How we cite our quotes: (Page)
Quote #7
Moving daily among those three different worlds under the blue skies of Egypt, we lived also in our heads and in the books we lost ourselves in, in a world peopled with children called Tom and Jane and Tim and Ann, and where there were moles and hedgehogs and gray skies and caves on the shore and tides that came in and out. And where houses had red roofs. Red roofs that seemed far better and more interesting...to me than roofs that were like, say, the terraced roof of our house in Alexandria. (154)
Ahmed learns to value everything that is not part of her own culture, partly because of the romantic associations of exotic things (hedgehogs are super cute) and partly because she's living in a culture that measures its success against European powers.
If only Egypt can act/be just like Europe, they might be civilized after all. It takes some time, but Ahmed and her fellow Egyptians realize that Europe isn't the pinnacle of civilization, as Europeans would have them believe. Still, Ahmed finds that such early admiration is hard to shake.
Quote #8
I found myself living, just as I had in Alexandria, in a place where women, presiding over the young in their charge, were the authorities. This is how it had been from when I first came into the world, and here it was, the same underlying reality, at Girton. Girton, that is to say, was a version of the community of women—the harem—as I had lived it every summer in Alexandria. (181)
Ahmed calls the female community at Girton College the "harem perfected." It reminds her in many ways of that idyllic fellowship in her grandmother's receiving room at Zatoun, but with one added dimension: Girton is well and truly free from male authority. It's comfortingly familiar for her at Girton, though she will later understand that this community of scholars would certainly look down their noses at the women of Zatoun.
Quote #9
That same activity essentially, practiced at Alexandria and Zatoun orally and on living texts to sustain the life of the community, was called by outsiders to the process—by men of the official Arabic culture and by Westerners, men and women—idle gossip, the empty and even sometimes evil, malicious talk of women, harem women. That same activity, however, practiced by the women of Girton on written, not oral, texts and on fictional, not living, people was regarded as honorable, serious, important work. (192)
Ahmed marvels over the snobbery of outsiders who would condemn the harem community in Zatoun. Ahmed believes that the practical, familial work of the women of Zatoun actually holds more value than the theoretical work done by professional academics in the West. Note that the divide here is more than a gap between the realms of male and female—it's more about cultural/professional superiority than gender differences.