Leila Ahmed

تقوم الكاتبة بـ"تقصى الخطابات حول المرأة والنوع في مجتمعات الشرق الأوسط بحيث يتضمن هذا دراسة المجتمعات التي تتأصل فيها هذه الخطابات، وذلك من خلال البحث تحديدا في الطريقة التي يتم بها التعبير عن النوع تعبيرًا اجتماعيًا ومؤسسيًا ولفظيًا".

وفيما تبدأ الكاتبة بحثها منذ العهد النبوي وصولا إلى الزمن المعاصر ، فإنها تولي أهمية كبيرة لفترة "النهضة" . وتركز ليلى أحمد نطاق بحثها جغرافيا على مصر باعتبارها مثلت آنذاك "البوتقة التي خرجت منها عمليات التحول والصراعات الدائرة حول مفاهيم النوع والتي ظلت تنفجر من حين لآخر في مصر وغيرها من المجتمعات العربية الإسلامية منذ القرن التاسع عشر، ويمكن القول إن التطورات التي شهدتها مصر قد آذنت بقيام التطورات في العالم العربي ، بل وعكست الكثير منها".
وتتبنى الكاتبة في وصف هذه المرحلة مفهوم "التحول الاجتماعي" محددة دوافعه ومعاييره في كل من: "الزحف الاقتصادي للغرب وتعسر الاقتصاد العالمي وظهور الدول الحديثة في المنطقة والسيطرة الرسمية وغير الرسمية للقوى الاستعمارية الأوربية على مساحات عريضة من المنطقة في أواخر ق19 وأوائل ق20". ففي هذا الإطار جاء "ظهور المرأة كموضوع محوري للجدل على مستوى الأمة، ارتبط بقضايا شديدة الأهمية" .
وتثير الكاتبة مفارقة مؤداها أن أنصار الحركة النسوية في الغرب -رغم التراث الغربي الشديد العداء للمرأة- لا ينادون بالتخلي عن التراث الغربي في مجمله وتبن كامل لثقافة أخرى كملجأ وحيد للمرأة الغربية. في حين أن الوضع في الشرق كان مختلفا حين صاغ دعاة تحسين وضع المرأة قضيتهم في إطار الحاجة إلى التخلي عن الممارسات غير القابلة للإصلاح الخاصة بالانحياز ضد المرأة في ثقافتهم لصالح الثقافة الأوروبية .
… (más)

Although it was a decent book to read about the history of the veil, there were a couple of sections of the book that made me question the author's viewpoint and analysis, which naturally taints the rest of the book.

Some highlights that I learned: women start embracing the hijab as a way of separating themselves from society. They want to stand out. It also helps reduce sexual harassment from men. As the trend becomes more mainstream through, women are gradually forced to veil by society.

The book also reports that although perhaps the vast majority of Muslims are moderate, there almost isn't a single moderate Muslim organization. They are almost all Islamists and are bidding their time to take over countries with their philosophy.… (más)

[A Quiet Revolution]: the veil’s resurgence from the Middle East to America is a fascinating and frustrating book.

Leila Ahmed, currently teaching at Harvard, writes from her perspective as a Muslim women born in the 1940s in Egypt and raised during a time when it was normal for women of her family (upper middle class, educated, urban) not to wear hijab (head covering). Thus, her experience of the advocacy of a return to a “pure” form of Islam, coupled with an increase in the wearing of hijab as a sign of this return is not welcome. In Ahmed’s understanding, the rise of hijab is coupled with the rise of a type of Islam that calls for political activisim on the part of its practioners.

I found Ahmed’s account a content-rich description of the combination of political and religious activism of Muslims in Egypt and, to a lesser extent, Saudi Arabia in the last decades of the twentieth century. In addition, it covers the influx of students and later immigrants to the USA from majority Muslim countries in the last half of the twentieth century, and the development of several organizations in the US. This was the fascinating part.

Unfortunately, the entire discussion is laced with the word Islamism, which is never clearly defined. This makes it difficult (impossible?) to be clear about what Ahmed’s position is. At the first use of the word Islamism (page 3, Introduction) Ahmed states the appearance of hijab signals, to her, the presence of Islamism, a political form of Islam which she associates with the Muslim Brotherhood and, by implication in the next four paragraphs, with violence. Thus the word carries a negative connotation. On page 9 she refers to Islamism as a term that becomes popular in the 1990s to describe a wider continuum of movements, from moderate to militant.

The confused meaning of Islamism coupled with a lack of thesis statement made this book disappointing.

I do appreciate Ahmed’s attempt to put the rise of hijab in historical and political context. This is, to me, a very helpful way of looking at it, and a perspective I haven’t run across before.… (más)

A wonderful autobiography by a feminist scholar who explores her own experience of colonization, and her own identity as an Egyptian, Muslim, Arab woman.

Leila Ahmed’s autobiography is a well-crafted, multifaceted gem, shining with an integrity all its own. And that makes it a difficult book for me to summarize and review. According to Ahmed, all of us have multifaceted identities. We are not this or that, but a mixture of many personas. She rejects identities that are purely negative, including an Egyptian identity that denies the value of European culture and literature, a Arab nationalism that is primarily anti-Jew, or an US-style feminism that invalidated Islamic religion. In describing how she has brought together her own various identities, she warns us all of the dangers of polarizing self-definitions.

Read more...
http://mdbrady.wordpress.com/2012/03/20/a-border-passage-from-cairo-to-america-a...… (más)