It is snowing outside, but inside the stately mansion on Ulitsa Gertsena it is the week after Ramadan and traditional sweet sesame cakes wait on the table for visitors, next to tiny steaming cups of potent Egyptian coffee.


Nadia El Orabi has kept the fast throughout the month of Ramadan, as she and her family do every year regardless of where they are living. The wife of Egypt's ambassador to Russia, she has been posted in five cities throughout the world, with two-year returns to Cairo, her birthplace, in between.


"It is not an easy life, you are constantly by yourself," she says of being a diplomat's spouse, "and every time in every different country you need to change yourself."


But one part of El Orabi's life has not changed over the years, and that has been her commitment to overturning myths and misconceptions of Islam.


"The veil, the harem, the restrictions on women's activities -- it is so clear and so obvious that Islam never intended women to be the way people think," she says.


In San Francisco, their previous post, as well as in Moscow, she has lectured about the place of women in Islam and published an article on the subject. The Koran, she notes, has a much more liberal approach than most people imagine.


"Mohammed's first wife was his employer, she was a business woman," El Orabi says. "And most people do not know this: The Koran says that if a man cannot satisfy a woman sexually, it is grounds for divorce."


El Orabi is fiercely proud of her family -- her twin sons recently graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, and pictures of them receiving their diplomas dominate a table in the living room.


She is also fiercely proud of her country's warm culture, and is actively preparing for Egyptian Week in Moscow, March 24 to April 3. The events will start Thursday with a reception at the Aerostar Hotel, where she has donated the residence's cook for the next 10 days to prepare traditional Egyptian food.