A Border Passage by Leila Ahmed Liela Ahmeds chronicle A Border Passage has to do widely with issues of perception. She states that ” We all mechanically assume that those who write and who put their understanding down in texts have something more precious to offer than those who just live their knowledge and use it to inform their lives” (1999: 128).
She says that the eminent position of textual knowledge in today’s culture diminishes the purer, if more basic information to be gained through direct experience. Reading its considerate texts in the quiet of the wilderness, I had, I presume, formed a idea of feminism as peaceful, logical, thoughtfulwhereas, of course, the alive feminism I encountered once on these shores was anything but a clear, calm, thoughtful affair. The inference that there is a noticeable difference between “texts” and “living” comes from Ahmeds earlier experience with the differences between text-based and experience-based knowledge. A significant part of her Islamic heritage comes from a exclusively experience-based context: “This diversity of Islam consists above all of Islam as fundamentally an aural and oral heritage and a way of living and beingand not a textual, written inheritance, not something considered in books or learned from men who studied books” (1999: 125) In A Border Passage, Leila Ahmed clearly addresses all of these questions, crystallizing for readers the strange, confusing process by which her individuality was constructed among a political focus.
The Essay on Learning from a New Experience
As human beings, we learn most of the things that we know from experience. New experiences give us new knowledge, enabling us to correct our mistaken beliefs in the past and to increase our awareness. It is only proper to open ourselves to new experiences so that we can be able to acquire better knowledge and to align our actions and thoughts with the right things in life, making us better ...
Her hunting for answers takes readers from a rooftop angel-watch in Alexandria to the refined classrooms of Cambridge, and from the strange cities nestled in the dunes of Abu Dhabi to the towers of academic America. Still, the most charming journey described within these pages is the expedition taken to the self. The discoveries made there are thoughtful and, in a world of dissolving borders and conflicting cultures, can be seen in each of our lives. In writing this memoir, Ahmed established two of the most stubborn issues to be of Arab patriotism and the “cargo of negatives” attached to Islam by Western academia. Her question is what it means to be an Arab? And how does a Muslim woman overpass the divides in her own culture, and how does she promote significant, compassionate discourse about being a feminist and being a Muslim in an educational atmosphere that presumes the two are mutually exclusive? As a child, Ahmed shared several different cultures. There was the nanny with whom Ahned spent most of her time. She was a Yugoslavian woman who spoke German, French, and Italian.
Ahmed has said that the taste of her cannelloni and apricot jams represent for her the “cleansing of childhood.” There was the confidential world created by her mother, her aunts, and her grandmother, all of whom personified the pacifist traits of an Islam that was steeped in a rich, living oral practice. It was in pointed contrast to the more harsh tenets of the representative Islamdrawn by men from mysterious written textsthat were beginning to be reemployed with new weight throughout the Middle East. There were the children with whom she attended the English school in CairoSyrians, Lebanese, and Palestinians as well as of Christian, Jewish and Muslim backgroundsand, of course, there were the English. Ahmeds relationship to the European society brought to Egypt by the British colonizers was strongly complex. Nobility families such as Ahmeds often grew up talking English and French. Ahmed willingly excepted that as a little girl she appreciated the works of Somerset Maugham.
But while they accepted the strides made by the European powers in the arts, democratic system, and discipline, they were shocked by the horrors of World War II. The days of the British Empire were fading, and as the issues pertaining to Israel became progressively unstable. “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.
The Term Paper on “Anti-Americanism” in the Arab World
This essay turns to history to answer the oft-asked question “Why do they (Arabs) hate us (America)?” True, you cannot generalize about 280 million Arabs each with its own tradition and history. However, there are certain historical and political contexts that can explain the rise of anti-American sentiment. The claim: Anti-Americanism is a recent phenomenon fueled by American foreign ...
They do not, however, foretell the events that would splinter the lives of the Ahmed family. For the Egypt of Leila Ahmeds childhooda 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).
The Term Paper on Israeli Arab Nationalistic Antagonism Bases For Legitimization
A Re-Evaluation of Israel's Actions in the Mid-East Conflict Examination of the situations that created and motivated Israel Part I-From Partition to War Now it can be told- Western historians are re-examining the troubled 20 th century history of Israel and Palestine. Previously published revelations of Israel's military strength and aggressive operations during the 1948 Israeli-Arab war remained ...
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. Words: 1,255.
Bibliography:
Leila Ahmed. A Border Passage. New York: The Viking Press, 1999..
