INTRODUCTION
"It was as if there were to life itself a
quality of music in that time, the era of my childhood, and in that
place, the remote edge of Cairo. There the city petered out into a
scattering of villas leading into tranquil country fields. On the other
side of our house was the profound, unsurpassable quiet of the desert."
—A Border Passage
"That," says Leila Ahmed, "is how it was in the beginning...
to come to consciousness in...a world alive, as it seemed, with the
music of being." Indeed, the early years of Ahmed's youth in Cairo were
blessed, and her recollections of her parents' vibrant garden and of a
city surrounded by expanses of breathtaking desert are exquisite and,
at times, mystical. They do not, however, foretell the events that
would splinter the lives of the Ahmed family. For the Egypt of Leila
Ahmed's childhood—a country that tolerated and even admired the
European culture of the British colonizers, a country that embraced its
diverse population and that for decades functioned under King Farouk as
a republic (with, of course, occasional "intervention" from
England)—was becoming increasingly unfamiliar. As Ahmed approached her
teenage years, Egypt underwent a revolution. It is from this revolution
that Nasser and Anwar al-Sadat emerged, espousing new messages of
socialism, anti-imperialism, and Arab nationalism to the Egyptian
people. It is in this era that Sadat penned his own memoir entitled
In Search of Identity.
And, as Ahmed astutely observed, "if the president of Egypt
himself...was searching for his identity, no wonder that I, crossing
the threshold into my teenage years in that era of revolution, would
find myself profoundly confused and conflicted."
Even as a child, Ahmed straddled several different cultures.
There was the nanny with whom Ahmed spent most of her time, a
Yugoslavian woman who spoke German, French, and Italian. Ahmed has said
that the taste of her kugelof, cannelloni, and apricot jams represent
for her the "distillation of childhood." There was the private world
created by her mother, her aunts, and her grandmother, all of whom
embodied the pacifist, life-affirming qualities of an Islam that was
steeped in a rich, living oral tradition. This was in sharp contrast to
the more severe tenets of the official Islam—drawn by men from arcane
written texts—that were beginning to be reimposed with new emphasis
throughout the Middle East. There were the children with whom she
attended the English school in Cairo—Syrians, Lebanese, and
Palestinians as well as of Christian, Egyptian, Jewish and Muslim
backgrounds—and, of course, there were the English.
Ahmed's connection to the European culture brought to Egypt by
the British colonizers was, to say the least, intensely complicated.
Upper-class families such as Ahmed's often grew up speaking English and
French. Ahmed herself readily admitted that as a young girl she
cherished the works of Somerset Maugham. But while they recognized the
strides made by the European powers in the arts, democracy, and
science, they were appalled by the horrors of World War II. The days of
the British Empire were waning, and as the issues pertaining to Israel
became increasingly volatile, a tidal wave of "Arab nationalism" washed
over Egypt.
In writing this memoir, Ahmed found two of the most
intractable issues to be of Arab nationalism and the "cargo of
negatives" attached to Islam by Western academia. What, she asks, does
it mean to be an Arab? And how does a Muslim woman bridge the divides
in her own religion, and how does she foster meaningful, supportive
discourse about being a feminist and being a Muslim in an academic
atmosphere that assumes the two are mutually exclusive?
In
A Border Passage, Leila Ahmed lucidly addresses all
of these questions, crystallizing for readers the mysterious,
confounding process by which her identity was constructed amid a
political hotbed. Her search for answers takes readers from a rooftop
angel-watch in Alexandria to the polished classrooms of Cambridge, and
from the surreal cities nestled in the dunes of Abu Dhabi to the ivory
towers of academic America. Still, the most fascinating journey
described within these pages is the journey taken to the self. The
discoveries made there are profound and, in a world of dissolving
boundaries and clashing cultures, can be translated into each of our
lives.
ABOUT LEILA AHMED
Leila Ahmed is the first professor of Women's Studies and Religion at Harvard Divinity School. She is the author of
Women and Gender in Islam and, the memoir,
A Border Passage.
AN INTERVIEW WITH LEILA AHMED
Early on in the book, you address the issue of Arab
nationalism, saying "we are so used to the idea of Egypt as 'Arab' that
it seems unimaginable that Egyptians ever thought of themselves as
anything else." You then go on to explain that the truth of this
assumption shifted as you began to write your book. Things, apparently,
were not what they seemed. Did these revelations change the original
focus of your memoir?
This is a difficult question to answer—precisely because my coming to
understand this—that our identity as Arabs was not just "objective
fact" but politically constructed—was so fundamentally transformative.
In fact I think I might never have finished the book if I hadn't
figured this out—I came to a dead stop in the midst of writing it and
found myself suddenly completely unable to write. This went on for
months—it was a miserable time and I had no idea what the problem
was—except that I did know of course that I felt an enormous sense of
guilt about my feelings about being Arab and I simply couldn't imagine
how I could ever write openly about such things.Looking back now I
believe I was extremely lucky that my memory of the scene between
myself and the Arabic teacher was as vivid as it was to me. Turning it
over in my mind led me to realize that in order to make sense of both
the scene and of my own feelings I needed to understand the history I'd
lived through rather than simply examining and reexamining my own
purely personal inner feeling and memories. And so I guess it did
change the focus in the sense that I had set out intending to write
simply of my own memories and not at all of history or politics—and
found that I couldn't understand my own experiences without these.
How long did it take you to write A Border Passage? Had you been keeping a journal throughout your travels?
It
took me about six or seven years to write. For most of that time I was
teaching as well, so basically I was writing only during the vacations,
although occasionally during the semester I'd be able to get to it on a
weekend. I've sometimes kept a journal—but very sporadically. I began
writing this book sort of sideways—almost as if I didn't really mean to
do it, not seriously anyway. And yet I also think the truth is I had
been desperately waiting for the moment when I could begin. Anyway, I
remember I began setting down some thoughts and memories—those that now
make up much of the first chapter—the day I was finally done with my
last book. I mailed off the corrected manuscript and came back from the
post office and went straight to my desk. In the beginning I wrote
simply as if I were starting a new journal. It was summer so I was able
to keep writing, sitting at it for a few hours every morning, looking
out onto the trees, watching the wind in between. That too now, those
wonderful trees and woods, are part of the past, no longer part of my
life.
When writing the book, did you confer with friends and family—namely your siblings—or did you reconstruct events
purely from your own memories?
It never occurred to me to confer with anyone because there was never a
point when I thought that what I wanted to write was an "objective"
reconstruction of facts, events, and so on. Always what I wanted to
write, what I felt a kind of driving, passionate yearning and even need
to do, was to set down and to be true to the living of this particular
life. "Facts" and history and politics are of course—and far more than
I understood to begin with—part of that story, but it's really how we
saw and experienced these, their trace and residue in our consciousness
and the workings of memory, that make up the stories that we tell and
that are the stuff of memoirs. I know very well—all of us know
this—that different people can witness the same event, brothers and
sisters grow up in the same home, and experience them and remember them
quite differently.
In any case, too, I didn't want to tell my family that I was writing
this book because I imagined it would cause a hullabaloo—that everybody
would be trying to tell me what I could write, and should write, and
very likely, too, above all telling me that I was absolutely not to
write it. And writing was hard enough without all this. So I didn't
tell the family—until it was done and actually in proofs. And I was
right, there was a tremendous hullabaloo. Happily, though, that has now
passed.
One of the most interesting topics explored in your book is
the difference between living, oral traditions and written texts. When
taken within the context of Islam, do you think that there will ever be
a bridge between the living Islam of Muslim women and the official
Islam? Universally, is it usually women that keep oral traditions
alive, or is this specific to Islam?
This question is difficult to answer. Today Islam (like other
religions), which already has all those internal differences and
diversities, is undergoing further tremendous permutations and
transformations as a result, for one thing, of the process of
"globalization" that we're all living through. I could answer your
question in a variety of different ways—depending, for example, on
which part of the world we look toward, and which element in any given
complicated scene we choose to focus on. If we look, for instance, to
countries where Islamic "fundamentalism" is entrenched or growing, it
would seem that the future of the oral tradition of Islam that I grew
up with is simply hopeless. But if you consider that today there are
more than six millions Muslims in America, and that we're in the
process of witnessing the development of an Islam that, for the first
time in history, is unfolding in a country where the freedoms of
thought and speech are guaranteed political rights, then the
possibilities are quite different. Or take the fact that Jaluddin Rumi,
the poet I quote several times in the book because his vision so
perfectly exemplifies the oral Islam I wrote about, is today the
best-selling poet in America. We could take that perhaps as an
indication that the future of this kind of Islam is actually enormously
promising.
