Plot Overview
Growing up during the last days of the British colonial presence in Egypt,
Leila Ahmed's childhood is marked by a collision of cultures. Among Syrians,
Lebanese, Palestinians, and other Egyptians from a similar class background in
school, young Ahmed considers it quite normal to grow up speaking English or French
and being called by the anglicized name “Lily” in school. Ahmed lives in Cairo, at
the crossroads of spiritual hubs, ancient sites, and modern sprawl, in a beautiful
house known as Ain Shams. Her father is an esteemed engineer who, as chairman of the
Nile Water Control Board, had run into trouble with the government for opposing
their plan to build the High Dam on ecological grounds. Though her father's concerns
about the fate of the Nile River will ultimately be born out by the facts, his
opposition to the government's grand improvement project will haunt him for years to
come. Later, he will be harassed by authorities and have his bank account frozen.
As a young child, Ahmed is very attached to Nanny, her Croatian governess.
Nanny is a deeply religious Christian and tells Ahmed stories of angels and the
supernatural. Ahmed has a more conflicted relationship with her mother. Ahmed
aspires to be a professional and views her mother with contempt for not working.
Later, when Ahmed's father falls ill with chronic pneumonia, Ahmed will come to
value her mother's dedication more, as well as the strength of the bond between her
parents. One of Ahmed's closest childhood friends is Gina, a neighbor girl and the
daughter of Italian parents. Gina's older brother, Freddy, subjects Ahmed to brutal
and sexual games when she is around eight years old, and when Ahmed's mother finds
out about it, she beats her and takes her to a doctor to be examined. In the
aftermath of this event, Ahmed is forbidden to play outside, even with Gina, and is
subjected to her mother's disdain, furthering the rift between mother and daughter.
Ahmed's view of Islam is shaped through the time she spends at her mother's
childhood home of Zatoun, in Cairo, where Ahmed is surrounded by a rich and engaging
community of women. While listening to her mother, grandmother, and other women
converse, Ahmed learns about Islam as being a generous and pacifistic faith. Though
she receives no direct religious instruction from these women, and her father has
decided not to send her to an Islamic school, Ahmed nonetheless comes to appreciate
the oral, living tradition of Islam, which, in contrast to the rigid, authoritative
Islam that is handed down in texts, encompasses many interpretations. As much as she
recognizes the positive force that this humane form of Islam has manifested in her
family's life, she also recognizes the powerlessness of her mother and grandmother
in the society they live in. Ahmed's grandmother, for instance, has for years been
mourning the suicide of her son Fuad, a tragedy she blames on her husband's
disapproval of Fuad. A similar fate befell Grandmother's daughter Aida, who
committed suicide after being unable to secure permission for a divorce from an
unhappy marriage through the stern figure of Grandfather. Because of these
tragedies, the estate of Zatoun always seems to have a pall of gloom over it in
young Ahmed's eyes.
Ahmed attends a British school in the suburbs of Cairo and prefers play to
work, though her test scores and voracious appetite for books help her move ahead
quickly in school. Jews and Muslims at the school are excused from the daily
Christian prayers, and that's how Ahmed meets and befriends Joyce, a Jewish girl in
her grade. Ahmed is encouraged to skip a grade, but her academic ambitions are
tempered by the school's English headmaster, Mr. Price, who accuses her of
plagiarizing her own well-written essays. Ahmed likewise finds her English teachers
discouraging of her ambitions of pursuing science or mathematics. In school, Ahmed
studies the history, geography, and flora and fauna of Europe, while learning little
about that of her own country. Still, Ahmed isn't completely insulated from the
politics of her day. She recognizes the growing influence of a group called the
Muslim Brotherhood, which stands in opposition to colonialism and Western influence
in the Middle East.
Ahmed is soon headed to Cambridge, England, to study literature, a place she
reveres as an intellectual wonderland and the embodiment of all the things she
remembers reading in English books as a child—forests, fog, turrets, and towers.
Here, Ahmed finds a different kind of community of women in teachers like Mrs. Madge
and Miss Bradbrook, and with friends like Veena, an Indian woman who shares some of
Ahmed's feelings of displacement. At Cambridge, Ahmed experiences a more genteel
form of racism, a feeling of being lumped together with all the people who aren't
part of the white British establishment, no matter what their race or cultural
background. Between her undergraduate and graduate days, Ahmed returns to Egypt to
find it totally changed. Her father is gravely ill, and she can tell that her mother
had suffered the burden of her father's illness as well as persecution via Nasser's
increasingly repressive regime. Upon returning to Cambridge to begin graduate
studies, Ahmed meets Alan, the man she will marry and eventually divorce.
During her graduate studies, Ahmed yearns for a place in the academy for the
voices from the margins—blacks, women, and people from the third world. Toward the
end of her graduate student days, Ahmed begins to suffer from a mysterious illness.
After several frustrating visits with different doctors, Ahmed is finally diagnosed
with sarcodosis, a chronic autoimmune disease. Ahmed reads Edward Said's
Orientalism while trying to sort out her place as an Egyptian
woman in the West. After leaving Cambridge, Ahmed accepts a teaching position in Abu
Dhabi and joins a committee to help reform education throughout the United Arab
Emirates. Recognizing the unique qualities of this “Gulf Arabic” culture helps her
to re-examine the implications of her own “Egyptian Arabic” identity and her place
in the larger Arab world. Ahmed moves to the United States and finds that the
atmosphere in women's studies departments in the 1980s is not exactly hospitable to
the viewpoints of women from other cultures. However, she does find her new
environment exciting and intellectually stimulating, and even as she endeavors to
make a contribution to her the world of ideas in her new home, she never turns her
back on her Egyptian heritage.
