Leila Ahmed , "On Becoming an Arab "

Leila Ahmed, the author of A Border Passage: From Cairo to America—A Woman’s Journey, has spent her life contending with issues of identity. Coming of age in Cairo during a period of political tumult, Ahmed witnessed the transformation of Egypt from a British colony into a sovereign Arab nation. The multi-lingual, multi-cultural family life that she knew – English and French were spoken at home, and a cosmopolitan Yugoslavian nanny introduced her to many different cultures through language and food – came increasingly into conflict with the young Egyptian nation’s attempts to carve out a discrete cultural identity. Ahmed found herself struggling in particular with the “living Islam” she inherited from the women in her family and the strict, patriarchal “official Islam” that was woven into the self-understanding of the Egyptian nation.

Drawn from A Border Passage, “On Becoming an Arab” charts the emergence of the Arab League as a political association. It also provides a record of Ahmed’s conflicted feelings as she is told that she is an Arab, and that this identity supercedes her prior understanding of herself as an Egyptian. For Ahmed, her experience is representative of how the process of developing an Arab identity “unsettled and undercut the old understanding of who we were and silently excluded people who had been included in the old definition of Egyptian” (244). Writing the book, and this section in particular, was a way for Ahmed to come to “understand the history [she]'d lived through.” As Ahmed’s personal and political history demonstrates, markers of identity are neither perfectly separate nor completely intertwined, but rather always in play.

Ahmed left Egypt to pursue her education and to fashion her identity as a scholar at Cambridge University’s Girton College; she has since been elected a lifetime member of Clare Hall at Cambridge. After receiving her doctorate in 1981, she taught Near Eastern studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She continues to cross borders in her academic career, having been appointed the first ever professor of women’s studies at Harvard Divinity School, where she currently teaches as the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Divinity. Prior to writing A Border Passage, Ahmed published her influential work, Women and Gender in Islam, which focuses on the range of relationships that Muslim women’s have to the Islamic religion.

Ahmed, Leila. “On Becoming an Arab.” A Border Passage: From Cairo to America—A Woman’s Journey. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999. 243-70.

Digital image drawn from Leila Ahmed's Harvard Divinity School faculty profile.
Quotations come from “On Becoming an Arab,” as well as an interview with Ahmed available at http://us.penguingroup.com/static/rguides/us/border_passage.html.

Links to Explore:

Penguin Reader's Guide: this web site features an interview with Leila Ahmed, as well as a series of discussion questions.

Leila Ahmed's faculty profile.

Muslim Women, and Other Misunderstandings: an episode of the public radio show Speaking of Faith that features Leila Ahmed.

Interfaith Voices: this podcast includes a conversation with Leila Ahmed on the subject of the veil.

Questions for Connecting:

• In Ahmed's narrative, she documents the changing meaning of Arab over time, pointing to a moment when the word "silently carried within it its polar opposite—Zionest/Jew—without which hidden, silent connotation it actually had no meaning." Later in her account, Ahmed reports that "[t]he European meaning of 'arab' hollowed out our word, replacing it entirely with itself." Does Ahmed find herself caught in one version of the "argument culture" that Deborah Tannen describes in "The Roots of Debate in Education and the Hope for Dialogue"? What roles do conflict and dialogue play in the identity formation of an individual? A nation?

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