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Different expressions of feminism exist because women in different countries have different priorities. Arab women everywhere struggle to construct a future in which justice and peace will no longer seem impossible dreams. Arab and Arab American feminists focus on one of the very basic rights humans are supposed to enjoy, the right to survive. With bombings, killings, building of Israeli settlements in Palestine, theft of water as well as of land in Iraq, Palestine, and other occupied locations, concerns and priorities of Arab and Arab American feminists differ from those of American feminists. Arab American poet Suheir Hammad says in an interview posted on her website that she cannot separate her obsession with gender equality from her obsession with the freedom of Palestine:
Indeed, for some Arab women, the American feminist movement has become too narrowly identified with issues they do not consider as top priorities, such as abortion and lesbian rights (although to some Arab American women, these represent extremely important issues). Leila Ahmed in A Border Passage begs the question of how to foster a meaningful, encouraging discourse about being a feminist and a Muslim in an academic atmosphere that considers the two mutually exclusive and remains ignorant of the plight of Muslim Arab women.
Finally, perhaps we can safely say that whether situations force Arab or Arab American women into exile, mentally or physically, like Sirine in Crescent or Mawal in West of the Jordan, or they voluntarily cross the borders from their Arab homelands to live in the United States, like Leila Ahmed and the different speakers in Kahf’s E-mails, they all go through Sirine’s and Han’s exilic experiences, as discussed in Abu-Jaber’s Crescent.