Gender

This is the seventy-sixth of Arab America’s series on American pathbreakers of Arab descent. The series includes personalities from entertainment, business, sports, science, arts, academia, journalism, and politics, among other areas. Our seventy-sixth pathbreaker, Leila Ahmed, grew up in Cairo in the 1940s and ’50s and sought to define herself – and to understand how the world defined her – as a woman, a Muslim, an Egyptian, and an Arab. John Mason, contributing writer, takes us on the journey that brought her to the Harvard Divinity School, where she became the first professor of women’s studies in religion and a primary interpreter of Middle Eastern society, especially of its women.