Drawing on Nawar al-Hassan Golley’s thesis that women’s autobiographies and memoirs feature a social rather than an individualistic self, this paper examines the memoirs of two prominent Egyptian women, Huda Shaarawi and Leila Ahmed. Born 61 years apart, both grew up in Egypt under British occupation, the former when the nationalist movement was at its height and the latter in the years of the forging of the national identity of Egypt. The turbulent political climate of their time had its impact on the shaping of their personal identity. Not surprisingly, the personal and the political lie enmeshed in their memoirs. Huda Shaarawi’s memoir Harem Years: The Memoirs of an Egyptian Feminist (1987) is a living testimony of the struggles and ordeals the women of her generation had to undergo and the deep-seated social conventions and prejudices they had to battle in their championing of nationalist and feminist causes. Shaarawi’s unproblematic conceptualization of identity, reflective of her moorings in religion and tradition, gives way in Leila Ahmed’s memoir A Border Passage: From Cairo to America – A Woman’s Journey (1999) to a fractured consciousness of self, one that grapples with questions of truth, identity, politics and religion. The paper also shows how the memoirs demystify orientalist stereotyping of Muslim women’s life in the harem.

Recently, there has been a surge in the publication of autobiographies and memoirs by women from the Arab world. Examining the theory of women’s autobiographical writings, Nawar al-Hassan Golley writes of a consensus among feminist critics that women’s autobiographical writings challenge critical assumptions about autobiography as a genre, assumptions that are generally developed from the study of male western autobiographers. Women have resisted and continue to resist the individualistic concept of the autobiographical self. The kind of self represented in most women’s writings is a social self, the self in relation to social forces (Golley, 2003, p. 51). The truth of this observation is borne out by the memoirs of two prominent Egyptian women, Huda Shaarawi and Leila Ahmed, whose individual lives lie closely intertwined with the sociopolitical developments in their nation. This paper examines how Huda Shaarawi’s Harem Years: The Memoirs of an Egyptian Feminist, translated and published in English in 1987 by the American feminist Margot Badran and Leila Ahmed’s A Border Passage: From Cairo to America – A Woman’s Journey (1999) document the process of these women’s subject formation against the background of the development of the nationalist consciousness of Egypt. The memoirs portray two crucial phases in the history of the nation, both marked by turbulence and upheaval.

English Studies Journal, The Intersection of the Personal and the Political, Huda Shaarawi’s Harem Years
and Leila Ahmed’s A Border Passage, Huda Shaarawi and Leila Ahmed, A Chronicle of Huda’s Early Life, Huda Shaarawi’s Sociopolitical Activism, Leila Ahmed’s A Border Passage, A Product of Diverse Influences.