Title: “Aisha’s Canadian Love”

Authors: Cherif Rifaat and Rasha Hassan.
Genre: Fiction

Aisha lives in Cairo, Egypt and is the central character in one of four separate novellas. She is unable to bear children, so her kind and gentle Egyptian husband takes a second wife. Since she wants him to have children, and is still very much in love with him, Aisha agrees to remain his wife. Under the manipulative pressure of his wily second wife, however, she is gradually marginalized and her husband eventually divorces her anyway. When she meets and falls for an expatriate Canadian engineer working on a rural electrification project near Cairo, things are far from being simple or straightforward …

This and the three other stories deal with the powerful influence of the culture and technology of the West on Middle Eastern societies. New and vibrant ideas from abroad interact with the proud values and traditions of an ancient civilization. As the characters cross cultures, they may accept or resist what might be different or alien to what they have always seen as the norm. There are meetings of the mind, clashes, irritants and the unexpected happy surprise of points of harmony between very different mentalities. Children brought up in the hybrid environment of two civilizations sometimes feel comfortable in both, or neither.

Mr. Rifaat lives in Canada. Mrs. Hassan lives in Cairo. The two authors are multilingual and have lived and worked in different countries. Many of their direct personal experiences and observations are woven in, lending the stories a skilled authenticity.