Pride

In the second section of the novel Palace Walk by Naguib Mahfouz we find out a lot more things about Amina’s family. The one interesting fact that I found out about Amina’s husband is that he is very prideful and nothing happens without him finding out about it.
“He walks along our streets morning and evening. So it’s not out of the question that people, if they learned he was marrying one of the girls, would suspect that he might have seen one of them. I would despise giving my daughter to someone if that meant stirring up doubts about my honor. No daughter of mine will marry a man until I am satisfied that his primary motive for marrying her is a sincere desire to be related to me… me … me… me. ‘No man has ever seen either of my daughters…’ Congratulations, Mrs. Amina, congratulations” (157)
In the quote above we see how it is that Amina’s husband hides his daughters from the public and all because he thinks that no one should see them. The reason for why he hides his daughters from people is so that they won’t ask for their hand because of the fact that they are beautiful but because they want to be related to him. A police officer went to Ahmad and asked him if he could marry one of his daughters. This is when Ahmad went home and talked to his wife Amina. Ahmad believes that if someone is going to marry his daughters is not due to their looks. They are going to marry his daughters because of the fact that they want to be related to him.
This to me is a show of pride. I mean no one would ever think that the only way that someone will ever marry someone’s daughter just to be related to the father of the girl. That only happens when someone is very rich and has plenty of power. Therefore Ahmad wants to believe that he has all the control even the control of whomever his daughters are going to marry. When the police officer asked him if he could marry his daughter his first thought was that the officer must have seen his daughter and that was the only reason for why he wanted to marry his daughter.
Many people have pride but in other cases people are just insecure about themselves and want to use all the power that they have to make people feel inferior to them.