~ No Shame for the Sun: Lives of Professional Pakistani Women. By Shahla Haeri ~
Disconcerted by the invisibility of Muslim professional women in academic and cultural literature, Shahla Haeri decided to fill this gap. As she says, they may be a relatively small percentage of their societies, but have had a disproportionate political, social, and cultural effect. Yet their experiences are almost impossible to find in Western academic and social literature, where Muslim women are often portrayed as a faceless downtrodden mass. As a social scientist, Haeri was well positioned to write about professional women in a Muslim society.
Haeri is of Iranian origin, currently the director of the Women’s Studies program at Boston University. She has written about Iranian women in the past, but for this book she chose to study women in Pakistan. As an Iranian woman she was familiar with Muslim societies, but as an Iranian woman she also had some distance from her Pakistani interviewees. Judging from the book, this distance has enhanced her writing, inviting her to probe deeper where a writer entrenched in Pakistani society might have taken more for granted. It has also allowed her to draw comparisons with both Iran and the US, the other societies with which she is familiar. These comparisons are not, she says, intended to draw a one-to-one correspondence or force likenesses, but to highlight similarities within the universal struggle for women’s rights.
The book is focused on six women, who were chosen because of their professional accomplishments in Pakistani society. An opening chapter discusses stereotypes about Islam and underlines the
diversity within the loose group of “Muslim women”. As an example, the veil is perhaps the object most closely associated with Islam in the West; Haeri says:
Some women wear the veil to demonstrate religious conviction, some to be distinguished as respectable, others to remain anonymous or safe, and still others to cover their poverty. Some wear a veil out of respect for local custom, and still others are forced to do so under the threat of punishment. Veiling is also primarily an urban phenomenon, and many peasant and tribal women, though modestly dressed, do not wear a veil.
Such background may be quite familiar to women in South Asia, but is probably necessary in this book to provide adequate context. However, Haeri moves beyond basic explanations into a well-written summary of Pakistani politics, and an interesting discussion on the dichotomy within a country where many women have little power, but a woman, Benazir Bhutto, is elected into the presidency.
The real charm of this book is that each woman is allowed to speak in her own words. The author interviewed them over a period of months or years, and has compiled and edited their conversations into a coherent whole. She has a light editing hand, and inserts very little of herself into the narrative, clarifying her role with footnotes such as “I had asked her how she resolved such conflicts”. These footnotes are also extensively used to provide background and context without breaking the flow of the narrative. Each woman’s voice comes through clearly and distinctly, allowing one to learn not only of their lives and professional accomplishments, but also their personalities.
What of the six women themselves? They are: Quratul Ain Bakhteari, a social organizer; Rahila Tiwana, a political activist; Ayesha Siddiqa, a young feudal lord with a Ph.D in War Studies; Kishwar Naheed, a well-known poet; Sajida Mokarram Shah, a widowed government official; and Nilofar Ahmed, a Sufi mystic.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the most eloquent are those for whom words are an intrinsic part of their work – Quratul Ain Bakhteari and Kishwar Naheed. Both their narratives are distinctive for their opinionatedness, honesty, and balance. Qurat, for example, speaks of her problems when she married into a conservative household, and of her husband’s distance and passivity, but she also discusses how this passivity allowed her to make her own decisions which often went against her in-laws’ wishes. Kishwar Naheed broke with tradition early, marrying a fellow student instead of letting her family choose a husband, but she also speaks of the imperfections within the marriage, her husband’s infidelity, and her simultaneous pain and relief at his death.
Not all the women are as appealing, but they are all interesting. Ayesha Siddiqui is decisive, articulate and independent. She is fairly senior in the Pakistan Telecomm Corporation, and chooses to go abroad for ‘War Studies’, a generally male domain. Yet her feudal interactions with her servants display her in a less attractive light; she is strict with them, screams abuse on occasion, and appears to enjoy and expect their deferentiality.
Rahila Tiwana’s chapter is entitled ‘Violence’. A political activist, she was arrested in 1991 on fabricated charges because of her work on behalf of Benazir Bhutto’s PPP party. She was tortured, possibly raped, and then hospitalized for several months. The “rape” is central to the narrative. Rahila herself maintains that she was beaten and abused, but not raped, in contrast to news reports and other information which imply that she was. Several pages explain the stigma of rape and why Rahila might not want to admit to it; a valid discussion, but faintly perplexing in this book where the women otherwise have the final word on their own experiences.
Nilofer Ahmed, in the final chapter, discusses women’s rights in a religious context. Her arguments are articulate and straightforward:
Nilofar perceived many (Pakistani) religious leaders as opportunists and hypocrites. “Several male scholars gave fatwas [religious decrees] that a woman is not allowed to become head of a state in Islam. Then later on, when Benazir Bhutto organized a conference, they all came running in and wanted to be sitting with her”.
[..]”Benazir Bhutto was corrupt to the core, and her removal had nothing to do with her being a woman. When people ask me why a woman prime minister did nothing for the women of this country, I say because she is a feudal lord first and a woman second.”
The stories of these women would always have been worth reading, but as told in book, are enhanced considerably by the cultural, social, and political background provided by the author.
No Shame for the Sun: Lives of Professional Pakistani Women. By Shahla Haeri. Syracuse University Press, 2004.
This review was first published on the now-defunct SAWNET (South Asian Women’s NETwork) website.
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