A Border Passage: From Cairo to America: A Woman's Journey by Leila Ahmed

Review by: Clarissa Burt

Feminist Review, No. 69, The Realm of the Possible: Middle Eastern Women in Political and
Social Spaces (Winter, 2001), pp. 156-158
Published by: Palgrave Macmillan Journals
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OO entertain those unfamiliar with Arabic, but which certainly adds to the
es
exoticism of the English text.
Ultimately the novel's success is troubled by the inescapable emergent
uncertainty concerning the political correctness of present-day cultural and
economic imperialism, now with an Egyptian face, just as the indignities
visited upon the Egyptian people in Cromer's time have ceded to indigni-
ties and acts of violence visited by Egyptian authorities and religious fanat-
ics. The irritating and unresolved question of incest also seems superfluous
- must everything be reducible to Oedipus after all? For all its flaws, the
imitation Victorian novel woven into Soueif's awkward bicultural millen-
nial reckoning of her relationship with contemporary Egypt make The
Map of Love well worth the read.
Clarissa Burt
A Border Passage: From Cairo to America - a
Women's Journey
Leila Ahmed
New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999
ISBN 0374115184 $24.00 Hbk
ISBN 0140291830 $13.95 Pbk (NY: Penguin, 2000)
Leila Ahmed is one of the most important contemporary figures in the field
of Gender and Women's Studies, especially in relation to the contemporary
Middle East. Best known for her seminal book entitled Women and
Gender in Islam, Leila Ahmed has contributed widely to opening the field
and conferring depth to the western academic discussion of gender in the
Middle East, the Arab world and Islam. This volume, comprising a per-
sonal memoir, is a further contribution to that field, while at the same time
annexing new intellectual space for multicultural productions. It is a post-
colonial memoir unfolding the constructs of Ahmed's multi-aspectual
identity, wedded beautifully to an exploration of the historical, political
and intellectual circumstances (and changes) in which she matured.
In a marvellous fugue of spiralling memories, Leila Ahmed conducts us
through a symphonic reconstruction of the development of her identity
and consciousness, looking back on her childhood in the gardens of privi-
lege in the then well-to-do multicultural and religiously pluralist Cairene
suburb of 'Ain Shams. Her recollection of the changes in that garden and
the surrounding neighbourhood over the course of her lifetime mark and
measure the amazing social and economic transformation of Cairo as a
city, as well as the personal fortunes of her family from the 1940s through
the revolution and Nasser's and Sadat's regimes.
156
OO entertain those unfamiliar with Arabic, but which certainly adds to the
es
exoticism of the English text.
Ultimately the novel's success is troubled by the inescapable emergent
uncertainty concerning the political correctness of present-day cultural and
economic imperialism, now with an Egyptian face, just as the indignities
visited upon the Egyptian people in Cromer's time have ceded to indigni-
ties and acts of violence visited by Egyptian authorities and religious fanat-
ics. The irritating and unresolved question of incest also seems superfluous
- must everything be reducible to Oedipus after all? For all its flaws, the
imitation Victorian novel woven into Soueif's awkward bicultural millen-
nial reckoning of her relationship with contemporary Egypt make The
Map of Love well worth the read.
Clarissa Burt
A Border Passage: From Cairo to America - a
Women's Journey
Leila Ahmed
New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999
ISBN 0374115184 $24.00 Hbk
ISBN 0140291830 $13.95 Pbk (NY: Penguin, 2000)
Leila Ahmed is one of the most important contemporary figures in the field
of Gender and Women's Studies, especially in relation to the contemporary
Middle East. Best known for her seminal book entitled Women and
Gender in Islam, Leila Ahmed has contributed widely to opening the field
and conferring depth to the western academic discussion of gender in the
Middle East, the Arab world and Islam. This volume, comprising a per-
sonal memoir, is a further contribution to that field, while at the same time
annexing new intellectual space for multicultural productions. It is a post-
colonial memoir unfolding the constructs of Ahmed's multi-aspectual
identity, wedded beautifully to an exploration of the historical, political
and intellectual circumstances (and changes) in which she matured.
In a marvellous fugue of spiralling memories, Leila Ahmed conducts us
through a symphonic reconstruction of the development of her identity
and consciousness, looking back on her childhood in the gardens of privi-
lege in the then well-to-do multicultural and religiously pluralist Cairene
suburb of 'Ain Shams. Her recollection of the changes in that garden and
the surrounding neighbourhood over the course of her lifetime mark and
measure the amazing social and economic transformation of Cairo as a
city, as well as the personal fortunes of her family from the 1940s through
the revolution and Nasser's and Sadat's regimes.
156
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All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
We learn of her introduction to the world of gender restrictions when pre- <
pubescent sexual explorations on the part of a neighbour boy result in her mE
being struck, punished, medically examined and thereafter isolated from
contact with boy children again. Leila Ahmed's marvellous description of
gender-segregated society, and her life among the women of her family is
refreshingly demystifying, clearly indicating the strength, power and influ-
ence of women in upper class Egyptian society. At the same time, Leila
Ahmed contemplates the oppressive consequences of social and legal
gender restrictions, as she recalls her aunt's unhappiness in a marriage she
could not dissolve, and which ultimately contributed to her suicide when
she threw herself from an upstairs window during an argument with her
husband. Several other examples illustrate what Ahmed considers the
gender troubles of her native and adopted cultures.
Ahmed contrasts her own experience of the spiritual, emotional and cul-
tural richness and ethical responsibility of that familial world of women
with what she sees as masculinist abuses of religion based on rigid interpre-
tations of medieval Islamic text traditions. She relates this contrast to the
tensions between the linguistic and cultural hegemony of the literary
Arabic texts and the natural, oral language and culture of daily living and
her own difficulty with Arabic literacy. As a privileged product of the
British colonial educational system, her biculturality and English literacy
have contributed to the positioning of the perspectives she shares with us
about her native Egyptian culture and the British, Arab and American cul-
tures into which she crosses in the course of her Border Passage.
Leila Ahmed also shares the development and transformation of her politi-
cal identity, as she recalls and mourns the disappearance of the multi-
cultural and religiously plural and highly tolerant society into which she
was born, through the procession of events surrounding the end of British
occupation in Egypt, the 1952 revolution and the establishment of Israel
in the region. She recounts the political repression encountered by her
father who campaigned against the building of the high dam at Aswan in
environmental foresight, a position that cost him dearly both under King
Farouq and Nasser thereafter. She struggles in front of us between the cost
of 1952 revolution and its nationalizing reforms under Nasser to her
family's personal fortunes, and the sweeping popular enthusiasm and hope
of equity encoded into the revolutionary project. The political punishment
of her father fell on her as his child, in the form of restriction from travel
by bureaucratic stonewalling.
Leila Ahmed describes her entry in the halls of academe in her tales of a
new phase of her life at Girton College in Cambridge, which she describes
as another world run by and for women, an academic harem. She honours 157
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the teachers who influencecl her deeply at that time, painting marvellous
portraits of them and how they contributed to her academic achievement
and intellectual development. After overcoming the travel restriction
which had kept her in Egypt for an extended time after her undergradu-
ate work, and during which she participated in the nursing of her father's
declining health, in increasing difficult personal economic circumstances,
Ahmed returned to England for her Ph.O. Her dissertation was written on
William Edward Lane, the nineteenth-century English orientalist who lived
extensively in Egypt and, whose name has been both revered and reviled
in turn in the changing ideological fashions of the academic environment.
It was in this phase of her life that Ahmed details for us her growing con-
sciousness of the pervasive racism directed against non-whites in Great
Britain, her association with other academic 'women of colour' and her
brief marriage in the context of the anxieties of completing her Ph.O. It
was at this point that she begins to take on an identification as an Arab
Muslim in response to the racism she encountered in both Great Britain
and thereafter in the United States, where she now teaches Women's
Studies at Amherst.
The memoir is beautifully written, and is very rich and instructive in its
historical, political and multicultural aspects. Leila Ahmed decorates her
text with quotations of poetry and mystical literature, particularly that of
Jalal al-Din Rumi, the famous Persian Sufi poet, giving the text the cast of
a spiritual journey, which is confirmed more than one in the context she
shares with us. Her refreshingly frank contemplations of various versions
and (mis)understandings of Islam and her struggle over whether to convert
to another faith are resolved in humanistic acceptance of a spirituality dis-
tinct from her culturally produced and maintained religious identity. The
very ability to articulate that, however, is perhaps only possibly through
her postcolonial use of English, directing her discourse to a primarily
western audience of the culture in which she now lives.
Clarissa Burt
158
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