Alifa Rifaat's short story "Another Evening at the Club" paints a clear picture of the powerless, inferior role of women in Egyptian society: the main character Samia is trapped in an arranged marriage in which she is repeatedly forced into betraying her own values and beliefs.
For example, when Bey, her husband, says to Samia "Tell people you're from the well-known Barakat family and that your father was a judge," she is obliged to lie about her own family's social status, in spite of how she was raised to be an honest person, just for the sake of making Bey look more important in the public eye.
In the end, Bey forces Samia into the ultimate act of dishonesty: protecting a lie that is causing their servant to be tortured, only to avoid his husband's embarrassment, when he says "By now the whole town knows the servant stole the ring—or would you like me to tell everyone: 'Look,folks, the fact is that the wife got a bit tiddly on a couple of sips of beer and the ring took off on its own and hid itself behind the dressing-table."
