Leila Ahmed example essay topic

"It was as if there were to life itself a excellence of music in that time, the period of my childhood, and in that place, the distant edge of Cairo. There the city petered out into a spreading of villas leading into peaceful country fields. On the other side of our house was the deep, unsurpassable quiet of the desert."That", says Leila Ahmed, "is how it was in the beginning... to come to realization in... a world alive, as it seemed, with the music of being". Indeed, the early years of Ahmeds youth in Cairo were sanctified, and her memories of her parents' lively garden and of a city bounded by expanses of breathtaking desert are exquisite and, at times, mystical. They do not, however, foretell the events that would splinter the lives of the Ahmed family. For the Egypt of Leila Ahmeds childhood a realm that tolerated and even admired the European society of the British colonizers, a country that embraced its varied population and that for decades functioned under King Farouk as a republic (with, of course, occasional "intervention" from England) was becoming unfamiliar.

As Ahmed approached her adolescent years, Egypt experienced a revolution. It is from this revolution that Nasser and Anwar al-Sadat emerged, espousing new messages of socialism and Arab nationalism to the Egyptian people. It is in this era that Sadat penned his own memoir entitled In Search of Identity. And, as Ahmed discovered, "if the president of Egypt himself... was searching for his identity, no wonder that I, crossing the threshold into my adolescent years in that era of revolution, would discover myself greatly confused". Ahmeds extended consideration on the meaning of Arabness, toward the end of the book, is worth reading for anyone who's ever used the word "Arab" in conversation.

Did you know that Egyptians didn't think of themselves as Arabs until lately? That the word "Arab" once referred only to the wandering peoples of Arabia, and the "Arab world" as we know it today is mainly a very triumphant social creation? That Zionism was once encouraged, within Egypt? Exploring the denotation of Arabness feels, to Ahmed, a little bit like disloyalty. "The long and the short of it is that I am not here to give up", she eventually says. "I am taking apart the notion of Arabness and following out the history of when and how we became Arab just to know not with the object of, or as code for, the betrayal of anybody".

Ahmed states that the really significant part of Islam is actually what is missing in the Islamic texts: "And yet it is precisely these recurring themes and this permeating courage that are for the most part left out of the medieval texts or smothered and buried under a welter of obscure and abstruse "learning" " (126). With these statements, Ahmed carries the idea that experience-based knowledge is more successful, and in this particular case more frank than text-based knowledge, and I think it would be reasonable to suppose that she would put real experience-based knowledge above illustrious-based knowledge. Ahmeds work has been of huge meaning to the studying of Islam's views and treatment of women. Ahmed was astonished when she came to the United States to discover that so many well-read feminists had little understanding about the lives of Muslim women. Writing and professing a more exact insight of the religion and its relation to women became vital to Ahmed to confront the ignorance about it in the Western world. Ahmed saw that there was such a enormous stress on issues such as polygamy and female circumcision that outside of these areas, people had little clue of the religion, mainly in the United States.

This complex misunderstanding is what Ahmed has set out to change.