How we cite our quotes: (Page)
Quote #7
For my mother, these were some of the hidden, uncounted costs of colonialism: her children's growing up speaking a language she did not understand and going off in their teens to college in a faraway land and a culture that would eventually steal them away. (111)
Ahmed's mother was never an admirer of European culture, and she always remained steadfast in her love of Egyptian culture. As a result, she earns the scorn of her daughter, who is an ardent admirer of things English. Ahmed says that this is the collateral damage of colonialism, but something that no one ever calculates. She doesn't like to admit this since it means that she has fallen prey in the worst way to colonial influence. It also played a large part in disrupting her already difficult relationship with her mother.
Quote #8
More specifically still, it is the Islam erected by that minority of men who over the centuries have created and passed on to one another this particular textual heritage: men who, although they have always been a minority in society as a whole, have always been those who made laws and wielded (like the ayatollahs of Iran today) enormous power in their societies. (126)
Ahmed differentiates between women's Islam—based on oral tradition and lived piety—and men's, which is mostly textual, relying on knowledge of classical Arabic (taught usually only to men). The problem? Men's Islam is often thought to be more legit, more authoritative than women's since it is based on literacy and written tradition. It's created by and for a small group in a larger population practicing a completely different version of the religion, and yet it is the Islam that outsiders see. And it's also an Islam that overpowers and erases the oral tradition that supports "women's Islam."
Quote #9
And so I sensed even then that I was witnessing loss: the vanishing of Bedu culture, its banishment to the edges of life, its smothering by a supposedly superior culture bringing, supposedly, "education." (272-273)
Ahmed notes the irony of her mission in the UAE to reform the educational system that is supposed to make life better for the local population. She has to ask: at what cost does this change happen? She sees a new type of colonization all around her: well-meaning people from the global Arabic community displacing traditional ways of life to make room for a "more sophisticated" culture. Ahmed is justly saddened and uncomfortable by such a shifting of power.