Her new book brings the critical historical perspective necessary to understand the deep and quiet revolution that is occurring among American Muslims.'-Tariq Ramadan, University of Oxford, 'What lies behind the phenomenon of Muslim women wearing 'Islamic dress'? Leila Ahmed provides an engaging tour through nationalism, socialism, Islam, and anti-imperialism in her beautifully written book, weaving together the themes of politics, dress, and women's changing roles with her usual historical and literary skill. Ahmed gives us a fascinating portrait of the Muslim Brotherhood, especially of its ''unsung mother,'' Zainab al-Ghazali.'-Mira Sethi, Wall Street Journal, 'Leila Ahmed 's views on women, Islam and Islamism are not only interesting but courageous and need to be read and debated. Richly insightful, intricately drawn, and passionately argued, this absorbing story of the veil's resurgence, from Egypt through Saudi Arabia and into the West, suggests a dramatically new portrait of contemporary Islam. Ahmed's surprising conclusions represent a near reversal of her thinking on this topic. It is often Islamists, even more than secular Muslims, who are at the forefront of such contemporary activist struggles as civil rights and women's rights. Ahmed observed that Islamism, with its commitments to activism in the service of the poor and in pursuit of social justice, is the strain of Islam most easily and naturally merging with western democracies' own tradition of activism in the cause of justice and social change. What she discovered, however, in the stories of British colonial officials, young Muslim feminists, Arab nationalists, pious Islamic daughters, American Muslim immigrants, violent jihadists, and peaceful Islamic activists, confounded her expectations. Why, Ahmed asks, did this change take root so swiftly, and what does this shift mean for women, Islam, and the West? When she began her study, Ahmed assumed that the veil's return indicated a backward step for Muslim women worldwide. Today, however, the majority of Muslim women throughout the Islamic world again wear the veil. To them, these coverings seemed irrelevant to both modern life and Islamic piety.

In Cairo in the 1940s, Leila Ahmed was raised by a generation of women who never dressed in the veils and headscarves their mothers and grandmothers had worn.

A quiet revolution by leila ahmed