December 1, 2002

“Six months before the publication I began to get cold feet. No, I wasn’t nervous or embarrassed or even afraid of what I had written. As a matter of fact, exposing what I have in The holy woman (virtually a debt of honour that I had carried all along my growing years away from Pakistan) is a personal triumph. I loved the writing part. I have no regrets about the hard work that I have put in. It was the unfolding of the package deal of becoming a published writer that I dreaded. I counted the days before the book came into public view not with excitement but with some sadness savouring the last days of my life as a private person.”

Still flushed with the response to her debut into novel writing, Qaisra Shahraz cannot get over the fact that life hence is destined to be a battle for personal survival. “That’s something you cannot share even with your nearest and dearest people, because they would just not understand. They would be frightened.”

So Shahraz continues as the lone ranger. Which is to say that in spite of everything her second novel Typhoon is with the publisher and a third is being worked upon! Alongside, her three sons’ schoolwork has to be supervised, the laundry has to be sorted out and the lost socks found and to top it all, a brave celebrity front has to be conjured. As a Pakistani growing up all of the last thirty years in Britain, life has also entailed pampering a cultural sensitivity.

More so, because the creative muse decided to visit with the vengeance that became cause for Shahraz writing The holy woman.

Certainly a novel that has every possible ingredient of being read as a romantic sequel to 9/11, given the purely Pakistani socio-religious context it sets out to explore.

Shahraz’ story starts off with romance in the air. Zarri Bano, university educated, rich, beautiful, modern to the core of her coloured nails. In comes Sikandar, the dashing city bred hero of romantic dreams. It was to be a marriage made in heaven, save the jealousy of the heroine’s father. Providence enters in the shape of tragedy. Zarri Bano’s only brother dies in a riding accident and her marriage is called off as she is destined to become the “holy woman”, to be denied a husband, children, love, everything that would go to make the book a nice juicy romance ending in a ‘lived happily ever after scenario’.

“I happened to see this BBC documentary where they had sensationalized an incident of a girl in Sindh being married to the Quran. I could not believe my eyes. The Pakistan and the Pakistani culture I knew supported nothing of the sort. But this sort of thing was obviously happening there. As a writer I thought I had the responsibility to raise the issue, to tell the milieu I lived in that no, this is not Pakistan. There is a Pakistan, which is very progressive. Which does not marry its women to a holy book and where whatever westerners label as a fundamentalist madness, has a method to it. The veil, the parental authority, the restrictions of dress and demeanour, everything is based on sound reasoning.”

So Shahraz went about exploring. In the process was born a heroine, her family, and the events that lead to her marriage to the Quran. Thereafter it was the commonality, the universality of human experience that she sought to unfurl. “I also had two readerships in mind and I wanted to share the pain, the travails of human sense and sensibility with both sets. I saw the mainstream English reader who had to be wooed well within his or her own parameters.

I wanted to tell them, “Come on, this is the world that I know more then all your journalists and analysts. Come with me and get to see it through my eyes. Then there were other readers, people like myself who had been born and bred in England and yet were constantly living under the shadows of another country — Pakistan which existed only as a dream. I wanted to specially make this second kind of reader proud of their roots so that like my own younger sister who wears the ‘hijab’ to university, these people could learn to carry themselves with the courage of conviction.”

Shahraz may as well add the third set of readers to her list; the Pakistanis who got to see the novel six months after Sharaz’s hurricane visit to Pakistan on a British Council sponsorship when she read out excerpts to select audiences in Karachi, Islamabad and Lahore.

Shahraz’s courage of conviction is infectious. Where Zarri Bano the main protagonist of a romantic horror is beautiful, glamorous and a feminist at that, forcefully agrees to succumb to feudal tradition she also emerges as the winner. It is this journey from a pure romantic to the prototype of the Muslim woman whose actions have a reasoning methodology that makes for the substance of The holy woman.

That Shahraz manages to reconstruct the original Islamic sensibility, freeing it from traditional patriarchy, in the face of international vendetta is no small cause to celebrate. So on the one hand is a heroine who admits to being, like her female peers, “a bead in a tapestry that our fathers and elders weave”. At the other end of the spectrum she emerges as the final victor capable of retaliating with conviction to the inquisitive English journalist’s empathy. Typical of the convoluted notions of human rights in the western mind, the journalist pushes Zarri to the edge by the question about her taking the veil, “Don’t you feel oppressed by this?” Zarri Bano answers back, “We are not freaks. We are women who like to dress modestly. Please treat us with respect.”

“To me the issue of the women who take up the ‘Hijab’ is important. The world needs to know that they do so because of a personal need and not because they are being told to do so by an elder or a religious cleric. In England a lot of young women are taking to the ‘Hijab’. They are educated intelligent women who have discovered their identity behind the ‘Hijab’. This is a development that the west is finding hard to digest.

My own younger sister started wearing it when she was twelve. My father was horrified and he had a right to be, because of the increasing racism around Pakistani emigrants. She went to university with it and my brother said, “you will be discriminated against”. My sister stuck to her guns because she was young and very clear about values.

So in this book I have explored the issue of the Hijab because these things are relevant if you are a Muslim and living in the west. Yet the Hijab is not what the book is all about. Neither is it an apology for following the call of religion. The holy woman is very much a novel that spans countries and continents, unravelling cultures and human emotions, penetrating the feudal psyche to elicit responses to all that baffles outsiders.

Then as Shahraz worked on these conflicts, putting the best of her creative juices to test, she met others. People who became characters in a saga of traditional values and insular faith. For three years the entire range lived with her, each moving on with the development of individual wisdoms destined to break so many of the myths that surround life in the mother country. Some of these become centrals in her next novel but of course with other perspectives. Shahraz promises that though the characters reappear in the Typhoon her second novel is not written as a sequel to the first.

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