{"product_id":"a-border-passage-isbn-9780143121923","title":"A Border Passage","description":"\u003cb\u003eAn Egyptian woman's reflections on her changing homeland—updated with an afterword on the Arab Spring\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn language that vividly evokes the lush summers of Cairo and the stark beauty of the Arabian desert, Leila Ahmed movingly recounts her Egyptian childhood growing up in a rich tradition of Islamic women and describes how she eventually came to terms with her identity as a feminist living in America. As a young woman in Cairo in the forties and fifties, Ahmed witnessed some of the major transformations of this century—the end of British colonialism, the rise of Arab nationalism, and the breakdown of  Egypt's once multireligious society. As today's Egypt continues to undergo revolutionary change, Ahmed's inspirational story remains as poignant and relevant as ever.\u003c\/p\u003e\"A richly insightful account of the inner conflicts of a generation coming of age during and after the collapse of European imperialism...a wonderfully evocative memoir.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAhmed, 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.\u003cbr\u003e — \u003cb\u003eLibrary Journal\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAs in her widely admired scholarly book Women and Gender in Islam, Ahmed  addresses how historical and political forces shape personal  identities, particularly those of Arab Muslim women. Here, however, the  subject is Ahmed's own identity as a scholar, a woman, a Muslim and an  upper-class Egyptian at home in both East and West. In elegant prose,  she tells of her childhood in Cairo, her college years at Cambridge and  of teaching in Abu Dhabi and America. In Ahmed's nuanced rendering,  politics are not the backdrop to people's lives but their fabric. The  internalization of colonial attitudes, the 1952 revolution and Arab  nationalism, class issues, the effects of Zionism and the politics of  gender roles are woven into her life and the lives of those around her.  Most poignant is the transformation of Ahmed's disdain for her  \"traditional\" Arabic-speaking mother, who spent her days with female  relatives, into an understanding of how these women made sense of their  lives. Indeed, throughout this fluid memoir, she provocatively  reformulates the terms by which men, Western and Arab, have defined women  through her own cross-cultural comparisons of women's communities, as  when she describes the all-female Girton College (at Cambridge) as a  harem, \"the harem as I had lived it, the harem of older women presiding  over the young.\" \u003cbr\u003e — \u003cb\u003ePublishers Weekly\u003c\/b\u003eLeila Ahmed is the first professor of Women's Studies and Religion at Harvard Divinity School. She is the author of \u003cb\u003eWomen and Gender in Islam\u003c\/b\u003e, and the memoir, \u003cb\u003eA Border Passage\u003c\/b\u003e.","brand":"Penguin Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46305178976485,"sku":"NP9780143121923","price":18.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780143121923.jpg?v=1767720312","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/a-border-passage-isbn-9780143121923","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}