A Border Passage: From Cairo to America—A Woman’s Journey
Ahmed, Leila
1999, Farrar Straus & Giroux, 0-37411518-4, $24 hb; 2000, Penguin usa, 0-14-029183-0, $13.95 pb
Two transformations make up this book: The political and social 20th-century transformation of Egypt, and the transformation of a Cairene child into a self-aware Egyptian woman scholar in the West. The mutually reflecting viewpoints of the child, the foreign student in England, the developing scholar and the established intellectual authority—author of an important book on Women and Gender in Islam—make this articulate memoir three-dimensional. The facts may or may not be objectively accurate, but “their trace and residue in my consciousness” are equally important.
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