Background
Born in the Heliopolis district of Cairo to a middle-class Egyptian father and an upper class Turkish mother in 1940, Ahmed's childhood was shaped both by Muslim Egyptian values and the liberal orientation of Egypt's aristocracy under the ancient régime. After Egypt's last ruling monarch was overthrown by the Free Officers Movement in 1952, life for Ahmed's family along with others in her milieu was irrevocably changed. Her father, a civil engineer, was a strong opponent of Gamal Abdel Nasser's construction of the Aswan High Dam on ecological principles. This earned him the wrath of the ruling regime for years to follow and had detrimental effects on the family.
She earned her doctorate degree from University of Cambridge during the 1960s before moving to the United States to teach and write, where she was appointed to professorship in Women’s Studies and Near Eastern studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1981 followed by a professorship in Women's Studies and Religion at the Harvard Divinity School in 1999, where she currently teaches.
Read more about this topic: Leila Ahmed
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