In most societies, children inherit from birth the religious beliefs of their family. A child is taught the religious beliefs and practices of a given faith and through affiliation and schooling grows to accept that religion as part of their identity in adulthood. .
Religion can be explained further by examining its different parts. Everyone's outlook and opinion on religion are different. These conflicting views and beliefs separate the identity of one religious person from the next. For instance, in A Border Passage, Ahmed believed her religion, Islam, was separated into female Islam and the official textual male Islam. Islamic women could not attend services at the male dominated mosques so could not decipher the beliefs written in the Islamic texts. They were prohibited from sermons and "therefore did not hear the same sermons that the men did, and they did not get the official orthodox interpretations of religion that men got every Friday". "Rather they figured things out among themselves and in two ways. They figured them out as they tried to understand their own lives and how to behave and how to live, talking them over together among themselves, interacting with their men, and returning to talk them over in their communities of women." (Ahmed 123) This belief in the plurality of Islam shaped the feminist identity of Leila.
The excerpt on the plurality of Islam also touches on the issue of gender and its effect on one's identity. The previous paragraph highlights the fact that different genders are not treated equally. In an Islamic culture, woman much like Ahmed's are intentionally undereducated in Islamic texts due to the belief that woman can not attend mosques to hear sermons relating to Islamic teachings. The gender issue relating to identity can be seen in the not so distant past of our culture. Before 1918, woman in America were thought to be intellectually inferior to men in worldly matters and therefore incapable of casting a cognitive vote.
