Fatimah Rifaat used the pseudonym Alifa to prevent embarrassment on the part of her family due to the themes of her stories and her writing career.

Her family boasted that their roots are said to extend back to Umar ibn al-Khattab, a companion and advisor to the prophet Muhammad.

When Alifa Rifaat expressed interest in continuing her education by enrolling in the College of Fine Arts in Egypt her father instead arranged for her to marry her cousin, a police officer.

She continued on to make the [hajj], the sacred pilgrimage to Mecca, in 1981 and travelled to multiple European and Arab states including England, Turkey, Germany, Morocco, and Austria.

Her style, though focusing more on romance in the beginning of her career, later shifted to social critique after she met translator Denys John-Davies.

Fatimah Rifaat, unlike the prominent Egyptian Feminist Nawal El Saadawi, focused her writing on women in traditional Islamic roles.

In her autobiography Fatimah describes her father's lack of affection towards her as a possible root of her exploration of the needs and desires of men in terms of women.

Fatimah also expresses in her autobiography the need for men and women to only participate in intercourse when they are in a serene state, so that orgasm can be achieved, which she believes acts to strengthen faith in God.

These stories handle themes such as sex, death, marriage, masturbation, clitoridectomy, love, teenage pregnancy, widowhood, and loss along with other controversial topics.

For Fatimah Rifaat, patriarchy is merely a fact of life and acceptable under Quranic terms, however it is the opposite and in some instances even the same gender's lack of observance towards religious teachings that acts as the catalyst to many of the protagonists’ problems.

In her stories many of the sexual encounters take place during the characters' marriage and there is no instance of extra-marital male-female relationships as this would be considered purely sinful under the practice of Islam.

She recalls how in the past she attempted to express her desire for sexual satisfaction to her husband which was met in return with denial and anger.

Bahiyya then recounts her childhood, her clitoridectomy by the women of her village, her widowhood and the hardships of raising children as a single mother.

When the woman and her husband move into a house the wife discovers a female jinni in the form of a snake who teaches her the height of sexual pleasure.