How we cite our quotes: (Page)
Quote #4
Still, the veil might go, but not necessarily the attitudes that accompanied it—the habits of seclusion and the cultural conditioning about the meaning of seeing and not seeing, of being visible and invisible. (95)
Ahmed reflects on the Egypt that her mother was born into. While there were exciting changes happening in society—Egyptian feminist Huda Shaarawi refused to wear the veil and was changing the way women could present themselves and be seen—it was a lot harder to change the way that individuals thought about women and their roles in society.
Ahmed doesn't have to look far to find a perfect example of this. Her own beloved father refused to marry the first woman he was engaged to because she tried to sneak a peek of him before their marriage. While Ahmed knows that her father valued her as much as he did her brothers and had no problem sending her to Cambridge for an education, it even took him some time to wrap his head around some version of equality.
Quote #5
It is easy to see now that our lives in the Alexandria house, and even at Zatoun, were lived in women's time, women's space. And in women's culture.
And the women had, too, I now believe, their own understanding of Islam, an understanding that was different from men's Islam, "official" Islam. (120-121)
Ahmed offers an enlightening observation about the difference between "lived" Islam (of women and everyday people, handed down by oral tradition) and scholarly Islam (of men, mostly clerics, codified through texts). It's in the company of women that she first learns the precepts of Islam and understands that it is a religion of pacifism, kindness, and spirituality.
This gentle version of Islam stands in contrast to the text-based version promoted by sheikhs and mullahs. Ahmed finds it both ironic and frustrating that it's men's Islam that gets transmitted and studied outside the Arab world, precisely because it is written and seems to carry more authority than a lived version of the religion.
Quote #6
But when things went wrong, the women were powerless and acquiescent in a silence that seemed to me when I was young awfully like a guilty averting of the eyes, awfully like a kind of connivance. (131)
While Ahmed's description of a gentle, pacifist, and highly spiritual women's version of Islam makes the religion sound super appealing, it does have its downside. It especially encourages women to embrace passivity in the face of male authority, sometimes with tragic consequences.
While the women of her family were good at arranging and helping in situations that traditionally fell under their control, anything outside that sphere (which includes their own sexuality) is truly beyond them. It's frustrating to Ahmed, who sees the women of Zatoun as capable and intelligent yet implicit in the very system that oppresses them because they don't speak out.