A Border Passage
The ideas and views that one has are usually generated throughout their childhood experiences. The events that one face, the problems that one has to deal with, and the people they encounter all have an impact on the way in which a person views the world. The same goes for Leila Ahmed as told throughout her memoirs, A Border Passage. Ahmed's feminism is one that was rooted throughout her childhood, and as she matured she gained a better sense of how it impacted her life. Although the arena of Egypt gave for an unconscious type of feminism, Ahmed's childhood there rooted her explicitly feminist consciousness later in her life.
To compare and contrast the streets of Cairo to the streets of New York is quite opposite. Women are recognized, praised and for the most part respected in Western culture, unlike that of Ahmed's Egyptian homeland. Ahmed grew up in an Egypt that pondered "the issue of identity, a profoundly ambiguous matter for Egypt", which was "deeply inescapably and deeply political" (Ahmed 10). Ahmed also dealt with her own identity, as she questioned and defied many of the ideologies given to women at the time. Ahmed found herself "profoundly confused and conflicted and, forever after, haunted by feelings of deep uncertainty" (Ahmed 10). It would take many encounters, events, people and places for Ahmed to gain an identity of not only an Islamic standpoint, but as a woman.
One of the people who contributed the most in shaping her feminism was her mother. Her mother, as most women in Egypt at that time, sat around the house tending to her husband and having no sort of professional life. This was not the way in which Ahmed wanted to live. Her mother was the example of what Ahmed did not want to be, the exact opposite of what she felt she was capable of achieving. Ahmed referred to her mothers life as "a life in which (in my eyes in those days) she had done' nothing" (Ahmed 21). Ahmed thought more of herself, her...
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