Leila Ahmed was born in Cairo, Egypt. She lived there until the 1960s, when she left to attend the University of Cambridge, earning undergraduate and graduate degrees before coming to the United States to teach and write. In 1999, Ahmed became the first professor of women’s studies in religion at Harvard Divinity School, and has held the Victor S. Thomas chair since 2003. She was named the Victor S. Thomas Research Professor of Divinity in 2020.
Ahmed has written extensively about Muslim women’s experience. Her book A Quiet Revolution: The Veil’s Resurgence, from the Middle East to America (2011) won the 2012 Grawemeyer Award in Religion. Her earlier book, A Border Passage: From Cairo to America — A Woman’s Journey (1999), is a memoir that dispels misunderstandings about the Muslim religion. “What was important,” Ahmed writes, “was how you conducted yourself, your attitude towards others, and how you were in your heart.”
Ahmed’s move to the West brought its challenges. In England, she longed for a place in the academy for voices from the margins. In the U.S., she found women’s studies departments not hospitable to the viewpoints of women from other cultures. As she has written in an essay published in the New York Times in 2020, her criticism of America “is not an act of hate, but an act of care. What rights and freedoms I have are tethered to those around me.… I would rather do the patient, necessary work of fighting for justice and equality. That, to me, is the ‘true faith and allegiance’ of the oath of citizenship.”
