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Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 25.1 (2005) 251-253



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No Shame for the Sun: Lives of Professional Pakistani Women. Shahla Haeri. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2002 xxxiv + 454 pp., $49.95 (cloth)

Shahla Haeri's new book is a groundbreaking ethnography in that it chronicles and analyzes the lives of six women from contemporary Pakistan who have not traditionally been the subject of anthropology's gaze. Instead of the typical ethnographic account focusing on "veiled" and "oppressed" Muslim (in this case Pakistani) women, Haeri has chosen as her subject a small but influential class, that of professional, middle-class Pakistani women (with the exception of Ayesha Siddiqa who, being a landlord in her own right, belongs to a wealthier feudal elite) in order, she says, to engage in a practice uncommon to the discipline of anthropology, that of "studying up." The strange refusal by feminist anthropologists, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, to look at the life and experiences of like-minded middle-class educated women from the Muslim world has led to the "general invisibility of professional women in the academic literature," which, as Haeri's accounts of these six women's lives show, "ironically contrasts with their visibility in their home countries"—because their activities, social and otherwise, are hotly contested and carefully scrutinized the closer these women are to being "public" presences in their male-dominated societies. Haeri's research is clearly intended to remove the cloak of "invisibility" enveloping Muslim professional women within the hallowed halls of Western academe, a fate that she herself, as an Iranian Muslim woman scholar living and writing in the West, has had at times to face and fight. Indeed, as she tells us on more than one occasion, she is fed up with what she perceives as the Western observer's obsession with veiling as the quintessential hallmark of Muslim women, which has led even highly educated academics to sometimes regard her as an anomaly, an exception who simply proves the rule that Muslim women everywhere are passive victims of a virulent male oppression sanctioned by the particularly regressive religion of Islam. Such an ahistorical, monolithic view of Islam and of Muslim [End Page 251] women (which she oddly claims has been rectified under the Bush administration) denies the diversity of women's experiences in the Muslim world prior to the Enlightenment and, worse, denies women's very real agency while inaccurately representing religion to be the major if not the only cause of the oppression and victimization of women (xxvii). Within Western academia, Haeri singles out what she refers to as "a growing fascination with difference" attributable, in part, to the "growing preponderance of subaltern studies" as a main reason for the invisibility of Muslim professional women in academic discourse, since these latter are really not too "different" or "other" from the Western-defined "us." While such a theoretical accusation against "subaltern studies" (which she unfortunately never defines) needs to be fleshed out much more carefully than she does in this book, her general point about the proliferation of stereotypical accounts of "oppressed" Muslim women in both popular and scholarly discourse is indisputable. Of course, she is at pains to underscore her acknowledgment of misogynistic practices in different Muslim countries. However, what is problematic is the singling out of Islam as "the champion of world oppression of women." She recognizes her own dilemma, which she claims is the source of both her professional and personal vulnerability as well as her strength—her need to both challenge social injustice and violence against women "back home" in the Muslim societies she studies while also fighting against the entrenched stereotypes and misconceptions of these societies and of Muslim women in general "abroad." Such a "dual positioning" inevitably affects her approach to her academic discipline as well. As her introduction states, her own work is a challenge to the "central assumptions of mainstream social science [regarding] the objectivity [of the] detached observer." Indeed, what she has...

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