The following review is a (very) long and detailed version of a much shorter one that was just published in Reading Religion, a publication of the AAR. You can find the link to it below. (Short version: this is a fantastic book and would be of interest & relevance to everyone.)
Forging the Ideal Educated Girl: The Production of Desirable Subjects in Muslim South Asia, University of California Press (2018), by Shenila Khoja-Moolji
The current Western discourse around Malala’s fight for education specifically and Muslim women’s perceived inability to go to school calls for a critique of the way education and Muslim women and girls are imagined, as well as of the promise that education is the solution to all sorts of problems. This is precisely what Shenila Khoja-Moolji’s Forging the Ideal Educated Girl: The Production of Desirable Subjects in Muslim South Asia accomplishes. Through an analysis of a variety of texts, linguistic and visual—didactic novels, political speeches, government documents, periodicals, advertisements, television shows, and first-person narratives—as well as through a focus group, the author examines the discourse surrounding women’s and girls’ education, the rationales given for their education, the ideal location for obtaining education, and the ideal curriculum. She finds competing notions of the ideal educated, and the failed, female subject. The book excellently shows that class, nationalism, religion, and patriarchy shape the conversation on girls’ and women’s education. Khoja-Moolji shows the changing nature of the debate, and the fluctuating ideas of the ideal woman, as illustrated in various media, including women’s magazines, periodicals, novels, and television shows. The book relies on both archival research and focused conversations with a community in southern Pakistan about education. These focus group interviews reinforce the arguments she makes throughout the book, particularly those pertaining to class, religion, and the patriarchal family. Khoja-Moolji’s focus is on the debate of women’s education internal to Muslim societies—in colonial British India and postcolonial Pakistan—in three moments of South Asian history: the turn of the twentieth century, the first decades after the creation of Pakistan, and the turn of the twenty-first century. The book is an essential reading not just for academics interested in questions of gender, South Asia, and gender and South Asia, but also and perhaps more importantly for development and education NGOs—and for anyone who believes that Nicholas Kristoff and others like him do noble work.
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