13/11/13 A Border Passage: From Cairo to America–A Woman’s Journey, by Leila Ahmed. | Me, you, and books

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conversation about reading, especially books aboutwomen and diversity, but including anything thatexcites my curiousity

A Border Passage: From Cairo to America–A

Woman’s Journey, by Leila Ahmed.

MARCH 20, 2012tags: Africa, Colonialization, Egypt, Feminism, Global feminism, Islam, Memior, Middle East,

Muslim womenWOMEN’S HISTORY MONTHA FAVORITE BOOK

A Border Passage: From Cairo to America–A Woman’sJourney by Leila Ahmed.Penguin Books (2000), Paperback, 307 pages

A wonderful autobiography by a feminist scholar who exploresher own experience of colonization, and her own identity as an

Egyptian, Muslim, Arab woman.

Leila Ahmed’s autobiography is a well-crafted, multifaceted gem,shining with an integrity all its own. And that makes it a difficultbook for me to summarize and review. According to Ahmed, allof us have multifaceted identities. We are not this or that, but amixture of many personas. She rejects identities that are purelynegative, including an Egyptian identity that denies the value ofEuropean culture and literature, a Arab nationalism that isprimarily anti-Jew, or an US-style feminism that invalidatedIslamic religion. In describing how she has brought together her own various identities, she warns usall of the dangers of polarizing self-definitions.

Another quality that sets Ahmed’s autobiography apart from others is its often lyrical quality, alyricism deeply rooted in nature. Her book opens with the trees and sounds outside her childhoodroom in Cairo. Trees and bird song and the particular angle of light at sunset punctuate and unifyher book. Even when not describing nature Ahmed tells her personal story with grace and charm,not the academic style in which she wrote her fine, but more distant study, Women and Gender inIslam.

13/11/13 A Border Passage: From Cairo to America–A Woman’s Journey, by Leila Ahmed. | Me, you, and books

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Although Ahmed’s autobiography is a traditional chronological one, patterns occur and then re-occur, each time richer and more nuanced than before. We see the value of oral-based culture overwritten ones first in the community of her mother’s female relatives in Egypt who have fashionedIslamic practice that differs sharply from the orthodoxy proscribed by its religious leaders. The sameissue appears again when Ahmed is working in Dubai and encountering another community ofnative women. The feminism Ahmed finds when she comes to the United States is another example.Oral tradition is not simply a women’s tradition, however. Ahmed cherishes the richness that shefears is squeezed out of Islam as increasing emphasis is placed on its documents, written in a classicArabic which is far removed from the daily life of its people. As educated as she is, Ahmed neverlearned classic written Arab.

Intrinsic to Ahmed’s life is the history of Egypt in the mid-twentieth century, a story she tells withclarity and insight. She grew up in an elite family living on the outskirts of Cairo in the 1940s and1950s. Although her family wanted the British out of Egypt, they looked on England as the epitomeof all that was good, humane and civilized. Only with the Nazi death camps and the use of theatomic bomb did they begin to question that “the west” did not necessarily represent progress. Attimes, Ahmed questioned her father’s and her own “internal colonization”, but later reconciled whatwas best in both cultures.

Ahmed’s family was strongly Muslim but they had close friends who were Jewish and Christian.During her childhood, Egypt prided itself on its pluralism. With Nasser’s rise to power in 1956,however, everything changed. Her family not only suffered the losses typical of their class, but herfather’s opposition to the Aswan dam, on scientific and ecological grounds, led to their particularharassment. In addition, Nasser pushed Egyptians into Arab nationalism, an ideology that hademerged further north with British help as the Ottoman Empire collapsed at the time of World WarI.

Growing up, Ahmed describes herself as more ambivalent about her mother, than her father. Hermother seemed distant and even rejecting, and Ahmed was raised primarily by her beloved Nanny,a Croatian. In Ahmed’s eyes, her mother did “nothing,” a lifestyle the ambitious child was notwilling to repeat. Looking back, Ahmed is able to relate to the anxiety of her mother and her fearsfor her girl child.

In addition, Ahmed’s appreciation has grown for the female world created by her mother,grandmother, and four aunts who gathered daily and spent summers together with their children atthe family’s summer home in Alexandria.Although women’s slavery and concubinage had ended, their seclusion had lived on. The women’slives retained something of the character of earlier harems. The older women had authority,especially in guiding and teaching their children and servants. One important aspect of the women’scommunity which nurtured Ahmed as a child was their Islamic faith and practice, a faith andpractice that differed radically from the Islam practiced by men and declared as normative byorthodox Muslim leaders. Morality and right living were important, not in a legalistic manner, butin concern for never hurting others.

Ahmed cherished her undergraduate years spent in a women’s college in Cambridge, finding theresomething of the same authoritative women’s community that she had found within her mother’scommunity. Returning to England for grad school was a different story. The academic world of thetime was very much a white man’s world with no hint of interest in race and gender. Ahmedabsorbed its popular theory which seemed to explain other people’s lives but had no relevance forher own. Racism was on the rise in England, usually directed at working-class immigrants, but for

13/11/13 A Border Passage: From Cairo to America–A Woman’s Journey, by Leila Ahmed. | Me, you, and books

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the first time, Ahmed was identified by others as black and thus inferior. Knowing few other blacksor women, she felt bewildered and devalued. To describe her situation she uses Betty Friedan’sphrase, “the problem that had no name,” originally meant for a very different situation.

After receiving her degree and teaching in England, Ahmed went to Dubai to work in educationalreform and the creation of a university there. She found herself a woman in authority in a male-ordered world, dependent on the community of native women for support. While there shediscovered the writings of feminists in the United States. They helped her make sense of her life, andshe determined to come here and become a part of the community of academic feminists which wasjust being created.

I was in grad school doing women’s history and women’s history during her early years teaching atAmherst, and I appreciate her description of those years. She captures our sheer excitement–thehopes, the chaos, and the fierce conversations of a new discipline being created as we wrote andtaught. I share her understanding that what we were doing was more than the ideas and words weput to paper but the discovery. We were creating of a way to make sense as women of the worldswhich had shaped us and to find ways to change those worlds.

Autobiographies are sometimes criticized as being unreliable and biased, but Ahmed tells her storyin order to probe with honesty the myths she created for herself as a child and the myths otherscreated about her. Often she finds both wanting. She questions and revises her childhood view ofher mother as useless and rejecting as well as the definitions applied to her as a grad student inEngland as a black colonial woman. Perceiving of her own identity as multiple and in flux, she canaccept older views of herself and her parents which she no longer affirms. Autobiography is alwaysthe past as reconstructed in the present, and Ahmed welcomes the opportunity for deliberatereconstruction.

I heartily recommend Border Passage for a wide variety of readers; those interested in understandinggender and womanhood, those interested in Islamic women, those interested in the recent history ofthe Middle East and colonization; those interested in autobiography as a search for truths, and thosewho simply want to read an impressive and enjoyable book.

from → Africa, Autobiography/Essays, Colonialization, FEMINISM, HISTORY, Islam, Middle East,MY FAVORITES, WOMEN

5 Comments leave one →1. amymckie PERMALINK

March 21, 2012 9:02 amDefinitely a book I will have to be on the look out for – you and Eva have definitely convincedme!

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13/11/13 A Border Passage: From Cairo to America–A Woman’s Journey, by Leila Ahmed. | Me, you, and books

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