A Quiet Revolution

A probing study of the veil's recent return-from one of the world's foremost authorities on Muslim women-that reaches surprising conclusions about contemporary Islam's place in the West today 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.To them, these coverings seemed irrelevant to both modern life and Islamic piety.Today, however, the majority of Muslim women throughout the Islamic world again wear the veil.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.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 expec