Unusual very short stories. The author and I are at logger heads with regard to the treatment of women in North Africa and the Middle East. She wants no major changes to how their religion is followed and practiced, agrees that the man is 'the boss' of the house, she does what is expected of her including all rituals and believes of Islam, yet the only change she wanted to see was that men treat women more kindly as she claims it is required in the Koran. So she is not a feminist nor does she want to upset any apple carts. Her brand of pro-woman/feminist ideology does not even begin to scratch the surface.

Meh ( )

Sharply honest stories by an Egyptian writing from within the isolated world of Muslim women. Very well crafted.

Alifa Rifaat (1930-1996) was an Egyptian woman, deeply committed to her Muslim faith and sensitive to the deep pain of women. She was educated, but entered an arranged marriage and remained isolated from modern, western ideas. Many books by and about Muslim women defend or attack Islamic treatment of women. Rifaat does neither; she simply writes from the inside of women’s lives, sometimes chiding Muslim men for not living up to their obligations to women.

Rifaat’s stories are striking. Some are only a couple of pages long. Most deal with women and how they cope with the loneliness and neglect. Some are explicitly sexual; one of them depicting a woman lying next to her satisfied husband her own desires unsatisfied. Some of the stories have a touch of magic. In one a woman moves into a “haunted house” where she is seduced by a female snake who gives her sexual pleasure she had never received from a man. The stories often took me by surprise; often ending with an unexpected twist. A mother conspires with her daughter to trick her husband, working abroad for a year, into thinking that the girl’s illegitimate child is really the mother’s.

Not all of Rifaat’s stories focus on women. Death is a common theme of hers, and in her stories both women and men die or are affected by the death of another. In one a man who has grown away from his parents and village returns for his father’s funeral and realizes how much he has missed by not sharing with his family when he still had a chance.

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Alifa Rifaat was an Egyptian writer who wrote in the 1950s - 1980s and lived a largely very traditional life. Her stories focus on the lives of women, often in rural settings, and present a straightforward view of sex, love and its absence, and death Women's lives are hard, and Rifaat shows their struggles for happiness in a culture in which men often do not live up to the family and sexual obligations required by their religion. Some of the most moving stories involve the closeness some of the characters to the rural world and its animals, more so, perhaps, then to other people. The daily five calls to prayer set a rhythm for the book, and mark the passing of time. As with any collection, some stories are better than others, but taken together they provide a vivid sense of time and place and the limitations of a world in which a women's role is circumscribed not only by poverty but also by oppressive tradition.