Leila Ahmed
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Leila Ahmed is an Egyptian American professor of Women's Studies and Religion at the Harvard Divinity School. Prior to coming to Harvard, she was professor of women’s studies and Near Eastern studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She earned her undergraduate and graduate degrees from the University of Cambridge, before she moved to the United States to teach and write.
Contents |
[edit] Background
Born in the Heliopolis district of Cairo to an upper class family in 1940, Ahmed's childhood was shaped both by Muslim Egyptian values and the liberal orientation of Egypt's aristocracy under the ancien régime. After Egypt's last ruling monarch was overthrown by the Free Officers Movement in 1952, life for Ahmed's family along with others in that milieu was irrevocably changed. Her father, a civil engineer by profession, was a strong opponent of Nasser's construction of the Aswan High Dam on ecological principles; a move that earned him the wrath of the ruling regime for years to follow and had detrimental effects on Ahmed's family.
[edit] Writing
In 1999, Ahmed published her memoir, A Border Passage. In it, she describes her multicultural Cairene upbringing and her adult life as an expatriate and an immigrant in the West. She tells of how she was introduced to Islam through her grandmother during her childhood, and she came to distinguish it from "official Islam" as practiced and preached by a largely male religious elite. This realization would later form the basis of her first acclaimed book Women and Gender in Islam (1993), a seminal work on Islamic history, Muslim feminism, and the historical role of women in Islam.
She speaks of her experience in Europe and the United States as one that was often fraught with tension and confusion as she attempted to reconcile her Muslim Egyptian identity with Western values and beliefs. Faced with racism and anti-Muslim prejudice, and after deconstructing traditionalist male-centered beliefs in her own culture, she set out to dispel equally damaging myths and misconceptions held by the West about Islam and Muslim women. Today, Ahmed is perhaps known most widely for her groundbreaking work on the Islamic view of women and their historical and social status in the Muslim world.
Ahmed has been a strong critic of nationalism in Egypt and the Middle East. She devotes an entire chapter in her autobiography on the question of Arab nationalism, and the political factors and efforts which went into constructing an Arab identity for Egypt after the army's coup d'état. According to Ahmed's research, the idea that Egyptians were "Arab" was virtually unheard of until well into the 20th century. She describes Arab nationalism, like many other forms of pan-nationalism, as a type of cultural imperialism eating away at the diversity and cultural creativity of both the Arabic-speaking national majorities (who often speak widely divergent vernaculars) and the non-Arabic speaking minorities throughout the Middle East and North Africa.
[edit] Bibliography
- Ahmed (1978). Edward W. Lane: A study of his life and works and of British ideas of the Middle East in the nineteenth century. London: Longman. ISBN 0-582-78083-7.
- Ahmed (1993). Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate. New Haven: Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-05583-8.
- Ahmed (1999). A Border Passage: From Cairo to America—A Woman's Journey. New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux. ISBN 0-374-11518-4.
