Leila Ahmed, A Border Passage: From Cairo to America – A Woman's Journey.
1999- 2000 New York: Penguin Putnam Inc.
In regard to Leila Ahmed's latest novel, the truth is definitely in the title. A border passage is an intimate account of life, and the journey one embarks on when one truly wishes to ‘live life.’ Ahmed writes about ‘border passages,’ passages from girlhood to womanhood, citizenship to immigrant, from Arab nationalism to Western feminism, and perhaps most importantly Egyptian to Arab. This book is a memoir, but it doesn't confine itself to the restrictions of the entirely personal. A Border Passage embodies the notion that the personal is political: and the political is also personal. And it's her ‘personal’ that take on the events that fashioned Egypt, her mother nation, which makes this novel brilliant. Leila Ahmed calls her book just a “work of memory,” however it is much more than that. She delves into the Suez Crisis and Nasser’s Arab Nationalism, what it means to be Arab and when exactly Egyptians became Arab, and finally the Harem reexamined in regard to “aural” Islam.
A Border Passage, is the story of her intellectual and emotional journey from a advantaged childhood in post-world War II Egypt to Cambrid
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------The despondency of her world was not the only issue that challenged Ahmed. Her work has been of immense importance to the study of Islam's views and treatment of women. Exploring the meaning of Arab-ness feels to Ahmed like committing treason against her people and homeland, “I felt like a betrayer. Race, culture, and language for Ahmed are not in any way black or white, their boundaries are indefinable just like the people who embody and use them. Ahmed expresses that this ‘women’s Islam’ is not ‘textual’ or ‘written’ not like the ‘official’ Islam but rather, “stresses moral conduct and emphasizes Islam as a broad ethos and ethical code. In the end, she comes to this conclusion. It was about what sense you make of your life and how aware you were of other people and the stars and the rhythms of existence”(129) She learned that this “lived” Islam is just as profound and important as an ‘official’ Islam. She realized that apart from these issues, westerners knew little or nothing bout Islam and its relation to women. The ideas are extremely complex and yet Ahmed reveals them in a logical and understandable manner. And looking around them, they understood perfectly well, too, what a travesty men had made of it. And it is this notion that Ahmed suggests embodies ‘lived’ Islam. In chapter five, Ahmed discusses Harem and the idea that there is a clear distinct between ‘lived’ Islam and the ‘official’ Islam, “and the women had, too, I now believe, their own understanding of Islam, an understanding that was different from men’s Islam, ‘official’ Islam.
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Approximate Word count =
2929
Approximate Pages =
12 (250 words per page double spaced)
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