Leila Ahmed

Egyptian American writer and professor

Leila Ahmed (لیلى أحمد; born 29 May 1940) is an Egyptian American scholar of Islam. In 1992 she published her book Women and Gender in Islam, which is regarded as a pioneering historical analysis of the position of women in Arab Muslim societies. She became the first professor of women's studies in religion at Harvard Divinity School in 1999, and has held the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Divinity chair since 2003. She was later awarded the Victor S. Thomas Research Professor of Divinity in 2020.

Born in the Heliopolis district of Cairo to a middle class Egyptian father and an upper class Turkish mother in 1940, Ahmed's childhood was shaped both by Muslim Egyptian values and the liberal orientation of Egypt's aristocracy under the ancien régime. The Ahmed family became politically ostracized following the Free Officers Movement in 1952. Her father, a civil engineer, was a vocal opponent of Gamal Abdel Nasser's construction of the Aswan High Dam on ecological principles. She earned her undergraduate and doctorate degrees from University of Cambridge during the 1960s before moving to the United States to teach and write, where she was appointed to professorship in Women's Studies and Near Eastern studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and the position of director in said programs in 1981. A professorship in Women's Studies and Religion at the Harvard Divinity School followed in 1999, where she currently teaches. As such, she no longer believes that the resurgence of the veil was solely driven by patriarchy, a view she held when she was younger, as she noted how many women in the United States wore it as a symbol of their Islamic identity, social justice, and to raise other women's awareness of society's sexist messages about women's bodies and dress. However, she believes that the veil has no universal meaning and is still driven by forces of patriarchy in other places around the world. From a description of Ahmed's work provided by Yale University Press London: "Ahmed observed that Islamism, with its commitments to activism in the service of the poor and in pursuit of social justice, is the strain of Islam most easily and naturally merging with western democracies' own tradition of activism in the cause of justice and social change. It is often Islamists, even more than secular Muslims, who are at the forefront of such contemporary activist struggles as civil rights and women's rights. Ahmed's surprising conclusions represent a near reversal of her thinking on this topic."

In her 1999 memoir A Border Passage, Ahmed describes her multicultural Cairene upbringing and her adult life as an expatriate and an immigrant in Europe and the United States. She tells of how she was introduced to Islam through her grandmother during her childhood, and she came to distinguish it from "official Islam" as practiced and preached by a largely male religious elite. This realization would later form the basis of her first acclaimed book, Women and Gender in Islam (1992), a now classic work on Islamic history, Muslim feminism, and the historical role of women in Islam as well as Muslim discourses about women. Ahmed speaks of her experience in 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. Ahmed has been a strong critic of Arab nationalism in Egypt and the Middle East. She devotes an entire chapter in her autobiography to the question of Arab nationalism, and the political factors and efforts which went into constructing an Arab identity for Egypt after the army's coup d'état. According to Ahmed's research, the idea that Egyptians were "Arab" was virtually unheard of well into the 20th century. 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.

"Women in the rise of Islam." The new Voices of Islam : Rethinking Politics and Modernity : a Reader. Ed. Mehran Kamrava. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006. 177–200. "The Discourse of the Veil." Post Colonialisms: an Anthology of Cultural Theory and Criticism. Ed. Gaurav Desai and Supriya Nair. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005. 315–338. "The Veil Debate Again: a View from America in the Early Twenty first Century". On Shifting Ground: Muslim Women in the Global Era. Ed. Fereshteh Nourale Simone. New York: Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 2005. "Gender and literacy in Islam." Nothing Sacred: Women Respond to Religious Fundamentalism and Terror. Ed. Betsy Reed. New York: Thunder's Mouth Press/Nation Books, 2002. "The Women of Islam". Transition 83 (2000): 78–97. "Early Islam and the position of Women: the problem of interpretation." Women in Middle Eastern History: Shifting Boundaries in Sex and Gender. Ed. Nikki R. Keddie, Beth Baron. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993. "Arab Culture and Writing Woman's Bodies." Gender Issues 9.1 (March 1, 1989): 41–55. "Women and the Advent of Islam." Signs 11.4 (Summer, 1986): 665–691. "Feminism and Feminist Movements in the Middle East, a Preliminary Exploration: Turkey, Egypt, Algeria, People's Democratic Republic of Yemen." Women and Islam. Ed. Ellen Skinner. Virginia: Pergamon Press: 1982. 153. "Western Ethnocentrism and Perceptions of the Harem." Feminist Studies 8.3 (Autumn, 1982): 521–534. Ahmed, Leila, Krishna Ahooja Patel, Charlotte Bunch, Nilufer Cagatay, Ursula Funk, Dafna N. Izraeli, Margaret McIntosh, Helen I. Safa, and Aline K. Wong. "Comments on Tinker's 'A Feminist view of Copenhagen". Signs 6.4 (Summer, 1981): 771–790. "Encounter with American Feminism: A Muslim Woman's View of Two Conferences". Women's Studies Newsletter 8.3 (Summer, 1980): 7–9.