A Border Passage by Leila Ahmed

Leila Ahmed begins her autobiography, A Border Passage From capital of Egypt to America A Womans Journey, It was as if there were to life itself a note of music, immediately entrenching the spirit of her early life story in the senses, in instinctthe tools that, above all(prenominal) else, enable her and the reader to retrace her stairs from curious, observant girl to introspective, self-determined cleaning cleaning woman.This story, however, is not only about Ahmeds self-discovery as a woman and feminist, just to a fault about the sociopolitical and historical events that took place in Egypt during the 1940s and 50s. As a witness to her countrys most dramatic period, from the dying of British influence to the birth of Arab nationalism, Ahmeds childhood is permanently shaped by the loss of Egypts multicultural and tolerant identity.Escaping a country she no long recognizes, Ahmed is seemingly left with only her fathers values of education, her mothers perspective on holiness through the oral tradition, and the memories of past places and people that rise to the surface interchangeable oases by which to navigate a new world. This new world, surprisingly, is not without its take lack of tolerance, an experience that alters her preconceptions of Western civility.Though Ahmed does, at times, disturb the natural and brutish narrative of the work with clinical and academic passages (most are near the eradicate of the novel), she rarely writes from a place of finality or total understanding, large-minded the impression that her journey as an Egyptian-American, Arab, and modern woman is far from over, if ever.Leila accounts a personal chronicle of her childhood in Egypt, education in England, and training in America. Being a competent and fine educator, she tempts with seemingly perfunctory talk it is only afterwards that it is realized how much she has given and how mesmeric the voyage has been. She reports a large amount of Egyptian culture, customs, tarradiddle and sociology.This similarly includes slightly background on the idea of Arabness, as well as a sparkling preface to the distinction between the Islam of men and the Islam of women. The portrayals of her grandmothers interject will certainly ring the bells of memory with any Western woman who spent time listening to older women in the kitchen at family meetings. (Shereen, 2003)Woman has incessantly been distinctly seen as a creative cause of human life. Traditionally, though, woman has been thought not only rationally subordinate to man but also a key source of appeal and sin. In classic mythology, for instance, a woman, Pandora, opened the prohibited box and caused epidemics and sorrow to mankind. Ancient papistical law depicted woman as children, forever lower than man.In the East, initially, the expression for woman was more encouraging. In Early Egypt, for instance, women were privileged by some property rights and personal freedoms after marriage, but obliga ted submission of women toward men.Wives had to whirl behind their husbands. Women did not bring on the right to own property, and widows could not unite again. In East as well as West, male children have a preference over womanish children.On the other hand, when they were permitted personal and rational freedom, women do important accomplishments. Nuns played an important role in the good life of Europe during the middle Ages. Aristocratic women benefited from authority and status. Whole eras were effect by women leaders for example, 16th light speed Queen Elizabeth of England, 18th century Catherine the Great of Russia, and 19th century Queen Victoria of England.Customarily a middle-class girl in Western society was inclined to be educate from her mothers pattern that cleaning, cooking, and caring for children were the deeds expected of her. Tests made in the mid-sixties proved that the scholastic success of girls was better in the lower classes than in higher education .The key cause given was that the girls own hope declined as neither their relatives nor their teachers want them to arrange for a future other than that of brotherhood and parenthood. This propensity has been altering in last decades.Proper education for girls traditionally has been less(prenominal) important as compared to that for boys. In colonial America girls have cleave schools for girls, where they could get education. They could go to the masters schools for boys if there was any room this happened generally in summer time when majority of the boys worked.As the 19th century ended, the number of female students had improved significantly. Higher education specifically was widened by the increase of womens educational institutions and the entrance of women to colleges, institutions, and universities. In 1870 an estimated twenty percent of college and university students were females. By the advent of ordinal century the ratio had improved to over one third.By the beginnin g of the twentieth century, 19 percent of all undergraduate college degrees were obtained by women. By the class 1984 the number had penetratingly improved to 49 percent. The number of graduate students was also increased significantly. By the mid of 1980s women obtained 49 percent of all post-graduate degrees and around 33 percent of doctoral degrees. Women constituted up to 53 percent of all college students in the year 1985.Ahmed concentrates on how historical and political pressures formulate individual identities, specifically those of Arab Muslim women. Here, though, the theme is Ahmeds own individualisation as an intellectual a woman, a Muslim and an aristocracy Egyptian at home in both East and West. In lovely literary style, she narrates her childhood in Cairo, Egypt, her college years at Cambridge and of teaching in America and Abu Dhabi.In Ahmeds shaded depiction, politics are not the background to peoples lives but their fashion. The incorporation of colonial conduct s, the 1952 revolt and Arab nationalism, persuade of Zionism, class issues, and the political affairs of sexual activity functions are embedded into her life and her near one. Most emotional is the changeover of Ahmeds contempt for her traditional Arabic-speaking mother, who spends her life with female relatives, into a consideration of how these women made logic of their lives.Certainly, all through this runny chronicle, she offensively refines the terms by which men Western and Arab have defined women through her own cross-cultural judgments of womens communities, as when she explains the Girton College (at Cambridge) for women as a harem the harem as I had lived it, the harem of older women presiding over the young. (Ahmed, pg. 183)A Border Passage is not a usual memoir. It has many factors of an autobiography, but it is also a collection of well rational essays on some of the most complicated phases of the Egyptian history and culture.