Leila Ahmed is an Egyptian-American scholar of Islam and feminist theory, born on May 29, 1940, in Heliopolis, Cairo, Egypt, to a middle-class Egyptian father who was a civil engineer and an upper-class Turkish mother. She grew up in Cairo during the 1940s and 1950s in a multicultural environment blending Muslim Egyptian values with the liberal orientation of Egypt's aristocracy. Her family was politically ostracized after the 1952 Free Officers Movement, as her father opposed Gamal Abdel Nasser's Aswan High Dam on ecological grounds—a story detailed in her memoir A Border Passage: From Cairo to America—A Woman's Journey (1999). She earned a BA, MA, and PhD from the University of Cambridge in the 1960s. Ahmed joined Harvard Divinity School in 1999 as the first professor of women's studies in religion. She previously served as Professor of Women's Studies and Near Eastern Studies, and Director of those programs, at the University of Massachusetts Amherst (from 1981; Director of Near Eastern Studies 1991–1992, Women's Studies 1992–1995). At Harvard, she was appointed Victor S. Thomas Professor of Divinity in 2003 and became Victor S. Thomas Research Professor of Divinity in 2020 upon retirement, now holding the title Emerita. Key publications include Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate (Yale University Press, 1992) and A Quiet Revolution: The Veil's Resurgence, from the Middle East to America (Yale University Press, 2011), the latter earning the Grawemeyer Award in Religion (2013). A critic of Arab nationalism as cultural imperialism, her views on the veil evolved from initial opposition to seeing it as a symbol of activism for justice in some contexts. She has faced racism and anti-Muslim prejudice in the West while reconciling her multifaceted identities.