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Nanny Suad sat on the floor of the kitchen stuffing vineleaves. As she worked, she chatted to her young charge, my five-year-old niece. But she was not just chatting - she was teasing, winding the child up. As the little girl got angrier and more violent in her replies, the nanny smiled up at me easily. "I'm sharpening her," she said, "so that she'll never be afraid of anyone." An Egyptian peasant-woman, who could neither read nor write, was administering a course in self-assertion to a girl-child.

This memory sprang to my mind in response to the following lines from Jan Goodwin's Price of Honour: "From the time a girl is five or six [in the Muslim world], preparation for the only acceptable role for her - wife and mother - begins. She is groomed to be a good wife: docile, obedient and self-sacrificing. [...] The birth of a girl...is invariably a time for mourning" - "invariably" no less.