Leila Ahmed

Leila Ahmed (Arabic: لیلى أحمد; born 1940) is an Egyptian-American scholar of Islam. In 1992 she published her book Women and Gender in Islam, which is regarded as a seminal historical analysis of the position of women in Arab Muslim societies. She became the first professor of women's studies in religion at Harvard Divinity School in 1999, and has held the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Divinity chair since 2003. She was later awarded the Victor S. Thomas Research Professor of Divinity in 2020 In 2013, Ahmed received the University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award in Religion for her analysis of the veiling of Muslim women in the United States, in which she described her rejection of her own previous critiques of the veil as sexist in favor of the view that the veil, when voluntarily chosen, is a progressive and feminist act. As such, she now supports Muslim women who advocate for the veil as a symbol of progressivism and feminism, although Ahmed herself does not practice veiling.