I work in areas related to child protection and family safety, women's empowerment, the creation of opportunities for youth, and culture and tourism. Daunting? Yes. Impossible? No. In fact, such challenges energize me.

By its very nature, hard-line ideology is self-serving and self-perpetuating; its primary goal is to survive - and that precludes everything.

First of all, in many Muslim countries women have incredible amounts of freedom, sometimes more than in some countries in Europe. So you cannot just make a generalized statement about women. Second, Islam is not the problem. It's tradition. It's culture. It's age-old mind-sets that need to be changed.

I don't lose sleep over failures. I worry about the successes and how they can be replicated.

I don't believe that there is fair enough understanding of either our status as women or the total context of our lives, which is very rich and multi-faceted.

At the end of the day, the position is just a position, a title is just a title, and those things come and go. It's really your essence and your values that are important.

When girls are educated, you get effects that cascade throughout society.