Egypt

Three of the best books I’ve read recently have been about Egypt, in whole or in part. The first is a history of the veil, Islamism, and Muslim women in Egypt and the United States. The other two are excellent memoirs written by women who have lived in both Egypt and the U.S.

Leila Ahmed, A Quiet Revolution: The Veil’s Resurgence from the Middle East to America (2011). This valuable book is far broader than its title suggests. I recommend it highly for anyone who is interested in Muslim women or Islamism, and is willing to read a well-written scholarly book. Ahmed grew up in Egypt and now teaches at the Harvard Divinity School, and she started with the question of why more women are wearing hijab now than a generation ago, in the United States and around the world. Answering this question led her not only to exploring the multiple reasons individual women offer for wearing and not wearing different forms of veils, but also to writing an extremely helpful history of Islamism in Egypt, where the Islamic Brotherhood was founded in the 1920s, and the United States, where Islamism-influenced women are now at the forefront of challenging gender hierarchies. Islamism puts the pursuit of social justice and service to others near the core of Muslim practice. Traditional forms of Islam, in contrast, tend to have a more personal, spiritual, and ethical focus. Because Islamism urges its members towards organization and activism, and because of financial support from Saudi Arabia, Islamism has grown rapidly and is increasingly able to define itself as the “true” Islam. Islamism has changed the symbolic meaning of hijab, and for many Islamist women, wearing hijab now signifies their commitment to social justice. In the 1970s the leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood repudiated violence as a means for achieving their goals, but not all Islamists agreed with them and some broke away to create militant groups, which are a small minority but more likely to make the news than the peaceful Islamist mainstream. Most American Muslim institutions have Islamist roots, but most American Muslims are not Islamist. 9/11 has had a huge effect on American Muslim organizations, making them more open to diverse opinions and challenges to hierarchical leadership. In the US, the Islamic call to justice has extended to gender justice among many, but probably not a majority, of American Islamists. Such a brief summary does not do justice to the depth of Ahmed’s work, but suggests the breadth and importance of her story.

Leila Ahmed, A Border Passage: From Cairo to America – A Woman’s Journey (1999). Ahmed’s memoir is lyrically written and very personal, but it also has a larger vision than most memoirs. It describes her 1940s childhood in a privileged Egyptian family, her father’s fall from favor because he opposed Nasser’s Aswan Dam project on environmental grounds, her studies in the “harem” of Girton College, her encounter with modern feminism, and her move to the United States, where she is now a professor at the Harvard Divinity School. Along the way Ahmed reflects on women’s traditions and men’s traditions within Islam, language and literacy, colonialism and nationalism, Arab identity, the breakdown of Egypt’s multi-religious society, her discovery that many Egyptians in the early 20th century supported Zionism, and how some interpretations and experiences of Islam overtake others. This is one of the most illuminating books I’ve read and I recommend it highly.

G. Willow Wilson, The Butterfly Mosque: A Young American Woman’s Journey to Love and Islam (2010). Wilson is an American woman who attended Boston University, was attracted to Islam, moved (temporarily, she thought) to Egypt, and fell in love with an Egyptian man and became part of an Egyptian family. Her memoir is beautifully written and offers a richly textured portrait of some corners of Cairo where Westerners rarely go. Throughout, Wilson seeks to engage with Egyptian people, culture, and traditions on their own terms, rather than asking the people there to adapt to her expectations as, she believes, most Americans do. If you’d like to understand how Islam, both as a religion and as a way of life, could appeal to a Western woman, I recommend this book. And you will certainly learn much about life in modern Cairo among people who are neither rich and privileged nor desperately poor.