Important Quotations Explained
1. Egyptians, for instance, might, with equal accuracy, define
themselves as African, Nilotic, Mediterranean, Islamic, or Coptic. Or as
all, or any combination of, the above. Or, of course, as Egyptian:
pertaining to the land of Egypt.
2. [W]e all automatically assume that those who write and who put
their knowledge down in texts have something more valuable to offer than
those who simply live their knowledge and use it to inform their
lives.
3. [T]he devastation unloosed on Muslim societies in our day by
fundamentalism . . . seems to be not merely the erasure of the living, oral,
ethical, and human traditions of Islam but the literal destruction of and
annihilation of the Muslims who are the bearers of those traditions. In
Algeria, Iran, Afghanistan, and, alas, in Egypt, this narrow, violent
variant of Islam is ravaging its way through the land.
4. We lived in fact, throughout our childhoods, easily and
unthinkingly crossing thresholds between one place and another—Ain Shams,
Zatoun, our school—places that formed their own particular and different
worlds with their own particular and different underlying beliefs, ideals,
assumptions.
5. “One is not born but rather becomes a woman,” goes Simone de
Beauvoir's famous dictum. I obviously was not born but became black when I
went to England. Similarly, of course, I was not born but became a woman of
color when I went to America.
