Loading ...Pathbreakers of Arab America—Leila Ahmed
By: John Mason / Arab America Contributing Writer
This is the seventy-sixth of Arab America’s series on American pathbreakers of Arab descent. The series includes personalities from entertainment, business, sports, science, arts, academia, journalism, and politics, among other areas. Our seventy-sixth pathbreaker, Leila Ahmed, grew up in Cairo in the 1940s and ’50s and sought to define herself – and to understand how the world defined her – as a woman, a Muslim, an Egyptian, and an Arab. Her journey brought her to the Harvard Divinity School, where she became the first professor of women’s studies in religion and a primary interpreter of Middle Eastern society, especially of its women.
A champion of women’s rights, Leila Ahmed, has written pioneering studies on women in Arab Muslim societies.
Leila Ahmed was born on May 29, 1940, in the Heliopolis district of Cairo to a middle-class Egyptian father and an upper-class Turkish mother. Wikipedia’s series on Arab Americans describes her childhood as “shaped both by Muslim Egyptian values and the liberal orientation of Egypt’s aristocracy under the “Ancien Régime,” meaning the earlier pre-revolution monarchy. Following the Free Officers Movement led by Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1952, Leila’s family became politically ostracized.
Her civil engineer father vocally opposed Nasser’s construction of the Aswan High Dam on ecological grounds. Almost 3/4s of a century later, her father’s concerns have come to fruition in terms of the Dam’s forcible displacement of the Nubian people, shattering their society, and Egyptian farmers, forced to use much larger fertilizer portions to replace soil sediments blocked by the dam.
A result of her family’s opposition to Nasser’s policies and the “persecutions that would throw their lives into turmoil set their youngest child on a journey across cultures.” Ahmed first went to England, earning her undergraduate and doctorate degrees from the University of Cambridge during the 1960s. During her academic years, Leila also had teaching jobs in Abu Dhabi and the U.S. She defines these years as a time when she “sought to define herself – and to understand how the world defined her – as a woman, a Muslim, an Egyptian, and an Arab.”
While searching for her identity, Ahmed began her long research career, asking questions about “language and nationalism, differences between men’s and women’s ways of knowing, and vastly different interpretations of Islam.” Through her journey, Leila “arrived as an ardent but critical feminist with an insider’s understanding of multiculturalism and religious pluralism.” It is not an unfamiliar story to women generally who have similarly moved across cultures.
Leila’s first position in the U.S. in 1981 was a professorship in Women’s Studies and Near Eastern studies at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and as director of the Women’s Studies programs. That was followed in 1999 by an appointment to professor in Women’s Studies and Religion at the Harvard Divinity School, where Leila currently teaches. Leila was the first women’s studies in religion professor at the divinity school and has held the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Divinity chair since 2003.
Leila has had a long, established career in writing, including her book, “Women and Gender in Islam.” A Yale University Press release quotes her proposition that women’s role is best defined in terms of the humanitarian side of Islam, “with its commitments to activism in the service of the poor and pursuit of social justice…the strain of Islam most easily and naturally merging with western democracies’ tradition of activism in the cause of justice and social change.”
Ahmed is not fond of the kind of Arab nationalism that overtook Egypt and much of the Middle East. She has questioned Arab nationalism, including the political factors and efforts that went into constructing an Arab identity for Egypt after the army’s coup d’état. “She describes Arab nationalism, like many other forms of pan-nationalism, as a type of cultural imperialism. This cultural imperialism eats away at the diversity and cultural creativity of not only the Arabic-speaking national majorities (who often speak widely divergent vernaculars) but also the non-Arabic speaking minorities throughout the Middle East and North Africa.”
Ahmed has argued that the oppressive practices to which women in the Middle East are subjected are caused by “the prevalence of patriarchal interpretations of Islam rather than Islam itself.” She maintains that as Islam evolved, two divergent voices emerged in the religion: 1) “An ethical structure that advocates the moral and spiritual equality of all human beings and 2) “a hierarchical structure as the basis of male/female relations; a gender-based/sexual hierarchy.“ Ahmed cites the origin of the second voice as the Abbasid Caliphate, defined as “androcentric” (male-centered) and “misogynist.”
Ahmed avers that this second voice “emphasized and institutionalized the gendered hierarchical voice and silenced the voice of equity and justice.” She claims that “Islam as a religion, therefore, became a discourse of the politically dominant elite, i.e., male society.”
Then came along early 19th-century colonial encroachment, according to Ahmed, in which European colonialism introduced the idea of female emancipation as an argument for legitimate geopolitical incursion. “Colonial feminism was a Western discourse of dominance which introduced the notion that an intrinsic connection existed between the issue of culture and the status of women, and … that progress for women could be achieved only through abandoning the native culture.” The initial reaction to this was a rejection of Western values by political Islamists.
Ahmed proposed the resurgence of the veil as a ‘quiet revolution,’ a sign of women’s struggle for civil and women’s rights
In Cairo in the 1940s, Leila grew up in a generation of women who did not wear veils or headscarves, but their mothers and grandmothers had worn them. “To them, these coverings seemed irrelevant to both modern life and Islamic piety. Today, however, the majority of Muslim women throughout the Islamic world again wear the veil. Why, Ahmed asks, did this change take root so swiftly, and what does this shift mean for women, Islam, and the West?”
Initially in her study, Leila thought the veil’s return was a backward step for Muslim women worldwide. She discovered, however, from stories of British colonial officials, that “young Muslim feminists, Arab nationalists, pious Islamic daughters, American Muslim immigrants, violent jihadists, and peaceful Islamic activists, confounded her expectations.” It is often Islamists (those who believe Islam should have a ‘fundamental’ role in life), “even more than secular Muslims, who are at the forefront of such contemporary activist struggles as civil rights and women’s rights.”
Given her upbringing, even as a liberated Muslim woman, Ahmed described her transition to Europe and the United States as one that was “often fraught with tension and confusion as she tried to reconcile her Muslim Egyptian identity with Western values. “Faced with racism and anti-Muslim prejudice, and after deconstructing traditionalist male-centered beliefs in her own culture, she set out to dispel equally damaging myths and misconceptions held by the West about Islam and Muslim women.”
A more valuable gift than that given by Leila Ahmed in changing our perceptions about Arab women, their rights, and the role of the veil cannot be imagined. She has truly gifted us with an excellent cross-cultural understanding of herself, her gender, and of Arab society in general.
Sources:
–”Leila Ahmed,” Wikipedia Series on Arab Americans, 2024
–“Leila Ahmed, Victor S. Thomas Research Professor of Divinity,” Harvard Divinity Faculty, 2025
–“Women and Gender in Islam,” Leila Ahmed, Review of republication, Yale University Press, Veritas paperback series, 2021
–“A Quiet Revolution: The Veil’s Resurgence, from the Middle East to America, by Leila Ahmed, Review of Paperback, 6/5/2012
John Mason, Ph.D., focuses on Arab culture, society, and history and is the author of LEFT-HANDED IN AN ISLAMIC WORLD: An Anthropologist’s Journey into the Middle East, New Academia Publishing, 2017. He has taught at the University of Libya, Benghazi, Rennselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York, and the American University in Cairo; John served with the United Nations in Tripoli, Libya, and consulted extensively on socioeconomic and political development for USAID and the World Bank in 65 countries.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of Arab America. The reproduction of this article is permissible with proper credit to Arab America and the author.
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