Engendering Islam: Religio-Cultural Violence and Trauma in Qaisra Shahraz’s The Holy Woman

Elham Fatma, Rahul K. Gairola, and Rashmi Gaur

The Trauma of Islam

In this chapter, we examine the historical and theoretical narrative vectors of Qaisra Shahraz’s novel The Holy Woman (2001), which interrogates the nexus of caste, gender, economics, and violence underlying the practice of a Muslim woman marrying the Quran. The novel is a significant example of trauma fiction as it highlights how, in patriarchal family structures and feudal customs of Islamic society, women are compelled to comply with those who enforce their subordination. In even’ society, a matrix of ideologically delineated conventions, the spectrum of beliefs and religious orientations impose pervasive and “intersectional trends” (Crenshaw 1991, 1245) of thought. These confer autonomous and distinctive status on any given society.

Although the plot is set in contemporary times, the novel ironically represents the afterlife of feudal thought and praxis. Set in the Sind Province of Pakistan, Shahraz’s novel reveals the exploits and vulnerabilities of women because of their gender, degrees of resistance, and stoic resignation to moral and emotional calamities. Shahraz exposes the ethical and religious tensions inherent in their situations as well as the psychological need of victims to have their trauma recognized by others. This is perhaps because “trauma is transmissible: it leaks between mental and physical symptoms, between patients and their listeners or viewers who are commonly moved to forms of overwhelming sympathy” (Luckhurst 2008, 3).

Violence against women is often justified in the name of tradition, culture, and religion to systematically disempower them. Patriarchal culture and religious traditions have meticulously created and maintained a system of norms and values to uphold their power over women and sacrifice them to preserve their “honor.” The Holy Woman explores how the institutionalized practice of Haq Bakhshish is deployed to protect established social hierarchies. In its literal sense, Haq Bakhshish is the custom of marrying a woman to the Quran, thereby making her Shahzadi Ibadat, meaning “a princess of worship” in Urdu. To support our premise that Haq Bakhshish symbolizes the victim’s suppression, our chapter discusses Judith Herman’s influential theorization of psychological trauma in relation to victim’s disempowerment and dissociation. We also engage with various theoretical arguments, including Nausheen Ishaque’s notion of “ritualized

Engendering Islam 139 violence” (2017), where the chemistry of tradition and religion legitimize the ritualization of violence and Laura S. Brown and Maria Roots’ “insidious traumata” (1995) that signifies how distressing experiences do not lie “outside the range of human experience” (101) but rather are very much part of everyday life. These theoretical frameworks elucidate the vicarious trauma of those related to the victim. Although our chapter does not discuss in detail the alliance of feminism and Marxism, we explore how aspects of gendered ideology and political and patriarchal interpretations of Islam invoke R.W. Connell’s (2009) concepts of “hegemonic masculinity” and “patriarchal dividend” suggesting how some men derive economic benefits by exploiting women (as well as men). In sum, we read The Holy Woman as a tale of a feudal and fundamentalist parochial society with negligible exposure to liberal education that maintains uncompromising belief in conventional gender hierarchies. The array of beliefs, ceremonies, and rituals described in the novel consolidate a highly prescriptive closed identity. In such a society, a woman has little agency and can only garner value and respect in familial roles, eliminating any question of sexual autonomy. In our reading of the novel, Shahraz challenges the social practice of marrying Muslim daughters to the Quran through her protagonist Zarri Bano, whose suffering is profoundly visceral. Zarri is forced by her family to marry the Quran as part of the traditional patriarchal practice of avoiding property distribution outside the family as a consequence of the marriage of daughters.

The Holy Woman depicts the trauma of Muslim women in ways not envisioned in current trauma theory. Zarri Bano’s anomalous marriage to the Quran and her subsequent strict observation of the precepts of being a Quran bride sculpt her personal experience of female oppression. Her sacrifice for family honor and obedience to gender discrimination and patriarchal norms differ from other women’s experiences described as traumatic by Western writers and trauma theorists. For instance, Judith Herman’s theorization of trauma, including its symptoms and recovery', aligns with experiences of incest, battering, rape, and domestic, racial, and ethnic violence experienced by' women in Pan-American culture. In contrast, as we demonstrate herein, The Holy Woman portrays a traumatic experience forged by' patriarchal perceptions of power, ownership, and honor within a religious context that leaves the victim disempowered while exposing her marginalized position in society. We also suggest that heterosexuality operates as a tool of dominance over women as Islamic code renders greater social power to men within its diktats. Also, in the same society certain varied abstractions and aspects are inordinately valued. For example, some religious communities in South Asia place inordinate and sentimental importance on the caste system.

The supremacy, authoritarianism, and fetishism espoused by' elites of the upper caste exacerbates prejudice against people of the same religion, often, ironically, to the detriment of those of the same caste. The upper caste and its concomitant lineage, practice, and “honor” are inextricably' intertwined in the Muslim communities of Pakistan’s rural Sind province wherein Shahraz’s novel is placed. In the context of a hegemonic understanding of marriage, gender, identity, and the caste system, it should be noted that “under Pakistani law the Haq Bakshish tradition is punishable by a seven-year prison sentence, but no one dares report such cases” (lastampa.it, 2013). The practice is still followed by some segments of Sindi society. In the remainder of this chapter, we first provide background information on how the author engages with the subject of her novel. This context sutures Shahraz’s real-life stakes to the fictional landscape of her heroine while demonstrating how the secular and mundane can shape the creative axes of fiction. Second, we offer a close reading of the narrative to explore traumatic experiences of Muslim women in such religious communities.

Holy Women: From Author to Protagonist

As we demonstrate, the novel reflects Shahraz’s ideologies, imparting resistance between the Active realm of the novel and the lived experiences of material life. For example, Shahraz, a Pakistan-born British national, explains in an interview how she learned of the tradition of Haq Bakhshish while watching a BBC documentary and subsequently decided to write a novel on it. She recalls:

I knew nothing about this Un-Islamic tradition - it is practically unheard of, even in Pakistan - and now it has been stopped by the government. I was deeply disconcerted and horrified as a woman to learn about this custom. It was that very evening, nearly 18 years ago, that I decided to write about this issue and the “Holy Woman,” Zarri Bano, my chief protagonist, came alive in my head and heart.

(Siddiqui, 2014, 218)

Although Shahraz expresses her shock and dismay with the practice, she does not mock or indict Islam. Instead, she maintains reverence and admiration for the religion while viewing the practice as a capitalistic formulation of patriarchy that deploys the Quran to justify selfish motives.

For Laura S Brown, “the definition of [a] traumatic event within which the person has experienced something distressful lies outside the range of human experience, often means ‘male human experience’ or at least, an experience common to both women and men” (1995, 100-101). We would suggest that Haq Bakhshish necessitates a situated experience in Muslim women’s lives that is specific to Pakistan. Furthermore, it is a practice that is neither supported by the Quran nor the hadiths (the words of the Prophet Muhammad and his companions). In Shahraz’s novel, the representation of Islamic social stratification mirrors the trauma of class relations that are parsed upon the landscape of contemporary Sind. She observes that “this is a world of inequality and male domination, where patriarchal tyranny strictly controls people’s lives, and yet results in tight-knit relationships between men and women” (Siddiqui, 2014, 223). As such, The Holy Woman presents insight into how socio-cultural facets of Islam are inevitably shaped by class and gender relations.

The innate purposiveness of Haq Bakhshish in the novel emphasizes how culture elevates certain acts as sacrosanct customs within communities. Ironically, the repression of Muslim women in this context results in close-knit heterosexual relationships that are strongly conditioned by culturally prescribed codes and arbitrary values that do not always distribute equality among partners. The novel is marked throughout by religious transgressions, life-changing decisions, and the melodramatic behavior of many characters. It is a saga fraught with conflicting family values, the objectification of a woman, and her feelings of betrayal, denial, and forlornness. Shahraz’s Zarri is the eponymous “holy woman,” the heroine of the novel, blessed with beauty and brains in equal measure. She is the prodigal daughter of Habib Khan, a feudal lord, and his wife Shahzada, from the city of Tanda Adam in Sind, Pakistan. The apple of her grandfather’s eye, she is also the primary target of her father’s obsessive affection as he favors her over his other two children and thus keeps her close to his heart like a precious asset. Habib also has a fixation with his family property, and he is highly obsessed with prestige and honor associated with his high status in the community.

Despite affection between the patriarchs and Zarri, she embodies the ways, in Ernest Gellner’s (1991) words, that “civil society has been atomized or fragmented in both the Marxist and Islamic systems, though in completely different ways” (1). Indeed, this fragmentation in the economic and religious systems that subjectify Zarri catalyzes her fragmented and gendered self-perception. The common characteristic shared by local feudal lords is the requisition of their capital. Habib too does not want to part with his property. Indeed, feudal patriarchy is based on the organization and reassignment of property and its ownership by women in any form is considered inappropriate since this grants power, and empowered and independent women are often disliked by conservative patriarchs. Following the tragic death of his only son, Habib’s property will be bequeathed to his daughters. Yet, in the highly conventional society of The Holy Woman, the property bequeathed to daughters will be controlled by their husbands. Habib’s staunch patriarchal beliefs entrenched in material interest rebel against this possibility, which could strengthen the position of his sons-in-law in his own family. His belief that only his son can inherit his property is also shared by his family and clan with a similar resoluteness.

This aggressive stance of patriarchs, their obstinacy in going to any extent to safeguard their wealth, renders them oblivious of their duties and their daughters’ rights; such is the case with Zarri. To her it is blasphemous to think beyond cliches comprising of family honor, daughters’ obedience, and their compliance to family power structures in which decisions are made. Similarly, when Habib and his father are willing to sacrifice a daughter’s happiness to retain land in the family, they follow a tradition that imparts the absolute right to a parent over their progeny’s decisions. Moreover, when Zarri accepts it with total surrender, she demonstrates a culturally propagated understanding of daughterly obedience, which is also demonstrative of inequitable fiscal structures codified in a skewed balance of gender binaries. However, this image of Zarri is fairly antithetical to what Shahraz introduces readers to at the beginning of the novels to readers - Zarri is an educated and strong-willed girl who wants to open a publishing house. She has spent her childhood and early youth in an opulent and affectionate atmosphere. The protagonist’s beauty and intelligence stir desire in the hearts of her various suitors, whom she rejects with an air of arrogance inherited in an attenuated form from her patrilineal side, which Shahraz describes as such:

It had almost become routine, turning suitors away. It wasn’t only Zarri Bano who rejected the men who came to see her and ask for her hand; her father too, was every bit as fastidious. Somehow, none of the callers ever seemed to measure up to his very intelligent and very beautiful eldest. He always ended up by declaring arrogantly: “The man has to be the best.” When Zarri Bano declined, Habib secretly applauded and was grateful for her decision.

(12)

Men of rank and wealth hold no sway over Zarri. All this changes for Zarri when she meets Sikander, whose strikingly different attitude toward her kindles her emotions. A friend of her brother, Sikander belongs to a wealthy urban family. Despite the intense gaze he fixes upon her during a chance encounter at a mela (village fair), he feigns total indifference to her when sitting at her villa in the presence of their respective families. His indifference is merely a mask to maintain his cultural male pride. According to the cultural inculcation of femininity expected of Muslim women for marriage, a prospective suitor must initiate the relationship, which also restrains Zarri from realizing her feelings for this handsome yet conceited man. Therefore, the erotic ambivalence and the identification of her desire produce initial denial. Shahraz writes:

Zarri Bano allowed her gaze to pass over everybody, catching their eyes individually smiling. Coming further into the room, she sat down next to her mother, on a sofa opposite Sikander and his father. Now she willed him to look up, piqued that he had not met her gaze, but had been more concerned with his stupid biscuit than with her!

(13-14)

She didn’t know where the impulse came from but it was totally in character, in her case, to go against normal etiquette. She decided to address him personally, so that he would have to turn to her and look up. She wasn’t going to be ignored by this arrogant, handsome stranger who had stolen into her peaceful world and had dared to violate her earlier with his gaze - suitor or otherwise.

(14)

According to Abu-Bakar Ali (2012), Sikander’s romantic and sexual indifference to Zarri is linked to his caste and class status:

Sikander is very much of the Nouveau riche class of people from the urban dystopia of Karachi, with his wealth being the product of capitalist endeavor and not feudal acquisition. Sikander and his family are diametrically opposed to feudalized patriarchy and landed gentry in almost every way

(190)

While Zarri’s mother, sister, and brother champion the match, her father calls into question Sikander’s suitability as the future husband of his beloved daughter. He implacably claims:

That conceited bastard was more concerned with biscuits than giving my daughter the respect and attention she deserves. He barely glanced at my Zarri Bano, Shahzada! Men have been falling in love with my daughter since she was a teenager, whereas he could not even be bothered to look at her properly. That I find very offensive.

(Shahraz 2013, p.17)

Zarri’s acceptance of a marriage proposal from Sikander is contingent on her father’s approval. Habib’s animosity toward Sikander is a byproduct of his feudal class consciousness mired in “hegemonic masculinity” (Connell 2009), which undoubtedly involves not only the subjugation of women, but simultaneously “disowns those men who treat women as equals. When men treat women as equals, hegemonic masculinity perceives it as a threat to man’s dominant societal role” (Arie, 2016). For Habib, Zarri’s conspicuous affection toward Sikander despite being inferior in power and status than her father is infuriating and insulting. Moreover, Sikander’s open abhorrence toward Zarri’s marriage to the Quran and Habib’s decision is a blow to his embodiment of hegemonic masculinity “that is culturally linked to authority and rationality, as key themes in the legitimation of patriarchy” (Connell 2005, 90). Yet, despite his propensity for conventions of the feudal system, Habib’s liberal thinking allows Zarri to pursue higher education at Karachi University. Habib appreciates his daughter’s progressive views of establishing a publishing company, and joins her in rejecting her suitors much to the chagrin of his God-fearing and humble wife, Shahzada.

In contrast to Habib, Shahzada admonishes her husband’s supercilious proclamations that he will only “let her marry a man of the highest pedigree from a land-owning family and that, with a good name and social standing” (Shahraz 2013,12). Later, her fury towards her husband’s decision to make their daughter Shcihzadi Ibadat is overtly manifested in emotional and physical distancing from her husband. Zarri’s nascent romance with Sikander is disrupted by the accidental death of Jafar, the male scion of the family, which leaves everyone emotionally devastated. At this difficult juncture, the eponymous “Holy Woman” is ceremoniously institutionalized when the family patriarchs invoke the rural Sindhi tradition. Habib forcibly weds her to the Quran, strongly instigated by his own father Siraj Din, despite the vehement protestations of Sikander and other members of her family. Although Zarri pleads, “I want to be a normal woman, Father, and live a normal life! I want to get married” (Shahraz 2013, 90), an impervious Habib crushes her desire to marry Sikander. Moreover, he degrades her wish to marry by insinuating that what she really craves is a man’s sexual presence in her life, implying that she has lacks agency beyond desire.

Jafar’s untimely death rattles Zarri’s emotional life, and is further magnified by a revelation of the harsh and unaccommodating man Zarri’s father is after the tragedy - a man who rejects Sikander and has strong patriarchal convictions in Haq Bakhshish. Zarri is completely perplexed by her father’s metamorphosis from a doting father to an uncompromising patriarch who forces his own daughter to embrace a life of celibacy and religious devotion despite her temperament. Moreover, the simultaneous feeling of losing Sikander forever aggravates her distress and haunts her. Zarri is insulted, emotionally crushed, and deeply traumatized by shame and grief. Amidst this internal eruption of violent emotions, she agrees to become Shahzadi Ibadat. Since the acceptance of sexual desire in girls is still sacrilegious, a taboo in conventional societies, like the one depicted in the novel, occurs because “the patriarchal order pervasive in a society prohibits women precisely to engage openly with the forms of emotion, attachment and pleasure that patriarchal society ironically itself produces” (Connell 2005, 85). Zarri’s consciousness cannot yet counter such mockery with a sustained fight. Having no tools to combat the guilt and shame of such an accusation nor to stifle the sexual desire that is socially prohibited, she discovers abject surrender to be her only solace.

The honor-shame complex is a cultural construct distinct from modernity. In Islamic society, its role in shaping female gender roles and in controlling women’s life choices is as significant as it is in internalizing self-worth. The honor-shame complex in Asian Muslim societies is a gendered phenomenon that is often deployed as a patriarchal weapon to control women and their sexuality. It often justifies violence against women, especially while securing submission from defiant daughters who refuse to many their parents’ choice. As a practice strongly inflected by the honor-shame complex, Haq Bakhshish not only subordinates Muslim women by imposing celibacy but also results in the denial of their rights/claims to family property. In other words, it usurps their economic rights. After the death of the male heir, in her capacity as the eldest daughter of the family, Zarri cannot abrogate the responsibilities that tradition confers upon her. Complying with her father’s intractable obsession with his forefathers’ property, Zarri gives in to his anguish over the bequeathal:

Well, that I have no son, who is going to be my heir, Shahzada? To whom I am going to bequeath all this land? I am not going to hand it over to some stranger who just happens to marry my daughter.

(Shahraz 2013, 68)

Circumscribed by tradition and the consequential apathy engulfing her individuality, Zarri enshrouds herself in a black cloak that symbolizes the bleak presentiment of her thwarted longings and the loss of her dreams and their realization. She almost becomes compulsive in wearing it all the time since “the core experiences of psychological trauma are disempowerment and disconnection from others” (Herman 1997, 56). This is how Zarri builds distance with others and in return distresses herself in isolation. While commenting on the significance of the veil, Dawn Chatty (2020) argues that:

A study of the Koran and Hadith show that there is no specific injunction indicating that women should be veiled or secluded from participation in public life. However, unwritten traditions do indicate that Mohammed asked his wives to wear face veils to set them apart, to indicate their special status, and to provide them with some social and psychological distance from the throngs that regularly congregated at his homes.

(128)

For many Muslim women today, wearing a black burqa or veil is representative of opting for modesty. It can also symbolize the appropriation of women in the name of culture, religion, and ethnicity. However, Anjum Alvi (2013) argues that:

The popular public discourse generally sees this as a violation of women’s rights and individual freedom and its wearer as either suppressed by the male gender in the name of religion or as engaged in fundamentalism and radical thinking, subverting Western values. The media associate the concomitants of economical poverty and corrupted institutions, such as lack of education, dependence on men, control of female sexuality, and violence, with Islam - just as many Muslims associate Western values of individual freedom and self-realization with moral decadence, the casting of women as sexual objects, and the breaking of families.

(177)

Islam presents the burqa as a garment which women choose to wear to protect their bodies from unwanted glances, threats, or sexual advances. Similarly, Zarri’s initial choice of becoming a virtual recluse clad in a black burqa is a concerted attempt to escape her trauma and avoid the world. Although the burqa may block the male gaze on the female body, Zarri adopts the practice of wearing it in order to constrain her spirited mind and encase her emotions and longings. In addition, it reflects a defensive coping strategy to shield herself from the vulnerability of her situation and her self-antagonism, which is symptomatic of the initial phase of adaptation after the traumatic incident. Indeed, she proclaims that “this is not an ordinary veil or burqa, but a symbol of my role” (Shahraz 2013,193).

Thus, wearing the burqa becomes an extension of her fragmented identity as a Quran Bride in contrast to other women who are entitled to conjugal rights. Zarri strategically reappropriates the black burqa, transforming it from a veil over her femininity into an emotional shield that now quells her feminine desires and emotional longings. Moreover, it enables her to put aside worldly temptations and concentrate on her status intertwined with the honor of being a Shahzadi Ibadat. In sum, Zarri donning the burqa symbolizes her identity, rank, and class, as well as her kinship status. In general understanding, the wearing of a burqa implies veneration within the customary honor-shame complex for Muslims. It also signals sexual modesty that holds great value in the politics of marriage that is also embedded within the complex of honor-shame. However, the politics of marriage focus on the right to control the sexuality and reproductive capacities of young women specifically by men from feudal families of Pakistan owing to their trenchant ideology.