Leila Ahmed

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Leila Ahmed is an Egyptian‑American scholar who studies women, religion, and Islam. Her 1992 book Women and Gender in Islam is a landmark work that looks at the historical role 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, later becoming the Victor S. Thomas Research Professor of Divinity in 2020.

Ahmed was born on May 29, 1940, in Heliopolis, Cairo, to a middle‑class Egyptian father and an upper‑class Turkish mother. Her family faced political ostracism after the 1952 Free Officers Movement. She earned her BA, MA, and PhD from the University of Cambridge in the 1960s and then moved to the United States to teach. She led the Women’s Studies and Near Eastern Studies programs at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1981 before joining Harvard.

Her work challenges simple ideas about Islam and women. She argues that oppression of women in the Middle East comes from patriarchal readings of Islam, not Islam itself, and she urges people to separate religious texts from culture. Ahmed has also been a critic of Arab nationalism, describing it as a form of cultural imperialism that can erase local diversity.

In 2013 she received the Grawemeyer Award in Religion for an analysis of veiling among Muslim women in the United States. She has since said that the veil can be a symbol of activism for some women, but its meaning is not universal and veiling remains tied to patriarchy in other contexts. Her 1999 memoir A Border Passage describes growing up in multicultural Cairo and her later life as an immigrant in Europe and the United States, where she sought to understand Islam beyond the male‑dominated “official” version.

Ahmed’s work has influenced discussions on Muslim feminism and how to rethink Islamic history to support justice and equality. Her book Women and Gender in Islam was republished in 2021 in a Veritas edition with a foreword by Kecia Ali.