"When I wrote my first article in the late 1960s, I didn't even dare to sign it in my real name," the author says in the introduction about herself. When I wrote my first novel, I left the heroine's town unnamed, because it was my town. In other words, I had to wait many years before I dared write my autobiography. Even when I did so, I did not do it on my own, but because Professor Elizabeth Verna, a well-known American expert on Middle East affairs, asked me, in addition to being directed to a foreign audience, to allow me to correct possible preconceptions about Islam and Muslim women. "