"The soul of the country"

Right from the beginning of the novel, we are presented with a family that lives within very strict guidelines and roles. Most startling is Amina's routine and submissive nature. She has learned to be happy with her life even though her husband is rarely home, preferring to be out on the town, drinking with his friends. Amina wakes up, out of habit, at midnight so she can receive her husband, undress and wash him. The role of women in the world of the novel has been set from the first chapter, which concerned me. The man, too, is just as bad, as Al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-Jawad is portrayed as a nearly-absentee father. While he imposes strict rule upon his family, he gets to do what he wants; it's contradictory, like Bibi mentioned, that he and his family are Muslims, and while the family is forced to be strict and devout, the father is allowed to break the rules and see women and drink, out all night.
The problem this novel has already begun to pose is the question of the portrayal of Islamic worlds and families. In Newsweek, Christopher Dickey said about the novel, "[Mahfouz] writes about family, and to understand the Egyptian family is to understand, more clearly than any political treatise can explain, the soul of the country," basically reducing all of Egyptian culture to this family we are presented. Emily said that Americans, with a tendency to remain ignorant, are content to make and believe sweeping generalizations of other people, countries, and cultures. There is a danger, then, when Mahfouz uses a single family that is (so far) very one-dimensional and embodies a lot of stereotypes to explore his ideas and themes on this Egyptian street. He seems to be very reductive.
If, like Dickey said, understanding the family is understanding the soul of a country, then so far, we are to understand that Egypt is about submissive women, strained family relationships, perversions of religion, and dominant, inattentive men.