" He dislikes it if I walk a few steps behind him. ‘What would people think,’ he says, ‘that we are backward, barbaric.’ He sneers at the Arab women in black abayas walking behind their men. ‘Oppressed, that’s what people would think of them. Here they respect women, treat them as equal; we must be the same,’ he says. So I have to be careful not to fall behind him in step and must bear the weight of his arm around my shoulder, another gesture he had decided to imitate to prove that, though we are Arabs and Africans, we can be modern too. "

― Leila Aboulela , Elsewhere, Home