What I will do is read a little from the memoir and then offer some reflections on writing memoirs. I read first of all, from the very beginning of the book:

(The following excerpts are from A Border Passage: Cairo to America - A Woman's Journey by Leila Ahmed. Copyright © 1999 Leila Ahmed. Used by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved.)

"It was as if there were to life itself a quality of music, in that time, the era of my childhood, and in that place, the remote edge of Cairo. There, the city petered out into a scattering of villas leading into tranquil country fields. On the other side of the house was the profound, unsurpassable quiet of the desert.

There was, to begin with, always the sound, sometimes no more than a mere breath, of the wind in the trees, each variety of tree having its own music, its own way of conversing. I knew them all like friends, although none more intimately than the trees on either side of my corner bedroom. On one side was the silky, barely-perceptible breath of a mimosa, which, when the wind grew strong, would scratch lightly at the shutters of the window facing the front of the house, looking out onto the garden. On the other side was the dry, faintly-rattling shuffle of the long-leaved eucalyptus that stood on the street side. On hot nights, the street lamp cast the shadows of the twirling eucalyptus leaves onto my bedroom wall - my own secret cinema. I would fall asleep watching those dancing shadows, imagining to myself that I saw a house and people in them, and telling myself stories about their lives.

I loved too, the patterns of light cast by leaves on the earth, and I loved being in them, under them. The intricate, gently-shifting patterns the flame tree cast where the path widened towards the garden gate, fading and growing strong again as a cloud passed, could hold me still for long moments.

Almost everything, then, seemed to have its own beat, its own lilt: sounds that distilled the sweetness of being, others that made audible its terrors, and sounds for everything between. The cascading cry of a karawan, a bird I heard but never saw, came only in the dusk - its long, melancholy call descending down the scale was like the pure expression of lament at the fall of things, all the endings that the end of light presaged.

And sometimes, in the earliest morning, there would be the sound of the reed piper playing his pipe as he walked past our house. A simple, lovely sound, when he was gone it would feel as if something of infinite sweetness had momentarily graced one's life and then faded irretrievably away.

Years later, I'd discover that in Sufi poetry this music of the reed is the quintessential music of loss and I'd feel, learning this, that I'd always known this to be so. In the poetry of Rumi, the classic poet of Sufism, the song of the reed is the metaphor for our human condition, haunted as we so often are by a vague sense of longing and nostalgia, but nostalgia for we know not quite what. Cut from its bed and fashioned into a pipe, the reed forever laments the living earth it once knew, crying out whenever life is breathed into it, its ache and yearning and loss. We, too, live our lives haunted by loss, we too, says Rumi, remember a condition of completeness that we once knew but have forgotten we ever knew. The song of the reed and the music that haunts our lives is the music of loss - of loss and of remembrance."

Next I'm going to read a short passage from a later chapter of an encounter between my mother and myself:

"Most commonly, Mother spent her afternoon reading. That's how we remember her: reading. Sitting, freshly bathed, on the chaise lounge in her bedroom, wearing fresh cotton clothes, clothes with the sweet smell of cotton dried in the sun, the air blowing through them. Behind her, the garden. French windows open, curtains lightly billowing. A book in her hand, a cup of Turkish coffee on the table beside her.

Two moments in particular live for me. One of these was on just such an afternoon, the air lightly stirring the curtains, the sound of running water drifting in. She was on the chaise lounge, a book in her hand or perhaps lying face down beside her because I had come in and she had stopped reading and looked up, waiting to hear me speak, a cigarette in her hand. I'd wandered into her room, I don't know why. We must have had some conversation and I must have said - I was probably about 15 at the time - that I wanted to be a writer. I don't remember saying this, nor can I now imagine why I would have said that to her: I wasn't wont, in my memory of our relationship, to speak to her of my secret desires. Still, I must have done so because I remember her looking up at me and saying, speaking with animation, that she too would have liked to have been a writer. It was too late for her now, she said. But sometimes she thought about her life and how interesting it had been, and wished she could write it all. Maybe I could write it for her, she said. Maybe she could tell me the story of her life and I could write it. 'I'd tell it to you and you could write it,' she said. She spoke enthusiastically, eagerly, looking at me.

I was 15. Like many girls at that age, I was sure of one thing - I didn't want to be like my mother. I was sure I wasn't like her and I wouldn't grow up to be like her. I didn't want to think that we were alike in anything, let alone, in our deepest desires.

And so of course I wasn't at all taken with the idea. Rather, anxious to distance my own desires from hers, I thought to myself that what she dreamed of doing, writing a memoir, telling the story of her life, wasn't at all what I wanted to do. After all, there was nothing in the least interesting about writing the story of one's life."

Next, I'm going to read from the chapter called Harem.

"By the time my mother was a child, the practice of men's having concubines had come to an end. But the attitudes underlying those bygone ways were not quite gone.

Even in my own childhood, Zatoun, my mother's paternal home, was a place palpably apart, imbued with some unnamably different order of being. The aura and aroma of other times and other ways pervaded it still, in the rustle and shuffle of silks and the soft fall of slippers along hallways and corridors; in the talk and gestures in the momentary tremor of terror precipitated by the boom of my grandfather's voice, and then the quiet, suppressed, chortling laughter of the women as the boom faded and he passed into the recesses of the inner hall.

Looking back now with the assumptions of my time, I could well conclude that the ethos of the world whose attitudes survived into my own childhood must have been one in which women were regarded as inferior creatures, essentially just sex objects and breeders to be bought and disposed of for a man's pleasure. But my memories don't fit with such a picture. I simply don't think that the message I got from the women of Zatoun was that we, the girl children, and they the women, were inferior. But what, then, was the message of Zatoun? I don't think it was a simple one. The best I can do is set it down as I remember it."

The chapter then goes on to describe the world of Zatoun and moves on to describe our communal lives in Alexandria:

"We, all of us - my mother and her sisters and their children and Grandmother - summered together in Alexandria. The house belonged to grandfather, but he himself came there rarely, perhaps once or twice for a few days in the summer. Similarly, the husbands, including my father, came intermittently and just for weekends.

Anyhow, even when they were there, they were marginal figures. The moods of the Alexandria house and the rhythms and currents of its life were ours - those of my aunts and mother and grandmother and us children.

It's easy to see now, looking back, that our lives in the Alexandria house and even Zatoun were lived in women's time, women's space and in women's culture. The women had, too, as I now believe, their own understanding of Islam, an understanding of it that was different from 'official' Islam. For although in those days it was only Grandmother who performed all the regular forms of formal prayers, for all the women of the house, religion was an essential part of how they made sense of their lives. It was through religion that one pondered the things that happened, and why they happened and what one should make of them, how one should take them. Islam, as I got it from them, was a gentle, generous, pacifist, inclusive, somewhat-mystical religion - just as they themselves were.

My mother was a determined pacifist and I see now, looking back, that her pacifism made complete sense given their understanding of religion. Being Muslim - as I believe also being Christian or Jewish in the multi-religious community in which I grew up - was about believing in a world in which life was meaningful and in which all events and happenings were permeated, although not always transparently to us, with meaning. Religion was above all about inner things. The outer signs of religiousness such as prayer and fasting and so on, might be signs of true religiousness, but on the other hand, equally might not. In our family in any case they were certainly not what was important about being Muslim. Rather, what was important was how you conducted yourself, your attitude towards others, and how you were in your heart.

What it was to be Muslim was passed on by these women, for the most part, not, of course, wordlessly, but without elaborate sets of injunctions, threats, decrees or dictates as to what we should do and be and believe. Above all, what is passed on, besides the very general basic beliefs and moral ethos of Islam, which are also those of its sister monotheisms, was a way of being in the world. A way of being in relation to God, to existence, to other human beings. And this they passed on to us just by the way they were, conveying their beliefs, ways, thoughts and how we should be by a touch, a glance, a word, prohibiting or approving. Their mere responses in this or that situation - a word, a shrug, even just their postures - passed on to us in the way that women, and of course men too, have forever passed on to their young how they should be.

It was Grandmother who taught me the fat-ha, the open verses of the Quran, the equivalent of the Christian Lord's Prayer, and who taught me two or three short suras, or Quranic verses. When she took me up onto the roof of the Alexandria house, to watch for angels on the night of the 27th of Ramadan, she had recited the sura about that special night, a surah that was, by implication, about the miraculousness of night itself. Even now, I remember its loveliness. It's still my favorite. Besides teaching me those surahs, I remember receiving little direct religious instruction either from her or anyone else.

I've already described - earlier in the book, that is - the most memorable exchange I had with my mother on the subject of religion, when, sitting in her room, the windows open behind her, she quoted to me the verses in the Quran that she believed summed up the essence of Islam - man qatala nafsan qatala al-nas gami-an, wa man ahya nafsan ahya al-nas gam-ian - which means, he who kills one being kills all of humanity, and he who revives one being, restores all of humanity.

That verse most often came up in speaking with her about religion. Live by that she would say, quoting it: that is the essence of Islam - in that one verse is all the religion we need."

So much, then, for my readings from the memoir. What I am going to do next is just reflect on the process of writing it.

When I think back to this, I think, first of all, about the fact that the way the book now opens, with a reference to music, had actually been how I had begun writing it on a day in July 1991, soon after mailing off the manuscript of my last book to Yale. This was long before I had an outline or even any notion as to what this book might be. And so, those opening words and also the sounds with which the book now begins, were there from the start. They were its beginning.

But I now realized I hadn't, after all, just been spontaneously thinking about how the book opened. Rather, these thoughts had been part of an ongoing rumination in response to something I had read recently in a book about memoirs in preparing to come to this conference. Someone in one of those books had said that women, and in particular, Third World women, write back. Reading this I'd had one of those moments of thinking - ah, yes, of course that's what I was doing - writing back. And my evidence, in the case I was now making in my head to prove this, was precisely that the book opened in the way that it did - with a reference, as you heard, to music.

Why else, this argument in my head went, would I have begun in that way if I weren't writing back? Wasn't I in fact responding quite precisely by beginning in this way, to the beliefs and myths in the midst of which I lived, about the miserable, oppressed lives of Muslim girls in those backward Muslim Arab countries? Wasn't I plainly saying through this: no, that's not it at all, far from it and on the contrary - it was as marvelous and sweet and replete as music. I actually no longer agree now with this passing theory I had as to why I began as I did. And I mention it only to explain my train of thought. It's true, though, I think, that we write back, in the sense that we are always in the midst of conversation, many conversations. And it's true too that I'd no doubt have written a different book had I been living in Egypt and writing firstly for that audience.

Later, when I glanced at the early draft of this book, I saw that though I had been right in remembering that music and the sounds with which the book begins had always been its starting point - the actual words I had written had, in fact, been different. All the ingredients were there. Trees, desert, birds, reed pipe and so on. But set down, I suppose, just as they came. The sentences in that first draft distinctly did not flowing as fluently as they do now in print. Of course, we routinely edit and rewrite as we write - or I do, at any rate.

But I find myself now sometimes imagining somehow freeing myself of this practice, figuring out some way of writing without revising, refusing to let myself rewrite. Because, though, as I tell myself, I do this in the interest only of greater clarity and readability, or whatever - not to impose conformity, nevertheless, that process itself must surely always be introducing and imposing conventions as we bring thoughts and words into line with norms of thinking and writing.

I began A Border Passage out of a similar, but more intense and driven longing to free myself from, at that point, the strictures of academic language and the assumptions and conventions in which that language is steeped. By the time I was working on the last stages of my previous book, it had come to feel, that language, almost like a prison. I think now that that was where many of us found ourselves, in those years, at least many feminists, at the end of the '80s and early '90s.

I know also that among the reasons I began to work on the memoir, the moment I got the other book off my desk, was the sense I had that there were things here that I needed to address - that had remained unaddressed and even unrecognized in any work I'd done so far. I know now, too, on the evidence of my own notebooks from that time, that I had no clear idea as to what it was exactly I meant by this. And yet also that at the same time my intimations of what work I needed to do were actually very exact. For instance, to quote just a couple of sentences from my 1991 notebook - that is, right when I was beginning to think about writing it - they read (and they come after a paragraph about a morning spent digging in the yard clearing a space for a vegetable plot): "The broad patterns of nationalism and politics lie. All my life I've tried to make sense of my experience in terms of blueprints that don't fit. This is where I must begin - dig up what's under here."

To me now that actually describes exactly what I did, in particular in my chapter on becoming an Arab, which, I think, does exactly that - sets aside the blueprints and sets out to unearth the unacknowledged history of the creation of nationalism and identity that I had been subjected to.

Also my chapter on the harem is extraordinary to me, now, looking back, in that in my previous book on women in Islam I'd left out the only dimension of that subject that I had myself experienced, growing up among Muslims. Apparently it had been invisible to me and in the process of writing A Border Passage that was one of the hardest chapters to write. To begin with, thinking back to my mother and about the world of women among whom I grew up I had thought - and for weeks on end I had thought - there's nothing to write here, nothing worth writing about.

Anyway, I came across this passage about wanting to dig up what was really there when I was actually trying to track down something else - a dream I'd had at the beginning of writing the memoir. And as it happened my journals were all very conveniently in a suitcase in the wardrobe in my work room. I'd placed them there a few months earlier when, just thinking as one does about the precariousness of life and wondering what I should do with the notebooks. Should I destroy them now? What if I want to read them some day? And so on. And so I decided to put them in a bag and then think about what to do with them later.

Of course, packing them didn't solve anything, but I have to say, it did feel very comforting because I felt I was doing something sensible - packing my bags, getting ready for departure. Anyway, there they were now, the notebooks, all packed together, ready to be looked through.

The dream that I'd been trying to track down had captured some quintessential quality about Pelham, which is where I'd lived, in the hills near Amherst, when I was writing that book. And in the dream I'd been driving home on an unfamiliar road, and just as I'd been thinking I was lost, I saw that the strange road that I was on with its marvelous views was in fact just an alternative road home. Then another memory of Pelham came - this, too, catching some essence of the place. This was of being unable to sleep and getting up finally, when it was scarcely yet dawn. And seeing, as I went to put the kettle on, a quite spectacular moon in the front window. The moon, I suppose, is always spectacular, but sometimes apparently more so than others. Anyway, I opened the front door then and went out as I was in my night dress on to the lawn. It was okay to do this there, at this hour anyway - trees screening one from the neighbors on either side and the house across the road distant enough and anyway asleep.

I don't know if I would have written that book had I lived elsewhere. In memory, being in that house feels integral to it and to the process by which I came to write it. My notebooks from those days are filled with references to the ordinary things that make up our lives, but which, in that setting, were not simply background, but rather, were often spectacularly and even intrusively present, the way the moon was that dawn and that the nights routinely were there driving home, say - night, stars, woods, all ordinarily spectacular.

And even when not spectacular, ordinary things there had the capacity to catch and hold one's attention. I write, for instance, in those notebooks, as if these were matters of riveting interest, about how exactly the leaves look at this moment, as I sit looking out the window, and the lawn and the paths beyond and the black dog loping across it, or about the sounds of the wind mysteriously moaning for no explicable reason, banging a door I didn't know I had. "Was that a screen door?" - I wrote. And how exactly the snow looked, scuffed and windblown, the shadows of trees falling across it like hieroglyphs.

It was here that I finished the book on women and Islam, a book I'd conceived of more than a decade earlier and on another continent: in response to watching the news of the Iranian revolution then underway and to observing the then, to me, extraordinary sight of women - including socialist and Marxist women - voluntarily putting on headscarves and joining forces with an Islamic resistance, apparently sharing with them some notion of Islam as a route to justice, and donning headscarves as symbol of resistance and of commitment to justice. What history was this that I was witnessing and what, in fact, was the history of Islam in relation to women? And so I began, soon, that research project.

I had been living then in Al-Ain - an oasis in the inland desert of the Emirates, as spectacular in its way with its dunes and mountains as western Massachusetts. At that time in the Emirates there was talk, because of the Iranian evolution, of requiring the Islamic covering for all women, including non-local women like myself who were there working. And so this history that I found myself at that point passionately wanting to understand was also certainly a history whose implications in various ways, bore directly and personally on my own life and history.

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?

Obviously I gave up, in the end, the struggle of trying to figure out what belonged where, and where exactly the boundaries were. Nor is it yet clear to me how exactly I will write up this current work. In what sort of book should it be? A memoir in some way? Sequel to A Border Passage? A book in which I am openly present and show myself to be caught up in the flux and turbulence of our times, along with my subjects, the 'Muslims of America'?

Even the meaning of this word now, of this identity - Muslim - is obviously undergoing change. I could easily imagine writing a chapter in this book too, reflecting on this re-forging of our identities that is once more in process today, under the pressures of politics and history. Our re-definition, this time, as Muslim, as inescapably Muslim - a term that today refers primarily not to belief, but rather, in the eyes of the CIA, the INS and of ordinary people, to something that is ineradicably there now, apparently - in our genes, our names, our place of origin.

Is it possible, I ask myself as I try to figure out how I should write, to write in personal voice and in a style that openly shows one's very implicatedness in the history and subjects we are writing about? And yet also produce a text that is as cogent, as complex, as fair to its subject as an academic text might be?

Is it possible too, in such a text, to open up questions, complexities, possibilities of meaning as richly as one might in an academic text? My guess for the moment is that, in this situation and on this topic at least, it should be possible. But I'm still struggling with whether a conventionally academic book would somehow be more useful or effective.

It's easy enough, of course, to remove oneself, to remove all outward traces of the personal: but the rest, the entire cargo and mark of our consciousness is of course always there, like some indelible watermark. Among these I would count, for example, the kinds of things I revealed a moment ago, when I mentioned that I had twice now responded to the unexpected appearance of the veil by embarking on a research project to understand its appearance. This is just one example of the implicit cargo that is always there in our writing and speech, like it or not.

Obviously we bring to whatever work we do that hidden cargo of preconceptions, assumptions, frames of narration - explicitly or not. Obviously, too, this sort of cargo informs and is as present in the work, say, of Bernard Lewis or any other writer and academic quite as fully and pervasively as in more overtly personal texts, and obviously, too, Lewis and other academics of his stamp often offer their texts as instances of 'objective' impersonal scholarship, presenting them in a style and format whose object is precisely to conceal the presence of the personal and of that entire hidden cargo. While feminist scholarship at least intends and attempts, on the contrary, to make embedded assumptions as self-conscious and explicit as possible and to make that underlay visible and bring it in under the lens of scrutiny.

I find that I miss, now, in all sorts of ways, my old habits of writing in notebooks. I've placed one of my very favorite kinds of notebooks right there, close at hand on my desk, to try and tempt myself back. It probably was the destruction of boundaries that occurred for me after 9/11 that was most responsible for my stopping. But other things, too, are different now. And these, too, perhaps contributed to the change.

I'm still as attentive as ever, I find, to how exactly the leaves - or whatever - look in the scene outside my window. But my view now is more circumscribed. The only leaves I can see are those of the azalea bush right by the window, and those of the two distant and delicate trees outlined against the patch of sky visible from my desk. I know intimately now how they look in each season, and in the different moments of the day.

Other things are different too, including where I am myself in my own life. This, perhaps, as much as anything, is shaping my changing perspectives on writing and as to where it is exactly that boundaries and borders fall. I used to be quite clear as to what belonged where - what was personal, what was academic. And I apparently knew, too, with unhesitating clarity what to write where. Looking back now, I see myself as having been exceedingly docile and obedient in these matters. Agreeing to and falling in with these conventions and categories as to what kind of thought belonged where.

Now, I'm more likely to catch myself reflecting that surely there was some very good reason as to why exactly one had to put those sorts of thoughts here, and those thoughts over there. No doubt, there was some excellent reason why it had to be this way. But, now, what exactly was it?

And so this sense I seem to have now that such borders are not, after all, quite as fixed and clear as I once took them to be, is perhaps simply my own version of that wonderful line by, I believe the English poet, Jenny Joseph: "When I'm old, I shall wear purple." When I'm old - or should I say . . . wherever it is that that particular movable boundary falls - my hope, I think, is that I will continue to stray across borders.