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As in her widely admired scholarly book Women and Gender in Islam, Ahmed addresses how historical and political forces shape personal identities, particularly those of Arab Muslim women. Here, however, the subject is Ahmed's own identity as a scholar, a woman, a Muslim and an upper-class Egyptian at home in both East and West. In elegant prose, she tells of her childhood in Cairo, her college years at Cambridge and of teaching in Abu Dhabi and America. In Ahmed's nuanced rendering, politics are not the backdrop to people's lives but their fabric. The internalization of colonial attitudes, the 1952 revolution and Arab nationalism, class issues, the effects of Zionism and the politics of gender roles are woven into her life and the lives of those around her. Most poignant is the transformation of Ahmed's disdain for her "traditional" Arabic-speaking mother, who spent her days with female relatives, into an understanding of how these women made sense of their lives. Indeed, throughout this fluid memoir, she provocatively reformulates the terms by which men--Western and Arab--have defined women through her own cross-cultural comparisons of women's communities, as when she describes the all-female Girton College (at Cambridge) as a harem--"the harem as I had lived it, the harem of older women presiding over the young." Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information, Inc. From: Reed Elsevier Inc. Copyright Reed Business Information

Ahmed, a professor of women's studies at Amherst and the author of such scholarly works as Women and Gender in Islam (Yale Univ., 1993), writes a personal memoir of her childhood in 1940s and 1950s Cairo, education in England, and teaching work in America. Like the most skillful and subtle of teachers, she entices you with what seems like an afternoon chat over tea; only when it is over do you realize how much you have learned and how fascinating the journey has been. She imparts a great deal of Egyptian history, culture, and sociology, including some background on the concept of "Arabness," as well as a brilliant introduction to the difference between the Islam of men and the Islam of women. The descriptions of her grandmother's salon will no doubt strike a chord of memory with any Western female who spent time listening to mothers, aunts, and grandmothers in the kitchen at family gatherings. A delightful read; recommended for libraries that collect in intercultural, gender, or Middle Eastern studies.Julie Still, Rutgers Univ., Camden, NJ Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information, Inc. From: Reed Elsevier Inc. Copyright Reed Business Information

Questions of identity engage Ahmed in this gracefully written and deeply felt reflection on her Egyptian Muslim childhood, Cambridge education, and life in U.S. academia. Born into Cairo's upper class during the 1940s, Ahmed, professor of women's studies at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, was taught to value all things European, an orientation discredited by the revolution, Nasser's assent to power, and the emergence of Arab nationalism. Ahmed's confusion about her place in the new Egypt was further exacerbated by her engineer father's bold opposition to Nasser's pet project, the Aswan High Dam. She was also profoundly affected by her observations of the great divide between the sexes, and she uses her carefully parsed memories of her extended family and friends to introduce striking insights into the radically different ways Islamic men and women interpret their faith. Poetic and questing, Ahmed brings the same perspicacity to her musings on the experience of being seen as a woman of color in England and the U.S., ultimately illuminating the malignancy of so many of our assumptions regarding gender, race, culture, and who has the power to declare what is right. (Reviewed April 15, 1999)0374115184Donna Seaman From: Syndetics Solutions, Inc. Distributed by Syndetic Solutions, Inc.

A beautifully written personal history and intellectual commentary, this is a reflective memoir, sweeping four decades of Ahmed's geographic, intellectual, and identity crossing. Ahmed weaves a narrative of past and present, personal and social, local and global, and theoretical and historical in her profoundly engaging tale of journeys across lands, fields, and time. She grounds her life experiences, from childhood to adulthood, in the specifics of historical events that have placed her at discontinuous points, borders, and margins, from Cairo to the US. Speaking frankly about her feelings toward people, events, and issues, she views them through multiple lenses acquired in her intellectual journeys. Despite its biographical focus, the book is a thoughtful meditation about individual intellectual growth, Arab women, feminism, Orientalism, Islam, contemporary history of Egypt, politics and society in the Middle East, migration, and Western colonialism. Though its movement between concrete and theoretical, personal and social, and present and past is occasionally distracting, the book provides enough diversity and continuity in its language and content to maintain readers' attention. All levels. From: Syndetics Solutions, Inc. Distributed by Syndetic Solutions, Inc.

Leila Ahmed is professor of women's studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and is the author of Women and Gender in Islam and Edward William Lane. Distributed by Syndetic Solutions, Inc.

Part I In the House of Memory	1
1 Egypt: The Background	3
2 From Colonial to Postcolonial	32
3 In Expectation of Angels	47
4 Transitions	68
5 Harem	93
6 School Days	135
7 Suez	158
8 The Harem Perfected?	179

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