A Border Passage

Ahmed believes that Islam can be separated into two distinctly different, often-contradictory strands: the expansive, pacifist oral tradition, and the more rigid, authoritarian written tradition. Islam's oral tradition is one that she associates with women, and she was immersed in it as a young child at her grandmother's house in Cairo. In this tradition, she finds multiple possibilities and a humane orientation toward the world. As she examines the impact of faith on her own identity and in the larger world, Ahmed associates Islam's rigid written tradition with the rise of fundamentalism. Fundamentalism, in Ahmed's view, obscures much of the beauty and meaning she was raised to associate with her faith. She finally points to this split as being responsible for abuse of politic power, as rigid interpretations of Islam become tools in the hands of religious demagogues.

Ahmed is raised speaking English, French, and Arabic, and schooled in England, and her entire life is defined by a collision of different cultural influences. Though she recognizes the inherent problems in being caught between two worlds, for Ahmed this plurality of influences is a rich part of her identity. As she makes an intellectual home for herself in Cambridge, England, Ahmed traces the influences in books that have brought her to this place. When she accepts a teaching job in the United Arab Emirates, Ahmed notes the differences between that “Gulf Arabic” culture and her own “Egyptian Arabic” culture. Appreciating such cultural intersections allows Ahmed to better understand what it means to be Egyptian.

The very language that people use in expressing themselves has political implications—it defines identity and often limits potential according to the labels people must wear. Through speaking English as a child in a British school, Ahmed comes to see the Arabic of her parents as inferior to the languages of western Europe. Given the anglicized name “Lily” in school, Ahmed examines the implications of denying her own cultural identity to adopt a new one only in later years, when she recalls her confusion at meeting Nasser and not knowing what to say her name is. While at Cambridge, Ahmed, like any other person from a third-world country, is labeled “black,” which prompts her to unravel the real implications of such labels as “Egyptian,” “African,” and “Arab.”

Growing up in Egypt before it had attained independence from colonial influences, Ahmed draws a stark picture of the way the Egyptians internalized a “colonial consciousness” in their reverence for all things British. This is an attitude she particularly ascribes to her father, who, despite being held back professionally by British policies, still seems to see British culture as superior to his own native Egyptian culture. Ahmed traces the rapid political changes that will end the Western colonial presence in much of the Middle East and points to political writers like Frantz Fanon and Albert Memmi, who were instrumental in dismantling colonial consciousness through their influential critiques of the dynamic between the colonizer and the colonized. She also notes the positive sides of Egypt's existence under British rule: the fact that the British presence helped speed Egypt's modernization and created a somewhat free press. In exploring the complicated legacy of colonial rule, Ahmed traces the implications of politics on a more personal level.

From the enchanting gardens of her Cairo home, Ain Shams, to the spires and forests of England, location figures prominently into A Border Passage. Ahmed's environment helps her define her place in relation to the world, and she uses the idea of place to explore the tensions of identity in a world where cultural identifications are complex and politically loaded. Ain Shams is where Ahmed develops her powers of imagination. Zatoun, her grandmother's estate, is where she discovers a community of women who shape her attitudes toward Islam. At Cambridge, Ahmed finds another type of community of women, one that will introduce her to a world of ideas.

Again and again, Ahmed faces a feeling of being displaced—whether she is in Egypt, England, or the United States. She traces her consciousness of her own cultural identity to her school days, where she recognizes a subtle form of racism from her English teachers because of her status as an Egyptian. One teacher accuses her of plagiarizing her well-written papers, and others discourage her from pursuing math or science. At Cambridge, Ahmed finds herself surprised to be labeled “black” and lumped together with many other students from the third world. While in Abu Dhabi, Ahmed confronts once again what it means to be an Arab woman in an Arab culture that holds as many differences as it does similarities to the culture she knows in Egypt.

Throughout her life, Ahmed draws strength and intellectual wealth from communities of women. The most formative of these is the group of women Ahmed interacts with at her grandmother's home, Zatoun. Here, Ahmed is steeped in the rich, multilayered tradition of Islam, and she comes to understand how the oral traditions of Arab women are different from the written, and more rigid, traditions of men. At Cambridge, Ahmed joins another important community of women, which feeds her intellectual curiosity and fosters her growth as an academic thinker. Finally, Ahmed circulates in women's studies departments in the United States in the early 1980s, finding them not exactly receptive to the input of third world women, but stimulating nonetheless.

In Chapter 8, Ahmed sees the community of women she is immersed in at Cambridge as a “harem perfected.” Instead of belonging to the realm of male fantasy, the harem suggests for Ahmed a nurturing community of women in which the old preside over the young—and in this way is similar to the community of women that she knew as a child, at her grandmother's house. By transposing an image of great symbolic power from her own culture to a Western one, Ahmed reclaims its power to represent a haven for women. Though the harem is traditionally seen as a symbol of female subservience, Ahmed seems to be suggesting that at Cambridge it became a manifestation truer to its historical roots.

For the young Ahmed, angels represent the magic and mysteries of the unseen world and were first introduced to her as a concept by her deeply religious nanny. Angels are a unifying symbol of both Nanny's faith and Ahmed's Islam. Ahmed recalls her grandmother telling her that during the holy month of Ramadan, God allows angels to descend freely, and one can see them if one looks hard enough. She also recalls the sense of wonder that overtook her as she stood on a Cairo rooftop, waiting for the angels to appear. As a symbol of a rich, hidden world, angels serve as a concrete manifestation of the imaginative world that Ahmed develops as a child.

Ahmed writes of her childhood as having “its own music,” a music that is symbolic of both a sense of innocence and the seemingly effortless blending of disparate cultural influences that marked her childhood. This imagery of music helps brings together the past and present, an overlapping of thousand-year-old artifacts and religious sites and a young girl's dawning political consciousness. This music also unites place, the beautiful garden of Ain Shams with the gloomy richness of Zatoun, and Ahmed's family's trips to the shore. Ahmed's childhood, characterized by a unifying music, contrasts with her later experience of displacement, as she spends time in several places where diverse cultural influences are not so easily blended together.