Review

In the border passage, Leila tries to search for the meaning that her identity has been a woman, an Egyptian and an Arab. Additionally she tries to establish the comprehension of the manner in which these categories shape her position in the world. Being a child, she revolves thoughtlessly around the imaginative boundaries of her home, the community of the women at her grandmother’s house as well as the English School, filled with the western ideas. In the end, she can establish that negotiating those social and cultural borders normally has some critical consequences. While studying at Cambridge, she has a difficult time trying to establish how her intelligent classmates can practice the refined forms of racism. The classmates were lumping all the students hailing from the third world countries under the “black” banner.      

Through her writings, she can create the connection between her experiences along with the politics, describing how individuals’ decisions and identities are resonating with the larger world. Her political awakening is during her childhood after she initially discovers that men and women had different ways of knocking as well as discussing Islam in her grandmother’s home. The discovery is instrumental in shaping her investigations into the race, religious as well as the gender studies as she tries to unravel the assortment of strands in her upbringing. The shaping of her identity is via the feeling of cultural displacement being an Egyptian student in an English establishment in Cairo and consequently as a minority in Cambridge. Ahmed attempts to apply the keen insight relating to the query of what the implication is about the being an Arab woman in the modern world.

Being an adult, she can embrace the assortment of labels such as intellectual, Muslim feminist as well as an Egyptian Arab while establishing how the labels limit as well as define the individuals adopting them. Thus according to Ahmed, identity that the individual develops defines their political narratives and perspective. She was brought up in an environment whereby her father revered the British, and thus it inculcated in her. During her school days, the racism that was portrayed the students from other countries labeling the students from the third world countries as black further reinforces the reverence. Through the identities people are given by others through the labeling, they serve to impact their developments through limiting them as well as defining the characters giving the labels. 

According to Ahmed, there is a woman as well as a woman in Islam. From this assertion, it is clear she is trying to imply that Islam has exclusive roles as well as responsibilities for the respective sexes. For instance, she asserts that her mother did not have anything to do since she offered everything, an attribute she abhors. Additionally she says that there different models of knocking and talking about Islam that both men and women had when they got to her grandmother’s house. Thus, it is to imply that not everyone was allowed to talk about Islam on the same wavelength with the position that Islam gives men dominion over their women. The position is evident from the Quran, which says that men are normally in charge of the women since they are creations of Allah to be excelled by men. The fact that men use their property to support the women gives them the dominion over their wives, being allowed to be polygamous on condition they can adequately support their families.

Sherry Roberts is the author of this paper. A senior editor at MeldaResearch.Com in custom speech writing companies services. If you need a similar paper you can place your order from affordable term papers services.