wear any makeup.

A bride at her second marriage does not wear a veil. She wants to see what she is getting.

And one of the things that I learned was you can't generalise at all about a woman in a veil. You can't think you know her story, because she will confound you over and over again. She may be an engineer or a diplomat or a doctor. Or she may be an unbelievable babe with bleached hair down to her waist.

To be a veiled Muslim woman on screen is a very scary minefield for me.

You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear a veil. You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway.

Because the traditional mode of dress for Muslim women is so distinct - the headcovering, which is not there for guys - women carry a greater burden of representation than Muslim men do in non-Muslim societies.