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Likely Ahmed's chronicle A Border Passage has to do widely with issues of perception. She states that " We all mechanically assume that those who write and who put their understanding down in texts have something more precious to offer than those who just live their knowledge and use it to inform their lives" (1999: 128). She says that the eminent position of textual knowledge in today's culture diminishes the purer, if more basic information to be gained through direct experience. Reading its considerate texts in the quiet of the wilderness, I had, I presume, formed a idea of feminism as peaceful, logical, thoughtful whereas, of course, the alive feminism I encountered once on these shores was anything but a clear, calm, thoughtful affair. The inference that there is a noticeable difference between "texts" and "living" comes from Ahmed's earlier experience with the differences between text-based and experience-based knowledge. A significant part of her Islamic heritage comes from a exclusively experience-based context: "This diversity of Islam consists above all of Islam as fundamentally an aural and oral heritage and a way of living and being and not a textual, written inheritance, not something considered in books or learned from men who studied books" (1999: 125) In A Border Passage, Leila Ahmed clearly addresses all of these questions, crystallizing for readers the strange, confusing process by which her individuality was constructed among a political focus.
Her hunting for answers takes readers from a rooftop angel-watch in Alexandria to the refined classrooms of Cambridge, and from the strange cities nestled in the dunes of Abu Dhabi to the towers of academic America. Still, the most charming journey described within these pages is the expedition taken to the self. The discoveries made there are thoughtful and, in a world of dissolving borders and conflicting cultures, can be seen in each of our lives. In writing this memoir, Ahmed established two of the most stubborn issues to be of Arab patriotism and the "cargo of negatives" attached to Islam by Western academia. Her question is what it means to be an Arab?
And how does a Muslim woman overpass the divides in her own culture, and how does she promote significant, compassionate discourse about being a feminist and being a Muslim in an educational atmosphere that presumes the two are mutually exclusive? As a child, Ahmed shared several different cultures. There was the nanny with whom And spent most of her time. She was a Yugoslavian woman who spoke German, French, and Italian. Ahmed has said that the taste of her cannelloni and apricot jams represent for her the "cleansing of childhood. " There was the confidential world created by her mother, her aunts, and her grandmother, all of whom personified the pacifist traits of an Islam that was steeped in a rich, living oral practice. It was in pointed contrast to the more harsh tenets of the representative Islamdrawn by men from mysterious written texts that were beginning to be reemployed with new weight throughout the Middle East.
There were the children with whom she attended the English school in Cairo Syrians, Lebanese, and Palestinians as well as of Christian, Jewish and Muslim backgrounds and, of course, there were the English. Ahmed's relationship to the European society brought to Egypt by the British colonizers was strongly complex. Nobility families such as Ahmed's often grew up talking English and French. Ahmed willingly excepted that as a little girl she appreciated the works of Somerset Maugham. But while they accepted the strides made by the European powers in the arts, democratic system, and discipline, they were shocked by the horrors of World War II.
The days of the British Empire were fading, and as the issues pertaining to Israel became progressively unstable.
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Research essay sample on Border Passage Experience Based Ahmed
