A Border Passage is a memoir of Leila Ahmed’s navigation of a turbulent era in Egyptian history.
Leila Ahmed became the first professor in Women’s Studies in Religion at Harvard Divinity School in 1999, and the
Victor S. Thomas chair in 2003. She has written extensively on British ideas of the Middle East and on women’s place in Islam. Although her focus has been on academic publication, Ahmed published an
outstanding memoir in 1999 that drew on her intellectual work on female, Muslim and Middle Eastern identity in relation to the West.
Like the post-WWII map of the world, Ahmed was born in 1940, just outside Cairo. The early part of her memoir recounts often idyllic memories of spending time with her family in Alexandria, and particularly of learning about Islamic and Egyptian identity through spending time in the women’s quarters with her mother and grandmother.
Ahmed comes to adolescence just as Nasser sweeps to power. Her teenage consciousness (and conscience) is shaped by her structuralist engineer father’s opposition to the Aswan High Dam, and by the conflict between her multicultural upbringing and education and Nasser’s Arab nationalism. In the 1960, Ahmed left Egypt definitively for the West, first for a Ph.D. at Cambridge and then to teach in New England. She arrived in England in the era of Enoch Powell, and experienced both racism and Orientalism. She also encountered student radicalism, both Marxist and feminist, and shaped her own thought to a moderate and critical path between them.
Her experience studying British Orientalist Edward William Lane (the subject of her Ph.D. and first book) made her equally critical of Edward Said’s project in
Orientalism for flattening the complexities of Arab identity in the West. However, she recognises that it created a discourse in which her own work could participate, and which implicitly shaped her journey to an academic position in the US after a period teaching in the Gulf. She is equally critical of American feminism’s flattening of class and race politics, and speaks eloquently of the need for an
Islamic feminism and its historical roots in Arab culture.
A Border Passage identifies many subtle and crucial boundaries and checkpoints through which Ahmed, both as an individual and as
a symbol of Arab identity, passed from 1940 to the present. She writes perspicaciously about the finer intersections and distinctions, for example in the chapter ‘On Becoming an Arab,’ where she identifies many slight shifts that, on the one hand, aligned Egyptians with Arab nationalism and anti-Zionism, and on the other, shaped her identity as an Arab in Western eyes. Ahmed points out that we are all always crossing and criss-crossing borders of others’ making with regards to our identity – the particular gift of
A Border Passage is to tease out how this applies to Arab identity in the twentieth century, and the identity of an Arab woman intellectual in the West in particular.
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