Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #401577 in Books
• Published on: 2000-06-05
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 307 pages

From the Publisher
More praise for A Border Passage
"A luxurious banquet of sensual images. . . Ahmed has spread a sumptuous table . . . her powers of observation and her skills and a communicator are keen . . . Extraordinary . . . Like a lapidary turning a gem repeatedly in order to refine and polish it to its highest sheen, Ms. Ahmed is never content to simply accept an apparent truth without examining it from all sides . . . Her admonitions are so kind and her reasons so sound that we never resent them, even when they are most accurate in exposing our weaknesses, prejudices, and failures." --G. K. Nelson, Savoy Magazine

Customer Reviews

Lyrical. Reflective. Beautiful. That's just the half of it
A very intimate autobiography because it's not an autobiography at all, it's about 'border passages' -- from child to adulthood, women's communities to patriarchal ones, citizenship to immigrant, and has stirred in me a strong desire to learn more about Islam. It blew a lot of my misconceptions out of the water, but in an incidental fashion: not, "You all think Muslim women are like this, you're wrong, here's the truth", but "when I was a child, I grew up this way, in a woman's community filled with the oral teachings of Islam, oral culture, oral tradition..." lots of wonderful and instructive reminisences about her family and culture and growing up in Egypt during the time that Nassar came to power, the era when the word "Arab" was redefined, and the impact of her parents, her immediate family, and their beliefs on the sum and substance of her own life. In the course of this discussion is embedded a course on Egyptian history from the eyes of both a child, and the adult scholar who turned her attention to her own home and history.

Ahmed's comments on coming to America at the height of '60s feminism', when white middle-class women where questioning fundamental tenets of their society, yet being discouraged from asking similar questions of her own society's tenets, a pressure many 'feminists of color' experienced, was of particular interest to me. I think there may be an interesting parallel between that experience and the pressure on Third Wave feminists by some older feminists to not stray from the path established by them in the 60s, to not ask our own questions.

Ahmed's discussion of the impact of a literary emphasis on education in a culture that is predominately oral has caused me to question my own rigid assumption that if "it isn't written down, it didn't happen". She makes a fascinating point about patriarchal ideas of Islam being proliferated by 'Western' educational systems that assign more credence to the written word than the oral tradition. The story of Islam that is distributed to the world, is that of a bunch of dead misogynists, not the living religion. I find this fascinating, having had more exposure to Christianity than any other religion, which is a faith that is based on its literature -- though the faith is studied and transmitted orally by a minister to a flock, it is still based on the written word, and the faithful are expected to read that word.

An oral Islam, a women's Islam, contemplated, discussed, refined, educated in women's communities, very seperate from the written Islam, the men's Islam, is a religious division I had never considered. It's excited me to learn more about this Islam.

In sum, A Border Passage covers a great deal of ground, in an intimate, contemplative fashion: social (life in Egypt, England, the United Arab Emirates, and the USA), psychological (her parents, her moral and religious education, and passage into adulthood), and political (Arab nationalism, colonialism, post-colonialism, race in England, race and feminism in America ), all wrapped up in fundamental discussions of self-identity. Worth every moment spent reading it.

A thought-provoking but readable autobiography
This book tells the author's experience of growing up in a priviledged Egyptian family (living through the Nasser Revolution and the Suez crisis), then moving to study and work in England and later the US.

It is a thoughtful and thought-provoking, yet very readable, book.

As an Englishwoman living in Cairo, and struggling to understand a culture very different from my own, I found Leila Ahmed's book fascinating and enlightening. The part about how Egypt's identity as an "Arab" state and nation is a recent construct, explained some things which I had been wondering about. (for example, why a Bedouin colleague here refers to himself as an Arab, as opposed to the Egyptians ... and why the Egyptians say "the Arabs" to mean the Gulf Arabs).

But there is lots more than that in the book - about the oral traditions of Islam, about womens experience, about becoming an immigrant...and very readable because written from a personal , not a theoretical, point of view.

I could not restrain a sense of irritation with some of the author's descriptions of her priviledged milieu ... but then forgave her everything when she pointed out (I thought this funny as well as perceptive) that it's OK to have servants in the West as long as you don't call them servants but "assistants" or "the woman who comes in to do some cleaning".

I think many different people will get something out of this book, because of (something that Salman Rushdie talks about) the way that the experience of the clash and mixing of different cultures is so central to our modern world.

It is a must-have book.
Reading this book was such an exciting and exuberant experience. As I was going through the book, I had this inexplicable feeling that Ahmed was talking about myself, my childhood, my Turkish descent, my life in Cairo before moving into the States three years ago, and my summer vacations in Alexandria. Ahmed elucidated her ethos and beliefs ardently and unfeignedly that every reader will be able to feel her sincerity and genuineness. In doing that, Ahmed presented a neat and precise summary of the Egyptian modern history. which to me, an Egyptian by birth, born after Nasser's era, was an undiscovered treasure.

To me, Egypt after Independence was a puzzle, and Ahmed's book helped me to put the bits and pieces together. Eventually, I was able to understand why the Egyptian people have different positions toward Socialism brought about by Nasser and his faction and why my father, a lawyer by profession and a capitalist by birth always hated Nasser and disrespected his party.

Albeit English is her second language, Ahmed's command of the lanaguage is prodigious. For non-Egyptians, I expect the book to be as interesting as it is for the natives. This book represents an intricately structured state-of-the-art mini-encyclopedia of Sociology, Psychology and History flowing naturally and smoothly. This is the kind of book, I, first generation Egyptian immigrant, would keep for my children and grand children as a reference they could get back to during their life journey.