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Leila Ahmed. A Quiet Revolution: The Veil's Resurgence, from the Middle East to America New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011. 352 pages. Paperback $22.00
Leila Ahmed's latest book examines the reemergence of the hijab from the 1970s in Egypt to the 2000s in the United States, analyzing various factors for Muslim women choosing to veil. Ahmed's lucid analysis of scholarship on Islamism and veiling in Egypt and the US is very useful for academics and non-specialists alike, and her findings from women activists' responses to the post-9 1 1 milieu is a valuable contribution to scholarship on American Muslims. Among Ahmed's conclusions is that Islamist movements have (inadvertently) influenced American Muslim activists advocating gender equality.
Ahmed first considers historical influences that contributed to Egypt's "Islamic Resurgence" and the re-veiling phenomenon of the 1970s. In the colonial period, British and elite Egyptian arguments for unveiling conflated progress and modernity with all things western. This perspective influenced not only the urban unveiling trend in the first half of the twentieth century, but also the veil's later reappearance when Egyptians reclaimed indigenous meanings of the veil. Another major factor was the emergence of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB), which was rooted in antiimperialism and a commitment to social justice. In part, the MB's opposition to Egypt's westernizing trend manifested as an insistence on veiling and gender separation. While Egyptians were drawn to the MB largely for its social services and populist outlook, the vast majority of urban women remained unveiled.
Ahmed examines the Islamic Resurgence of the 1970s in the context of the secular state's failures and the Arabs' defeat in 1967. Not only did the MB broaden its base in Egypt, but it also promoted its views abroad via the Saudi-financed World Muslim League. In this period the MB explicitly...