Leila Ahmed

Despite such resistance, establishment Islam experienced little serious challenge until early 19th-century colonial encroachment. European colonialisms' remit was essentially economic; however, female emancipation was used as an argument to legitimate geopolitical incursion. Colonial feminism was a Western discourse of dominance which, "introduced the notion that an intrinsic connection existed between the issue of culture and the status of women, and … that progress for women could be achieved only through abandoning the native culture."

In her 1999 memoir A Border Passage, Ahmed describes her multicultural Cairene upbringing and her adult life as an expatriate and an immigrant in Europe and the United States. She tells of how she was introduced to Islam through her grandmother during her childhood, and she came to distinguish it from "official Islam" as practiced and preached by a largely male religious elite. This realization would later form the basis of her first acclaimed book, Women and Gender in Islam (1992), a seminal work on Islamic history, Muslim feminism, and the historical role of women in Islam.

In her seminal work, Women and Gender in Islam (1992), Ahmed argues that the oppressive practices to which women in the Middle East are subjected are caused by the prevalence of patriarchal interpretations of Islam rather than Islam itself. She maintains that as Islam evolved, two divergent voices emerged in the religion:

She earned her undergraduate and doctorate degrees from University of Cambridge during the 1960s before moving to the United States to teach and write, where she was appointed to professorship in Women's Studies and Near Eastern studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and the position of director in said programs in 1981. A professorship in Women's Studies and Religion at the Harvard Divinity School followed in 1999, where she currently teaches.

Leila Ahmed (Arabic: لیلى أحمد; born 1940) is an Egyptian-American scholar of Islam. In 1992 she published her book Women and Gender in Islam, which is regarded as a seminal historical analysis of the position of women in Arab Muslim societies. She became the first professor of women's studies in religion at Harvard Divinity School in 1999, and has held the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Divinity chair since 2003. She was later awarded the Victor S. Thomas Research Professor of Divinity in 2020 In 2013, Ahmed received the University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award in Religion for her analysis of the veiling of Muslim women in the United States, in which she described her rejection of her own previous critiques of the veil as sexist in favor of the view that the veil, when voluntarily chosen, is a progressive and feminist act. As such, she now supports Muslim women who advocate for the veil as a symbol of progressivism and feminism, although Ahmed herself does not practice veiling.

Born in the Heliopolis district of Cairo to a middle-class Egyptian father and an upper class Turkish mother in 1940, Ahmed's childhood was shaped both by Muslim Egyptian values and the liberal orientation of Egypt's aristocracy under the ancien régime. The Ahmed family became politically ostracized following the Free Officers Movement in 1952. Her father, a civil engineer, was a vocal opponent of Gamal Abdel Nasser's construction of the Aswan High Dam on ecological principles.