Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, July 2001, page 106

Book Review

Harem Years: The Memoirs of an Egyptian Feminist (1879-1924)

By Huda Shaarawi, Translated and Introduced by Margot Badran, The Feminist Press, 1987, 158 pp. List: $13.95; AET $12.50.

A Border Passage: From Cairo to America—A Woman’s Journey

By Leila Ahmed, Penguin, 2000, 320 pp. List: $13.95; AET $11.

Reviewed by Sara R. Powell

Memoirs provide a wonderful way to study history. For the casual reader they offer a detailed glimpse into another way of life, another time, on a personal level that traditional histories cannot match, and on a factual level that historical fictions cannot achieve. For the scholar memoirs provide personal and social detail that often is difficult to find elsewhere.

The reader of both Harem Years and A Border Passage is quickly struck by the similarities between them. They are set against a background of an historical continuum, namely Egypt in the late 19th to the mid-20th centuries, with its nationalist and feminist movements. Both Shaarawi and Ahmed came from well-to-do, politically connected and politically active Muslim families. They wintered in Cairo and summered in Alexandria. They traveled abroad.

Of course, these characteristics would most likely describe many of Egypt’s upper-middle to upper-class families. Yet as the reader wanders through the maze of these two particular women’s lives, some unexpected similarities appear. Even as little girls, they seem to have had much in common on a personal as well as a social level. Both Shaarawi and Ahmed had Turko-Circassian mothers whose culture blended with that of their Egyptian fathers to produce the strong independent women they both became. Moreover, their fathers’ attitudes and somewhat dissident political stances affected each of the girl’s relationship with Egyptian society.

Shaarawi and Ahmed both loved their gardens, spending much time there as little girls. Each memoir mentions a fondness for the same two landmarks near their homes: the spreading Sycamore tree where Mary and Joseph were said to have rested on their flight into Egypt, and the ancient Egyptian obelisk at Heliopolis. They both loved literature and poetry, and were very concerned with their place as women in society.

Though the reader may come to these stories with the knowledge that both women had an impact on feminism, the serendipitous discovery of their personal similarities somehow serves to propel the uninterrupted flow of the historical narrative. Interestingly, Ahmed herself speaks of similarities between Shaarawi’s and her own mother’s lives, yet does not seem to make a connection between Shaarawi’s life and her own. Yet Ahmed’s description of her mother undeniably strengthens the sense of historical continuity evident in both memoirs.

Shaarawi and Ahmed did not lead entirely parallel lives, of course. Many of the bold pioneering feminist steps Shaarawi took had become societal norms by the time Ahmed was of an age to have encountered them. Shaarawi’s famous 1923 act of unveiling in the Cairo train station, however, was a paving stone on the path that Ahmed took toward the writing of her watershed work, Women and Gender in Islam.

Harem Years, Shaarawi’s memoirs, are at their best when she speaks of her personal frustrations and jealousies at being born female in a male-oriented world. Also pleasing are the glimpses of pride and excitement in her accomplishment Shaarawi occasionally allows the reader to see.

Yet it is Ahmed’s A Border Passage that proved to be the more entrancing. In contrast to the scholarly tones of her other works, the language of her memoirs is lyrical. Her themes of geographical and gender-based alienation, moreover, both will evoke empathy in a broad audience, as evidenced by her discussion of the book at the Library of Congress earlier this year (see April 2001 Washington Report, p. 95) as one of a number of women discussing their own experiences of such alienation.

Each of these books on its own, and in conjunction with each other, are an enjoyable and somewhat haunting way to further one’s understanding of Egyptian nationalism, Muslim feminism, and the trials of being different. Each of them, and both of them, succeed.

Sara R. Powell is the administrative director of the Washington Report.