
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.
You may also be interested in...
Book Deconstructs Myth Surrounding Egypt’s Most-Famous Boy King
Egyptologist Aidan Dodson sifts the evidence—from tomb paintings to statuary to temple inscriptions—in his quest to recover the real King Tutankhamun.Drawing New Conclusions About the Status of Women in Ancient Egypt
Egyptologist Mariam F. Ayad that gender bias among historians accounts for an underrepresentation of women’s lives in historical studies of Egypt.The Ebb and Flow of History on the Zambezi River
In tracing the past six centuries of history, historian Malyn Hewitt captures the cyclical rise and fall of the river and its people.