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July 13, 2003
Review: Creating room for themselves
THIS book comprises six lengthy interviews of educated Pakistani women who have achieved unusual visibility in one form or the other. The women are Nilofar Ahmed, Quratul Ain Bakhteari, Sajeda Mokarram Shah, Kishwar Naheed, Ayesha Siddiqa Agha and Rahila Tiwana. There is a long sociological introduction in two parts. The first is for the book and the second (41 pages) is of a theoretical nature. In the second, called “Stating the Problems” the author, Shahla Haeri, tells us what methodology was used and how the interviews of the six women took place.
The first woman, Quratul Ain Bakhteari, is a famous social activist running an NGO which trains young people to run projects on community development. She began life as the daughter of educated parents who were forced to live in a refugee community which they considered much below their social status. Qurat was used to a tomboyish life with the neighbours taking care of her till she became an adolescent and her mother tried to restrict her freedom. She was married off to a dentist who, despite being a responsible and devoted father, could not understand her unusual urge for freedom and self fulfilment. They separated and Qurat, who resumed studies completing her PhD found her true identity as a public person. However, eventually she reconciled herself with her husband.
Rahila Tiwana was a PPP worker belonging to the People’s Student Federation (PSF) which was the student wing of the party. She was arrested and tortured in police custody in 1991 when Nawaz Sharif was ruling Pakistan. According to her, she was not raped though that is the news which came into the Pakistani press. She was told to involve Benazir Bhutto, the leader of the PPP, in a political case but refused to do so. The chapter brings out an especially violent and ugly aspect of the Pakistani state.
While Rahila Tiwana shows one type of resistance, there are others also. The resistance to the privileged life of a feudal landowner, nearly worshipped and always deferred to by her people, is exemplified by the life of Ayesha Siddiqa Agha. The daughter of a feudal family, the leaders of which are also spiritual leaders in Bahawalpur, she was pulled in two directions in her childhood. Towards the father’s feudal world but also towards the mother’s artistic and intellectual world. The mother, the novelist Jamila Hashmi, had a greater influence on her possibly because the father died. She was, however, a perfectionist who infused a sense of inadequacy in her highly intelligent daughter. Ayesha, however, broke out of the feudal world as well as the artistic one by the force of her intellect. She completed her doctorate from London in war studies and joined the bureaucracy. She is now a respected scholar whose writings are taken seriously by the academic world.
There is a chapter on Kishwar Naheed, the famous Urdu poet of Pakistan. Kishwar probably had more impediments in her way to success than most other women. Belonging to a respectable but impecunious lower middle class family, she was forced to marry the young man — her class fellow and companion to poetry meetings but not her lover — who did not appreciate her. She kept working, feeding her husband and in-laws and later her own children while, at the same time, composing feminist poetry which was hailed as being unique, powerful and revolutionary. She is now a famous personality whose work is known internationally.
The chapter on Sajida Makarram Shah, who made a name for herself as a working woman after her doctor husband’s death in a tragic car accident, brings out a woman of outstanding courage and indomitable will power. She bore all the pressure brought upon her as a widow to conform and live with male relatives. However, she chose to live her own life and finally got accepted as an independent person. She died in a plane crash in Kathmandu.
The last chapter is on Nilofar Ahmed, who is described as a Sufi feminist. She is one of the founders of an organization called the Daughters of Islam (DOI) which is a nonpolitical, nonsectarian, nonprofit organization. The major aim of this NGO is to promote knowledge, especially among women and children, and to carry out projects of various kinds. Among other things, Nilofar has written on laws or norms of society which oppress women such as the pronouncement of the irrevocable triple-divorce in one go. She also opposes the veiling of the face which the ulema of Pakistan generally support ardently.
In the end the author tells us how this research on people nearly equal in position and power is different from the traditional ethnographic research in which the ‘other’ is downtrodden and marginalized. She also comments that it is important to understand the changes in Muslim societies, especially as regards women who have to struggle to get recognition — indeed, even to be regarded as a person and not property. While the book is short on theoretical insights, it is an important contribution to both sociology and women’s studies. After all, it is important to document lives which are pioneers in a society which grudges them even a name of their own. Maybe, because of these models, all women will have a space for themselves — a concept which Virginia Woolf symbolized as “A Room of One’s Own”.
No Shame for the Sun: Lives of Professional Women
By Shahla Haeri
Syracuse University Press, New York
ISBN 0815629605
454pp. Price not listed
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