Leila Ahmed, "A Border Passage - And Some Further Thoughts and Afterthoughts"
(page 5 of 6)

Looking back now, I see the book I next began - the memoir - as also, among other things, an attempt to address, all over again, those same sorts of questions. What history was this that I was living? But this time I was approaching these same questions from a different place, looking at different sources - above all, obviously, my own memories. Using myself now, as it were, as my own resident 'native informant,' - this was not, of course, how I put it to myself then but this is, after all, a way that one could put it.

I see now too, more clearly than I did then that this kind of writing - moving from one kind to the other - was in tune with where we were then in feminism. By the end of the '80s, there had been a great deal of feminist work reflecting critically on scholarly methods, on the kinds of things that they were useful to exploring and the kinds of things that, on the other hand, they served in some ways in fact to obscure. So those sorts of ideas were part of where we were at the end of the '80s and early '90s, and these were the kinds of things we had not (or I had not, at any rate) really been aware of ten years earlier. Also in my own local environment, western Massachusetts, all sorts of 'alternative,' 'radical' sorts of things were going on.

These and other things I imagine were among the reasons that I turned now to an alternative kind of writing. And the house I lived in, as I said, I think was important. I had always kept journals - notebooks, as I think of them - long before I ever moved to Pelham. But now I wrote in them more regularly and the habit of finding myself often and ordinarily now writing about ordinary things in ordinary language became perhaps, in those Pelham years, more ingrained and routine.

It's been a habit of decades - and one that now seems to have stopped. I didn't decide to stop. It just happened. And it's only retrospectively that I've taken in that it has. What had felt in the moment, whenever I decided not to write something down in a notebook, like a decision always for this instant - turned out, in fact, to be a decision that I repeatedly made for what were months, now several years.

I'm not sure why it happened, but as I think it over, I wonder now whether this change just in the sheer materiality of my writing habits isn't in fact a direct expression of some of those perplexities I find myself in these days, as regards writing, perplexities that seem to bear on the issues that are implicit to our subject of where it is exactly that those boundaries fall - between the personal, the public, the political, the academic.

And so, for my remaining moments I will reflect just on this - why I have apparently abandoned the habit and how this relates perhaps to these sorts of questions.

I think it's basically correct to say that it was in the wake of 9/11 that I stopped: though notebook-keeping, at the best of times, has always had its own inexplicable rhythms. Some months I filled up notebook after notebook and then there are gaps and lulls of desultory writing. In any case, I had no notebooks after 9/11. In place of them, for the months and now years since, I have many, many folders. Boxfuls of them, filled with all sorts of papers. News cuttings, articles off the Internet, emails and so on. And also, in amongst them, my own notes about whatever - more or less the kinds of things that in the past I would have written in notebooks.

In there too, and in those same folders - folders marked, for the most part simply by date, November '03, for example - are also my notes about my current research project. Everything now, in other words, is mixed in together. Nor is it inappropriate, in fact, that everything is mixed together. The news articles and materials from the Internet that I placed there relate to things going on today with regard to Islam in America, which is the topic, specifically in relation to women, of my current research.

I had begun work on this in the late '90s, soon after moving to Boston and observing there what, at that point, was a just emergent trend in American cities - that of women wearing hijab, or headscarves. I was startled, at that point, to see this - and, to be honest, even a little dismayed.

I hadn't previously given any thought to Islam in this country, and so this development, which, of course, has been in the making for years, came then as a surprise. And so, once again now, just as back in 1979 when I had watched on the news women voluntarily taking on the hijab in the Iranian revolution, I found myself precipitated, simply by this unexpected appearance of the veil, into a project of trying to understand what it was that I was witnessing.

As I discovered interviewing young women here, some among them at least, just as with the socialist women in Iran, choosing to wear hijab as a signal of their commitment to justice - ethnic, religious, global justice, and even, paradoxical as this may seem, out of a commitment to gender justice.

And so in any case my folders filled with materials relevant to this and to Islam in America, a huge subject of course about which, obviously, a deluge of information has been generated since 9/11. Hence those boxfuls of folders stuffed with materials of daily happenings relevant to my research.

But of course, too, many of these happenings were relevant also and had resonance and implications, whether directly or distantly, to my own life and my own sense of just the ordinary experience of how it felt, now, to be living here these days. On any given day it could sometimes be quite unclear as to where exactly some event belonged. Was this something about my own life that I should write about in my notebooks? Or did this belong in my research? When I read, for example, about women in hijab being attacked, or even more directly, when, as in fact happened, one of my students arrived in class distressed and disheveled, having been spat on, her head scarf torn off: where did this belong? Was this about my own life and its fabric and texture these days? Or did it belong with observations about Muslims in America? Similarly, with the sorts of news and happenings that we now ordinarily live with and take in with our morning tea - civil rights issues, raids on people's homes, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo or even just the local row that erupted at Harvard as to whether a student delivering the commencement oration was to be allowed to use the word 'jihad' in his title. Was this notebook material or material for folders on Islam in America?