Dr. Leila Ahmed’s memoir, A Border Passage: From Cairo to America — A Woman’s Journey, pulses with a theme of many women’s stories: the struggle to define oneself in the face of social restraints. The 1999 book by Ahmed, the first professor of women’s studies in religion at Harvard’s Divinity School, came long before the recent wave of memoirs and other writings by Muslim women that have intrigued American readers.
“There is just a tremendous appetite for the books — a media-created appetite. And the voices are perceived as authoritative,” says Dr. Kecia Ali, professor of Islamic studies at Boston University, who teaches some of the writings in her courses. As memoirs such as Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Infidel, and even Deborah Rodriguez’s fiction best seller Kabul Beauty School: An American Woman Goes Behind the Veil, enjoy popularity here, Ali and Dr. Aminah McCloud, who also teaches Islamic studies, say it is important to consider how they affect the representation of Muslim women.
“I’m very attuned to these kinds of issues. … Issues of gender are very much on everybody’s minds [in Islamic studies],” says Kecia Ali, adding that the chair of religious studies at Boston University writes about Muslim women.
But the situation in her department at Boston University is an exception to the rule, Ali admits. And at a time when there is a growing scholarly body of information about Muslim women, the more popular memoirs such as Infidel, in which author Ayaan Hirsi Ali renounces Islam because she says it condones violence toward women, often reinforce rather than expand Western expectations about the women.
Kecia Ali says one must ask, “Who is funding the books, and how are they being produced?”
For example, Hirsi Ali, a Somali who settled in the Netherlands and is a former member of the parliament, has become the voice of secular Islam. But Egyptian-born Dr. Nawal El Sadaawi, a leading feminist and critic of Islam’s treatment of women as well as of patriarchy in all cultures, has not enjoyed the same publishing success in the United States as has Hirsi Ali. Her books include, Woman at Point Zero and The Hidden Face of Eve.
They are both vehemently anti-religion,” Kecia Ali says, but they come at their critiques from very different perspectives. Hirsi Ali reserves her harshness for Muslims, while El Sadaawi attacks patriarchy wherever it is, including the West.
Rather than just examining the books being published here, Kecia Ali says it is instructive to ask, “What voices aren’t being heard?”
“There is a certain type of story being published in the West,” says McCloud, echoing Ali. Also being left out of the dialogue, she says, are African-American women who are Muslims.
McCloud, the director of the Islamic World Studies Program and professor of Islamic studies in the department of religious studies, describes many of the works as stories about “victims.”
“After you’ve read about all this victimization, what do you have left?” she asks.
She also says that, in most cases, they fit a pattern: They are apologetic toward Islam and many of the authors are elites who have left their countries.
“They are either trying to talk about ‘it’s wonderful that I wear a veil and it’s very, very positive,’ or ‘my family has fought long against this sense of oppression,’” says Mc- Cloud.
Long before authors such as Ahmed, Kecia Ali, Dr. Fatima Mernissi, Marjane Satrapi and Shirin Ebadi, to name a few, had their memoirs published in the United States, Muslim women had their stories published elsewhere, says McCloud.
“They have been marginalized in America, not in Europe. I was collecting a bunch of women’s memoirs in India and Pakistan, and they date back to the 1920s,” says Mc- Cloud, among a handful of African-American women who teach Islamic studies.
Mernissi’s 1994 memoir, Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood, is an exception to the pattern, says McCloud, who knows Mernissi, a sociology professor at the University of Mohammed V in Rabat.
“I found [the memoir] intriguing because it is one of the rare ones that doesn’t apologize … I used it in class,” says Mc- Cloud, who, unlike Ali, does not specialize in women in Islam. Dr. Leila Ahmed’s memoir, A Border Passage: From Cairo to America — A Woman’s Journey, pulses with a theme of many women’s stories: the struggle to define oneself in the face of social restraints. The 1999 book by Ahmed, the first professor of women’s studies in religion at Harvard’s Divinity School, came long before the recent wave of memoirs and other writings by Muslim women that have intrigued American readers.
