A Border Passage

Library Journal

Ahmed, a professor of women's studies at Amherst and the author of such scholarly works as Women and Gender in Islam (Yale Univ., 1993), writes a personal memoir of her childhood in 1940s and 1950s Cairo, education in England, and teaching work in America. Like the most skillful and subtle of teachers, she entices you with what seems like an afternoon chat over tea; only when it is over do you realize how much you have learned and how fascinating the journey has been. She imparts a great deal of Egyptian history, culture, and sociology, including some background on the concept of "Arabness," as well as a brilliant introduction to the difference between the Islam of men and the Islam of women. The descriptions of her grandmother's salon will no doubt strike a chord of memory with any Western female who spent time listening to mothers, aunts, and grandmothers in the kitchen at family gatherings. A delightful read; recommended for libraries that collect in intercultural, gender, or Middle Eastern studies.--Julie Still, Rutgers Univ., Camden, NJ

Barbara Crossette

...[A] richly insightful account of the inner conflicts of a generation coming of age during and after the collapse of European imperialism....Through [her life experiences], Ahmed kept her balance and distance....[S]he was able to draw much wisdom from experiences that often radicalized and blinded others....a book of...strong images and provocative ideas.
— The New York Times Book Review

Kirkus Reviews

A lucid and luminous evocation of growing up in a whirlpool of cultures and the rewarding struggle of sorting it all out. Ahmed (Women's Studies/Univ. of Mass., Amherst) was born into a professional Egyptian family that thrived in the quasi-republic of King Farouk and the British protectorate. When Nasser came to power in the early 1950s, her father's influence sank as a result of his protests (on what turned out to be ecologically sound grounds) against the Aswan Dam. The Suez crisis made Nasser a hero in the Arab world and put pressure on Egyptians—until then a motley and proud mixture of Coptic Christian ("the only truly indigenous inhabitants of Egypt"), Muslim, and Jew; of Mediterranean, African, Nilotic—to identify as "Arab." Growing up in a home where English was honored (although Arabic and French were also spoken), Ahmed had come, with her friends, to regard things Arab as inferior. Faced also with the dichotomy of privilege vs. poverty, always visible in Cairo, Ahmed became more and more confused about who she was and where her loyalties lay. This book is about working out that identity—as a woman in a traditional society, as a "black" at Cambridge University, as a Muslim in the anti-Islamic US environment of the 1980s. Even her feminist colleagues' prejudice against Islam was extreme, based primarily on what they saw as "fundamentalist" strictures against women. Ahmed examines these events, questioning various cultural frameworks she has encountered: the men-only mosques where the classical Koran is taught, the white male template of Cambridge, and the written culture so different from the fluid oral traditions she examined on a sojourn in Abu Dhabi. Shedelicately untangles and eloquently describes the threads of political and personal circumstance that led first to confusion and then to understanding. A beautiful tale that is a celebration not only of women and the author's native country (with all its flaws), but also of intellectual flowering.