549193

research-article2014
GASXXX10.1177/0891243214549193Gender & SocietyKhurshid / Islamic Traditions of Modernity

Islamic traditions of modernity:

Gender, Class, and Islam in a Transnational

Women’s Education Project

Ayesha Khurshid
Florida State University, USA

Women’s education has been central to discourses that have sought to modernize develop-
ing and Muslim societies. Based on ethnographic data collected from women teachers from
rural and low-income communities of Pakistan, the article shows how being a parhi likhi
(educated) woman implies acquiring a privileged subject position making claims to middle-
class and Islamic morality, and engaging in specific struggles within, rather than against,
the institutions of family, community, and Islam. This focus on the lived experiences of
educated Muslim women complicates the prevalent narrative of modernity that presents
women’s education and gender empowerment as an expression of individual women’s
choice and free will against the oppressive frameworks of family, community, and Islam.

Keywords: women’s education; gender; international development; Islam; modernity

“Y ou can tell just by looking at people if they are educated or not,”

Rehana commented as she instructed a group of young girls play-
ing in the school courtyard to keep their voices low and behave like parhay
likhay (educated) people. For Rehana, making sure that her kindergarteners

AUTHOR’S NOTE: I am grateful to Myra Marx Ferree, whose mentorship and guidance
was central to conceptualizing and developing this piece. I would also like to thank Mary
Louise Gomez, Kirin Narayan, Katherin Pratt Ewing, Catherine Campton Lilly, and Carl
Grant for their support to write this article. A very special thanks to Joya Misra and the
three editors of the special issue as well as to the five reviewers whose comments were im-
mensely helpful. This research was made possible with the help of grants from the Tashia
Morgridge Fellowship Program and Mellon Foundation. I am deeply grateful to the IEL
staff and policymakers as well as to the women teachers who made this project possible by
generously sharing their experiences, reflections, and time. Correspondence concerning this
article should be addressed to Ayesha Khurshid, Florida State University, 1209 Stone Build-
ing, 1114 W. Call Street, Tallahassee, FL 32306, USA; email: akhurshid@fsu.edu.

GENDER & SOCIETY, Vol 29 No. 1, February 2015  98­–121

DOI: 10.1177/0891243214549193
© 2014 by The Author(s)
 Khurshid / Islamic Traditions of Modernity 99

learned “proper” manners was the most important part of her work. A
30-year-old woman with an energetic and warm personality, Rehana was a
popular teacher at the girls’ school in her low-income village where she
had worked for five years. Her village was typical of the Pakistani rural
landscape, with limited access to schools and low literacy rates, especially
for women. Rehana was one of the first women in her village to complete
a high school and college education. However, she did not consider her job
or her academic credentials to be her most important marker of distinction.
Instead, Rehana was proud that she had learned to behave like an educated
person. “People can tell that I am parhi likhi1 even if they do not know
about my educational background,” she said.
Like Rehana, most of the women teachers I interviewed during my
16-month ethnography of girls’ schools in Pakistan were among the first
women in their rural and low-income communities to have received high
school, college, and sometimes even graduate education. For these women,
the primary purpose of education was to instill mannerisms associated with
the middle class, such as polite and confident speech, conversing in
English, dressing like city women, speaking confidently with strangers,
establishing eye contact during interactions, and resolving conflicts with-
out engaging in verbal or physical fights. On the one hand, the participants
approached middle-class mannerisms as the distinctive feature of the
parhay likhay people. On the other hand, they argued that acquiring educa-
tion was an Islamic right and responsibility of all Muslims. In this narrative
of women’s education, the parhi likhi subjectivity instilled in women the
mannerisms and values central to them becoming “good” Muslims as well
as productive members of their families and communities. This parhi likhi
subjectivity provides insights into a discourse where being educated, seen
as synonymous with being a good Muslim, is validated through the perfor-
mance of middle-class mannerisms. In a global context where education is
seen as a universal tool to empower Muslim women, the experiences of
parhi likhi teachers offer important insights into the intersections between
education and gendered, class-based, and religious subjectivities among
Muslim women from rural communities in Pakistan.
Women’s education has been central to different discourses that have
sought to modernize the developing and Muslim societies (Abu-Lughod
1998; Adely 2009; Chatterjee 1989; Cornwall 2007; Kandiyoti 2005;
Najmabadi 1998). These multiple paradigms approach education as the
process to change women: For example, international development agen-
cies assume that education will equip Muslim women with tools to trans-
form their “oppressive” culture, whereas religious militant groups such as
100  GENDER & SOCIETY / February 2015

the Taliban approach women’s education as a tool of Western imperialism.

Instead of mobilizing women’s education as either an indicator of libera-
tion or of oppression, this ethnographic article shows that although educa-
tion presents new economic and social opportunities for women from
marginalized communities, it also reinforces gendered and class-based
norms and creates new restrictions on them. Second, it examines how
education is experienced by the women participants of this study as hav-
ing access to specific and limited forms of power that they used within,
rather than against, the institutions of family, community, and Islam.
I first discuss how the global project of educating Muslim women
mobilizes women’s education as a tool to challenge the “unmodern” Islam
reflected in the patriarchal institutions of family and community in
Muslim countries. This narrative overlooks the importance of women’s
education to the Islamic revivalist movement of the nineteenth century
that shaped the nation-making projects in a number of Muslim societies.
I then show how the Islamic modernity project of South Asia produced
particular configurations of gender, class, and Islam that shaped the parhi
likhi subjectivity of the women participants of this study. Employing
Butler’s (1999) and West and Zimmerman’s (1987) concept of gender as
an interaction and a performance, I examine how Islam, as it intertwined
with class, gender, and educational categories, shaped the day-to-day lives
of the participants. This focus on the lived experiences of educated
Muslim women complicates the prevalent narrative of modernity, which
presents women’s education and gender empowerment as an expression
of individual women’s choice and free will against the oppressive frame-
works of family, community, and religion.

Women’s Education: Modernity, Religion, and

Nation-Making

In the postcolonial world, women’s attainments have become symbolic

of their nations’ progress (McClintock 1997). Scholars have employed the
concept of multiple modernities, defined as different cultural forms of
modernity in various non-Western contexts (Chakrabarty 1997; Chatterjee
1989; Giddens 1991; Mitchell 2000), to examine the complex hierarchies
that shape contemporary modernity projects. However, the relationship
between religion and modernity remains controversial, particularly in rela-
tion to Islam being seen as “unmodern” and oppressive especially toward
women (Asad 2003). Feminist scholars have highlighted how states and
 Khurshid / Islamic Traditions of Modernity 101

international development agencies focus on the individual rights of

Muslim women in opposition to local family, community, and kinship
structures in Muslim societies (Kandiyoti 2005). For example, the hijab
and marriages arranged by families are seen as traditional Islamic practices
that by definition restrain women’s free will and free choice (Bloul 1998;
Killian 2003; MacLeod 1992). The patriarchal family, community, and kin-
ship structures are approached as a mere reflection of Islam rather than as
complex products of social, political, and historical processes.
Global discourses on women’s education are also grounded in a mod-
ern versus traditional binary, where the West is seen as progressive, mod-
ern, and secular and Muslim societies are positioned as backward,
traditional, and religious (Abu-Lughod 2009; Ahmed 1992; Asad 2003;
Mahmood 2005; Scott 2007). In these international projects, women’s
education becomes an individualistic and market-oriented goal, whereas
Islam is treated as a challenge that restricts women’s access to schools, job
markets, and political participation (Abu-Lughod 2009; Cornwall 2007;
Kandiyoti 2005). There is no doubt that women’s low literacy rates and
limited access to educational facilities, especially in rural areas, are seri-
ous issues shaped by the lack of educational infrastructure, poverty, and—
in some cases—cultural values that constrain women’s mobility in public
spaces. However, debates on women’s education fail to capture how,
despite these realities, the popular perception of women’s education in
Pakistan is overwhelmingly positive, connecting it to Islamic history
rather than to Western values (Saigol 2012). The state and other local
actors present women’s education as an Islamic right and responsibility
for both men and women. I argue that this local understanding of women’s
education as inherently connected to Islam is shaped, in part, by the
nineteenth-century Islamic reformist project of South Asia/India,2 which
constructed gender, class, and education as central to Muslim religious
identity. Whereas this indigenous South Asian movement resembled
Islamic modernity projects from a number of other Muslim societies, the
next section discusses why examining context-specific configurations of
gender, class, Islam, and women’s education is central to understanding
modern nation-making projects.

The Production of An Ideal Muslim Woman

In Remaking Women (Abu-Lughod 1998), Abu-Lughod and others

examine the centrality of the “woman question” in the modernity projects
102  GENDER & SOCIETY / February 2015

of different Middle Eastern societies. These modernity projects over-

lapped in three important ways: in terms of their encounter with dominant
Europe; in their need to ground claims of modernity in Islam, thereby
redefining “Islam” itself in the process; and in their primary focus on
middle-class and elite women in constructing ideas of scientific domestic-
ity and the new public sphere. However, while challenging universal
notions of modernity as European, Abu-Lughod and others insist that we
can understand how Muslim women became the subject of modernity
only “through carefully researched analyses of historically and regionally
specific situations” (Abu-Lughod 1998, 4). Instead of focusing on “undif-
ferentiated Islam,” we need to instead examine how class, gender, and
Islam enter into differing political projects of nation-states (Ahmed 1992;
Najmabadi 1998; Shakry 1998).
The Islamic modernity project in South Asia was primarily a product of
the nineteenth-century Islamic revivalist movement. The project focused on
constructing a modern Muslim community in response to the British colo-
nization of India. Muslim reformists presented science and Islam as two
compatible paradigms informing Muslims’ daily lives (Metcalf 1994;
Minault 1998). This was in direct response to the colonial enlightenment
project, which painted Indian culture as backward (Chakrabarty 1997;
Chatterjee 1989). These two modernization projects—the colonial and the
Islamic—simultaneously constructed gender, class, and women’s education
in such a manner that the performance of middle-class dispositions came to
reflect modern Muslim educated status (Chatterjee 1989; Minault 1998).
In the aftermath of colonization, the Islamic reformist movement
shifted leadership from traditional Muslim elites to urban educated
Muslim men. At the same time, women in middle-class households
became central subjects of reform (Minault 1998; Robinson 2008).
Instead of focusing on broader social and political issues, the reformist
project, led by Muslim men, focused on daily life, social decorum, and
moral rights as central to constructing the ideal Muslim woman (Mian and
Potter 2009). For women, being educated through practicing politeness,
orderliness, thrift, cleanliness, accounting, and hygiene was set in opposi-
tion to the coarse, vulgar, loud, quarrelsome, and sexually promiscuous
“un-Islamic” mannerisms associated with lower-class females. The
reformist project, thus, was able to universalize these urban middle-class
traits as a reflection of “authentic” Muslim womanhood and Islam as a set
of values synonymous with modern science (Minault 1998).
Reconfigurations of gender, class, and Islam produced new regulations
as well as new possibilities for middle-class Muslim women as they
 Khurshid / Islamic Traditions of Modernity 103

entered into public spaces that were earlier reserved for men. Muslim
women became participants and eventually leaders in women’s literacy
movements as well as in India’s Muslim nationalist movement, which in
1947 resulted in the creation of Pakistan. However, rather than challeng-
ing existing hierarchies, the public presence of Muslim women was meant
to protect the domestic domain from unscientific and un-Islamic values
(Metcalf 1994). This article shows how Islamic reformism has shaped the
contemporary sociocultural context of Pakistan, where women’s educa-
tion is seen as an Islamic institution, and urban middle-class values as a
reflection of that education.

“Doing Education”: Gender, Class, and Religion

The discourse of Islamic modernity shapes how parhi likhi women par-
ticipants negotiated and embodied a particular class-based Islamic morality.
Feminist scholarship highlights how Muslim women create and recreate
their gendered identities in complex ways, such as through attire, social
relations, and a domestic/public division of labor (Huisman and Hondagneu-
Sotelo 2005; Hutson 2001; Killian 2003; Marshall 2005; Predelli 2004;
Read and Bartkowski 2000). For these women, Islam becomes a flexible
resource (Predelli 2004) and a “dynamic tool kit” (Bartkowski and Read
2003) used to activate, reinforce, and subvert gendered boundaries. This
context-specific engagement with Islam to define gender empowerment is
captured in ethnographic accounts of Muslim women’s participation in
diverse Islamic movements (Mahmood 2005; Rinaldo 2013).
I employ the concept of “embedded agency,” defined as a capacity to
act in a particular context (Korteweg 2008). My approach is grounded in
theories of gender as a social construction and a performance rather than
a universal norm (Butler 1999; West and Fenstermaker 1995; West and
Zimmerman 1987, 2009). This is a departure from more individualist
notions often employed by the mainstream international development
agencies that support women’s education in countries like Pakistan
(Adely 2009).
Specifically, I examine how context-specific structures of gender, class,
Islam, and women’s education enter into the gender performances of par-
ticipants as they make claims to the parhi likhi subjectivity. This parhi
likhi subject position provides insights into gender performance and gen-
der empowerment as constitutive of multiple levels of contestations, con-
tradictions, and tensions. For instance, Muslim women in countries like
104  GENDER & SOCIETY / February 2015

Pakistan have become the subject of global modernity projects, which

present education as an avenue for entering into labor markets and escap-
ing oppressive institutions of family, community, and Islam. Participants
claimed modern womanhood through acquiring education: However, they
also engaged in specific struggles regarding issues such as employment,
mobility outside of the home, and participation in decision-making pro-
cesses within, rather than against, their families, communities, and Islam.
Embedded agency, in this context, involves participants claiming a sub-
ject position that has historically been reserved for Muslim men and
middle-class women in colonial and postcolonial discourses. The use of
choice and free will, in this case, may translate into parhi likhi women
acquiring jobs but also in their reinforcing gendered norms about wom-
en’s sexuality as well as reproducing hierarchies that distinguish them
from the uneducated and un-Islamic women. We can recognize the mean-
ing of such performances only by situating them in their local and global
contexts, as this process of doing gender is legitimized through existing
accountability structures (Messner 2000; Trautner 2005; Utrata 2011).
My context-specific analysis of parhi likhi subjectivity also approaches
religion as a set of practices and discourses instead of solely a belief system
(Asad 2003). For participants, being parhi likhi was synonymous with being
good Muslims and productive members of their communities. Being
Muslim, on the other hand, was less about bringing their lives into strict
alignment with universal Quranic scriptures and more about performing
context-specific configurations of Islam. I employ this sociological framing
of religion as lived experience to also problematize debates about culture
and religion. These debates are particularly pertinent to the study of gender
and Islam, as Islam, rather than local culture, is often blamed for oppressive
practices toward women in Muslim societies (Asad 2003; Kandiyoti 2005).
Instead of trying to resolve questions about where culture ends and religion
starts in shaping women’s identities and experiences, this article aims to
conceptualize Islam and culture as context-specific institutions and relations
by showing how the women participants mobilized Islam and local culture
sometimes as competing influences, sometimes as distinct but not opposi-
tional forces, and at other times as overlapping narratives.

Methods

This article emerged from a larger study that examined how a woman-
centered transnational development organization that I call the Institute
 Khurshid / Islamic Traditions of Modernity 105

for Education and Literacy (IEL) defined, developed, and implemented

policies and practices to educate and empower women from marginalized
communities in Pakistan. (I use pseudonyms for the organization and the
research participants.) IEL is headquartered in the United States, with
chapters in major cities across the United States, Canada, and the United
Kingdom. Workers at the headquarters and chapter offices are primarily
female volunteers from the Pakistani diaspora, who are either recruited by
IEL officers or seek out IEL on their own. The staff in Pakistan, mostly
women from urban middle-class backgrounds, are generally educational
or development professionals and are paid for their work. IEL has offices
in Islamabad and other regions of Pakistan with staffs of 60–70 people.
The organization manages more than 200 girls’ schools with more than
16,000 students in low-income communities throughout Pakistan. It has
recruited and trained more than 600 women from the same communities
to work as teachers at its schools.
IEL attracted my interest because it was founded in the mid-1990s by
a group of middle- and upper-class Pakistani-American women based in
the United States. Most of these women did not have any experience
working in the education or international development fields, but they
were able to raise funds primarily from the Pakistani diaspora living in
North America and the United Kingdom to support extensive operations
in Pakistan. The organization also piqued my interest because its approach
to women’s education and gender empowerment resembled the prevalent
cultural perceptions of women’s education as a reflection of middle-class
and Islamic morality. For example, IEL’s strategy is to develop a quality
education model comparable to middle-class private schools in Pakistan
instead of simply increasing the number of schools or the enrollment rate
of female students. IEL served communities that often did not have access
to schools for girls.
This approach to women’s education reminded me of my own experi-
ences growing up in a middle-class home in Pakistan where parhay likhay
people were seen as wiser, modern, and good Muslims. As a graduate
student living in the United States, I became curious to learn how these
cultural perceptions interacted with the global preoccupation with wom-
en’s education as the solution to all social and political ills. IEL and its
girls’ schools provided a productive site to examine the intersection of
class, gender, and Islam in defining what being parhi likhi means in the
rural villages of Pakistan.
This article focuses on the ethnographic data collected from the IEL
women teachers to understand how they constructed and negotiated their
106  GENDER & SOCIETY / February 2015

identities as educated Muslim women. My positionality as a Pakistani

urban middle-class woman living in the United States shaped my relation-
ship with IEL staff, whose backgrounds were similar to mine, as well as
with the women teachers who were from rural communities. During the
process of data collection, the women teacher participants and I were able
to develop a relationship of respect and friendship, and continue to visit
each other’s families to socialize as well as to attend celebrations such as
weddings and childbirth. Whereas this social relationship does not negate
the significant power differentials that exist between us, it also highlights
the openness and willingness of the participants to share their lived expe-
riences as well as the local culture of hospitality toward outsiders.
I initially conducted ethnographic research over 16 months from 2008
to 2010, focusing on IEL staff, teachers, and community members in
Pakistan. I followed up during the summers of 2011, 2012, and 2013. This
article is primarily based on interview and participant observation3 data
collected from 32 women teachers working at IEL schools in Pakistan. I
met the majority of these participants during a training workshop held at
IEL’s Islamabad office in 2008. I approached the teachers to request their
participation in the study at the end of the session, and everyone I con-
tacted agreed. The fact that I approached the participants through the
organization they worked for, in addition to my status as a middle-class
woman, may have led to such a positive response. However, I also believe
that the local culture of politeness and hospitality may have influenced this
response. It is important to mention the participants did not feel forced to
be part of the study as IEL did not ask or request their participation.
The interviewees worked at four girls’ schools located in the suburbs of
Islamabad, where I lived during my data collection process. This geo-
graphical access helped me ground participants’ experiences in the par-
ticular economic, social, and cultural contexts of their villages. While all
the schools served communities living in four villages of the Punjab
province, these communities differed greatly in terms of their caste, kin-
ship, and, in some cases, even language structures.
I used Urdu, the national language of Pakistan, to communicate with
the teachers. My limited skills in Punjabi and Potahari (regional lan-
guages) facilitated my communication with the families, especially with
the elders. I conducted at least two semistructured interviews, each lasting
60 to 150 minutes, with each teacher. The open-ended questions focused
on a broad range of topics, such as personal history, family relationships,
and the women’s work as teachers, as well as their perceptions of wom-
en’s education and the role of women in their community. I explored
 Khurshid / Islamic Traditions of Modernity 107

issues brought up by the participants in detail, especially during the sec-

ond interview. Most interviews took place at their schools when they were
not teaching and some took place in their homes. All of the interviews
were audio-recorded. I transcribed and translated them into English. I also
conducted participant observation in classrooms and during formal and
informal meetings with other teachers, IEL staff, parents, and community
members. I took handwritten notes during these meetings and transcribed
a more detailed description of the event immediately afterward.
I approached each interview transcript as an independent conversation
focusing on participants’ particular understandings of women’s education
and of their relationships with family and community. Emergent themes
were coded during the first stage of analysis. I employed parhi likhi as a
central code because participants used this term frequently to refer to both
education credentials as well as to discuss ideal characters and manner-
isms. As such, I coded how participants used the term parhi likhi as consti-
tutive of middle-class ways and Islamic morality. In the second stage, I
compared emergent themes, looking for similarities and differences across
interviews. In the third stage, I used common themes as codes to generate
an in-depth understanding of how participants negotiated their gendered
and class-based identities. The focus on common themes was not meant to
overlook the dissenting voices, but rather to examine the shared values and
structures of accountability in terms of constructing and performing a parhi
likhi subjectivity. However, even the women teachers who were perceived
by staff and teachers as lacking the educated mannerisms valued the very
dispositions that excluded them from the “educated” category.
While this article focuses primarily on the lived experiences of women
who are validated as parhi likhi, it is important to note that this analysis is
informed by the broader study which includes the voices of the unparh
women. Whereas a specific comparative analysis of the lived experiences
of the so-called unparh women would be productive, such an analysis is
outside the scope of this research. However, through my in-depth account
of parhi likhi women, I show how parhi likhi subjectivity is constituted
through dichotomous conceptions of middle vs. lower class, urban vs.
rural, and authentic vs. un-Islamic characteristics of Muslim womanhood.

Becoming Parhi Likhi Women: Islam,

Class, and Gender

The importance of middle-class etiquette was a common theme in the

research. The teachers, most of whom were the first women to receive
108  GENDER & SOCIETY / February 2015

education in their families, believed that as parhi likhi women, they were
distinct from other women in their villages. They attributed this distinc-
tion to their dispositions, which they aimed to teach to their students.
Interestingly, some of the women who were labeled unparh (uneducated)
by interviewees had also attended school and some even had academic
credentials. This became clear as Salma, the 28-year-old headmistress of
an IEL school serving a low-income rural community, discussed the per-
formance of women teachers at her schools:

You should have seen my teachers when they started working at the school.
They would come to school looking as if they had come to work in the
fields and not to teach children. Their clothes would not be pressed, their
hair would not be combed, their dupatta [scarf] would be hanging from
their head, and they would be yelling at each other and at the students. They
have their degrees, but can anyone call them educated? They are no differ-
ent from other women in the village.

Salma felt that the teachers at her school did not qualify as parhi likhi
because they neither looked nor behaved like educated women. They had
attended schools but were unable to learn educated ways of being.
Salma contrasted these women’s behavior to herself and her family,
who were more like “people from the city.” Salma’s father was the first
person in his village to receive a high school education, which secured
him a clerical government job. Salma and her family moved with her
father to the city, where Salma and her siblings attended school. For
Salma, studying in the city distinguished her from village women who had
attended school but were never exposed to city life. Salma moved back to
her agricultural village after her parents arranged her marriage to her
cousin, following the local custom.
The IEL staff invited Salma to work at their school because there was
an extreme shortage of educated women in her village. In Salma’s narra-
tive, being parhay likhay involved not only acquiring academic creden-
tials but also learning the mannerisms of educated urbanites. Her ability
to perform this identity qualified her as educated while excluding teachers
who lacked the cultural styles of educated women. These cultural styles
not only were significant within the space of the school but also shaped
women’s opportunities outside of school. For instance, Salma was the
only woman to participate on village committees that worked with non-
governmental organizations and state institutions to initiate development
projects providing health care, roads, and clean drinking water to the com-
munity. In rural villages, participation in these decision-making processes
 Khurshid / Islamic Traditions of Modernity 109

is traditionally limited to male community elders and older men from

families with kinship connections and/or landholdings. The inclusion of
Salma on the committees was partially a response to state and interna-
tional agencies’ emphasis on women’s participation in development pro-
jects. However, the choice of Salma in particular, as compared to other
village woman who possessed similar academic credentials, validated her
status as the only true “educated woman.”
This validation of Salma’s educated status in the village is particularly
pertinent because Salma, a confident and articulate woman, sometimes
openly disagreed with male community elders during these meetings.
However, the manners she cultivated allowed her to disagree in a way that
community members viewed as respectable. Her father shared this per-
spective with me when I visited her family:

People used to get upset when Salma disagreed with them in the meetings.
But she was always polite and respectful and did not get into fights. Now,
that’s the difference between parhi likhi and unparh women, and people
saw that. Today, people send their daughters to school because they want
them to be like Salma.

Salma’s mannerisms justified her presence in the space of the commit-

tee; at the same time, her willingness to articulate disagreements with
powerful local men were accepted because they were seen as the perfor-
mance of an educated subjectivity. Whereas the male members were not
necessarily expected to be polite, these gendered dispositions enabled
Salma to be seen as pahri likhi and to enter into traditional male
domains.
Salma and other women participants often used Islam to convince their
families to allow them to take up nontraditional roles. For example,
women were to be accompanied by a close male relative in any public
domain but especially while traveling outside of the village. However,
Rafia, a 26-year-old teacher, convinced her father to allow her to attend
IEL teacher training workshops in a nearby city by telling him how Islam
asked Muslim men and women to seek knowledge at every cost. She
described the argument she made to her father: “In our [Muslims’] history,
women worked at schools, ran businesses, and even fought wars. Then
why can’t we have jobs [outside of home] or go for shopping on our
own?” It was very common for participants to use Islamic teachings to
justify new roles for parhi likhi women. Interestingly, for them, being
parhi likhi also implied being a good Muslim who is aware of her rights
and responsibilities.
110  GENDER & SOCIETY / February 2015

The performance of politeness, hospitality, modesty, dressing well, and

hygiene that qualified women participants as parhi likhi were seen as
Islamic, rather than middle-class, virtues. Fatima, a 38-year-old teacher,
explained this:

I tell my girls to look at Fatima Jinnah [a woman leader who played a

prominent role in the creation of Pakistan] to learn how to be a good
Muslim. Women did not even get out of the house in her time [1930s–1960s],
but she was so graceful and decent as she led the nation. After all, she was
a parhi likhi woman.

In these narratives, the term parhi likhi was used not only as an indication
of the ability of educated women to take up nontraditional roles but also
as a reference to their qualifications as “good” Muslims who understood
their rights and responsibilities.
Home was another site for shifting patterns of gendered participation as
a result of access to education for women. This is reflected in the story of
Noor, a 33-year-old teacher at an IEL elementary school. Noor lived with
her elderly parents, her two brothers’ wives, and their children, while her
brothers lived in the city and worked government jobs. In Noor’s low-
income rural village, it was common for women to marry in their mid-
twenties, but Noor’s parents had not found a suitable match for her because
Noor had a master’s degree in a community where few men had studied
beyond high school. Noor’s refusal to marry a man who was less educated
had troubled her family, but they eventually accepted her decision. Noor
laughingly told me that her education had saved her from “serving a man”
because her parents would not have honored her choices regarding mar-
riage if she were not educated. Noor proudly added that due to her educa-
tion, her brothers respected her opinion and consulted her before making
any decisions about their families. In their absence, Noor made all of the
decisions regarding her nieces’ and nephews’ education and health as well
as about agricultural work on her family’s land. Noor believed that the
respect she had earned did not come from her academic credentials alone,
but also her ability to prove her worth as an educated woman:

My sisters-in-law at times do not like that my brothers give me so much

importance. But I tell them that if they want more importance, then they
should behave like parhi likhi women. They cannot stand on the rooftop
and either gossip or fight at the top of their voice the whole day. . . . But if
you meet my nephews and nieces you would never guess that they live in
a village. They are so well-mannered and confident.
 Khurshid / Islamic Traditions of Modernity 111

For Noor, her sisters-in-law were unable to embody the mannerisms that
she wanted to instill in her nephews and nieces, the mannerisms that
qualified her as a parhi likhi woman. She believed that she learned this
educated way of being primarily from her interactions with the IEL staff,
all of whom were women from urban middle-class backgrounds.
Parhi likhi women like Salma and Noor distanced themselves from the
gossip, fights, and practices associated with unparh women, who were
seen as lacking knowledge about Islam. They were accepted in public
domains because they were able to perform an educated subjectivity that
separated them from “other” women in the village. However, although
such inclusions of women into the public domain signify a shift in patri-
archal structures, it would be simplistic to assume that it completely trans-
formed these structures. Male members of these committees became
dependent on Salma because of her ability to engage with representatives
from the state and development organizations, read documents, and pro-
vide academic guidance to young girls and boys in the village. But Salma
was not invited to participate in the meetings when they involved resolv-
ing local issues such as land and marriage disputes. Similarly, despite
being parhi likhi, Noor, unlike her brothers, could not take a job outside
of her village. Thus, becoming parhi likhi not only implied carving out
new roles for women, but also reinforced certain gendered norms by stop-
ping short, for example, of demanding participation in processes that did
not require the “educated expertise” of parhi likhi women or by not enter-
ing into labor markets outside of the local context.

Women’s Education and Islam: Public

Displays Of Domesticity

One of the main goals of the global project of women’s education is to

prepare Muslim women to participate in male-dominated public spaces.
Such public mobility is meant to challenge oppressive institutions of
family, community, and Islam. The participants in this study had become
mobile in public spaces by seeking employment outside of the home and,
in some cases, participating in community-level decision-making pro-
cesses. However, this mobility produced new economic and social oppor-
tunities as well as regulations for women. For example, at the age of 23,
Noreen, an IEL teacher, took her first trip outside her village without a
male relative escort. Although Noreen called it “traveling on my own,”
she was actually accompanied by a woman friend as she journeyed to
visit the nearest doctor in a town 20 miles away. Noreen was filled with
112  GENDER & SOCIETY / February 2015

excitement as she described her “travel” to discuss her recurring cold

with the doctor and described in detail how she and her friend waited for
the public transport by the roadside, got off the bus at the right place, saw
the doctor, bought medicine, and returned home. The success of this trip
was a source of great pride for this young teacher at an IEL school serv-
ing low-income students in her village. She had accomplished something
that most women were not allowed to do in her village: traveling without
a close male relative. She was even more pleased when her father found
out about this trip, which was made without his permission, but did not
get upset. She explained, “My father did not get mad at me because he
trusts me. He knows I am educated and will not do anything wrong.”
When I asked what she meant by doing anything “wrong,” she smiled
and looked at me as if the answer was self-evident before replying:

This is not a city where women are smart enough to do everything on their
own. Here, women can be so naïve. They are not educated to know the dif-
ference between right and wrong. I bet my cousins would not stop giggling
on the bus if they were traveling on their own.

Noreen went on to explain how unparh women might engage in conversa-

tions with strange men, which she considered irresponsible behavior that
might lead to extramarital relationships that would “destroy” women’s
lives and bring “dishonor” to their families.
Noreen drew a distinction between what was expected of her as a parhi
likhi woman and what was expected from the unparh women. In her view,
unparh women lacked not only self-discipline but also the wisdom to see
how their actions could harm them and their families. As she spoke of
unparh women, she used the term to refer both to women who had not
attended school and to those who had been formally educated but whose
behavior continued to reflect a lack of proper values. For Noreen, her trip
without a male companion provided her with a sense of independence that
was very important to her. She also justified it to her father as a right that
Islam had bestowed upon her and thus as superior to the outdated “local”
traditions that restricted women. But she was reluctant to extend the same
level of public mobility to unparh women. In her opinion, only parhi likhi
women could be trusted to navigate unfamiliar spaces because they were
aware of their rights as well as their responsibilities as Muslim women.
Noreen’s reluctance to trust unparh women with new freedoms was
shared by most of my interviewees. These women spoke enthusiastically
about women’s education and Islamic rights for women as active and vis-
ible members of the community, but were apprehensive that unparh
 Khurshid / Islamic Traditions of Modernity 113

women lacked the awareness and self-control to work outside of the home,
travel alone, and interact with men. They were less concerned with wom-
en’s sexual morality than with their ability to comport themselves in a way
that would display an Islamic and class-based respectability. This Islamic/
class respectability for women entailed displaying wisdom to negotiate
situations and avoid unproductive conflict. For instance, Rukhsana, a
35-year-old teacher who saw herself as a role model for women in her rural
village, shared how young girls often came to her with their problems:

Young girls are like colorful butterflies who want to fly, have fun, see the
world. But they can also be so easily lured too, right? I warn them to be
careful if they want to live lives that are different from their mothers and
grandmothers. If they want to become something, attend college, have a
job, and have some say in their lives. But they have to prove that they can
be trusted before they can have this freedom.

Rukhsana approached her young students’ sexuality as something that had

to be protected in order for them to have more opportunities than earlier
generations of women. Her discussion of the possibility of young girls
being lured into romantic or sexual relationships was not necessarily
framed in terms of morality, but referred to the expectations that educated
women had to meet to be allowed certain kinds of freedoms as respectable
Muslim women. Women suspected of having extramarital affairs before or
after marriage were seen as bringing extreme dishonor to their families.
Unlike men involved in such affairs, women’s mobility would be strictly
confined if they were caught, and they would not be allowed to attend
school anymore. In extreme cases, especially when the partners in the
affair belonged to different ethnic and caste groups, these acts lead to vio-
lence against those involved and/or long, drawn-out disputes between
families. The wisdom of parhi likhi women, in this case, is to avoid actions
that could potentially harm them and other women in their communities.
Overall, the parhay likhay status was bestowed upon women who were
able to perform an Islamic and class-based subjectivity that reflected their
positionality as agents of change, who could also sustain certain gendered
norms that kept families and communities together. As educated women
entered the labor market and public spaces, they were trusted to self-reg-
ulate their sexuality as well as their relationships with their families. In
cases where parhi likhi women like Noreen modified certain gender
norms, their communities, families, and they themselves placed higher
expectations upon them to uphold other norms. Interestingly, whereas
women explained their right to become publicly mobile as an Islamic
114  GENDER & SOCIETY / February 2015

right, they mobilized gendered local norms to restrict such mobility for
unparh women. In other words, whereas Islamic rights were seen as supe-
rior to local customs, it was only parhi likhi women who could effectively
utilize rights without violating the respectability of their families.

Women’s Education and Islamic Rights:

Regulated Choice

Participants’ selective and strategic deployment of Islamic rights and

local customs reflects how class, gender, and Islam intersect to construct
parhi likhi Muslim women as agents of change. It also shows that family,
community, and Islam are not merely rigid local structures against which
women’s education has to modernize, but rather are institutions in flux
that shape the meaning of educated Muslim womanhood in different con-
texts. For instance, international development agencies and Western
women’s rights activists often view arranged marriage as an oppressive
Islamic tradition that denies the free will of Muslim women, which wom-
en’s education can help eradicate. The women participants, however,
argued that education had in fact informed them of their Islamic right of
choice in marriage. However, their use of this choice is another example
of pragmatic thinking to gain respectability and access to specific forms
of power within institutions of family and community. For instance, par-
ticipants spoke of both entering into arranged marriage and not getting
married as reflections of parhi likhi women’s awareness of their Islamic
rights. However, participants did not position “love marriages” or women
choosing their husbands with or without the approval of their families as
evidence of women’s right to choose.
Salma, the participant discussed earlier, was strong and assertive but
still agreed to an arranged marriage with a cousin despite having strong
reservations about it. She believed that her refusal would have brought
dishonor to her family and especially to her father who had supported her
education against community wishes. Abiding by the wishes of her family
won her the trust of her family and community and later helped her take
a stand against her husband and in-laws to work as a teacher. Salma
decided to stay in the marriage despite serious differences with her in-
laws and physical abuse from her husband, because she wanted to keep
her family intact. In a community where she was seen as a wise and
respectable role model for girls, she did not consider divorce an option
despite its being allowed in Islam and Pakistani law. In fact, she shared
that her marriage remained intact primarily because she as a parhi likhi
 Khurshid / Islamic Traditions of Modernity 115

woman could see the potential consequences of divorce. It would not only
bring dishonor to her family but also make it difficult for other girls in her
community to pursue education, as people would view Salma’s action as
the outcome of her being educated. There were a number of cases in her
village where women had separated from their husbands, but a parhi likhi
woman was not expected to defy community norms. In other words,
Salma saw her choice to stand up against her husband and in-laws as well
as to enter into an arranged marriage and stay in the abusive relationship
as a reflection of her making informed choices as a parhi likhi woman.
Similarly, Noor, another participant discussed earlier, explained her
choice to not get married as an expression of the right given to her by
Islam. She shared how she convinced her parents of her decision by telling
them how Islam had forbidden forcing people into marriage against their
free will. However, she recognized that she could not exert the choice of
seeking an educated man outside of her caste and kinship group as a poten-
tial match. In fact, her being parhi likhi implied that she, unlike unparh
women, would not “misuse” the freedom of employment and mobility
outside of home. This misuse implied any romantic or sexual liaison out-
side of marriage that could bring dishonor to the family and disharmony to
the community. Noor’s reserved mannerism in public earned her a good
reputation in the community and helped her convince her parents that she
was capable of making the decision of not getting married.
Women exercising choice in marriage was perceived as a potential
challenge to the institutions of family and community, even when it was
acknowledged as a right given by Islam. For example, Sabiha, a 33-year-
old teacher, described her marriage to her cousin as a “love marriage.”
She and her husband fell in love and their respective families agreed to
the match because of their shared caste and kinship backgrounds.
However, instead of approaching this choice as an expression of edu-
cated Muslim womanhood, she spoke about how education had helped
her learn how the unmodern traditions, and not Islam, deemed women a
burden for the family:

At times, people think of daughters as a burden. My mother started collect-

ing my dowry probably from the day I was born. But you know, my hus-
band does not have a regular source of income, but I do. So who is the
burden? Islam has told us that men and women are equal but only education
can help us understand that.

Sabiha viewed dowry as an un-Islamic and unmodern tradition that

women like her mother practiced because of a lack of education. She
116  GENDER & SOCIETY / February 2015

contrasted this to her actions as a parhi likhi woman who supported her
family in the “right” way. This view echoed the experiences of other
women participants for whom the economic benefits of working as a
teacher were valuable. However, they spoke of their work in terms of its
usefulness to the girls in their communities, and insisted that “making
money” was not the central objective of their work. Furthermore,
whereas employment extended economic benefits as well as an ability to
make certain decisions at home, it was not the central avenue for women
to respectability in their communities. Indeed, it was the authentic parhi
likhi women, and not all the teachers, who were invited to participate in
community-level decision-making processes.
Participants also made differentiated claims to respectability in relation
to marriage. Mariam, a 24-year-old teacher, summarized her position by
stating, “We know that Islam has given us the right to choose our hus-
bands but we do not feel the need to practice this right. The parents who
have educated us can also make best decisions for us when it comes to
marriage.” Mariam did not see marriage as a productive site to practice
her rights because of the staunch opposition to women involved in pre- or
extramarital relations. Participants shared that, although the families pre-
ferred men to also enter into marriages, the repercussions of men having
“love marriages” or marrying outside of their community were often neg-
ligible. Thus, being an educated Muslim woman, in this case, did not
constitute exercising the right given to women by Islam but rather deploy-
ing it in a manner that did not disrupt the harmony of the family. Being
parhi likhi thus highlights a tension between acknowledging and yet
refraining from practicing an important right given to women by Islam.
This tension is also a productive site to examine the separation and/or co-
construction of religion and culture. Whereas the women participants
recognized the lack of choice in marriage as a cultural rather than Islamic
norm, they viewed their efforts to support family harmony as a reflection
of their wisdom as parhi likhi women.
Ultimately, the lived experiences of participants complicate liberal
notions of women’s education as a tool to challenge patriarchal Islamic
traditions. At the same time, they also highlight the tensions inherent in
the subject position of parhi likhi women, who at times willingly
embraced and reinforced structures of domination instead of opposing
them in order to gain respectability equated with Islamic and middle-class
morality. This analysis helps us understand how parhi likhi women
actively participate as embedded agents, rather than passive objects of
modernity discourses, by negotiating which cultural practices to transform
 Khurshid / Islamic Traditions of Modernity 117

and which ones to keep intact as they exercised the limited and specific
forms of power available to them in day-to-day life. As discussed earlier,
dominant structures sometimes benefited the participants by distinguish-
ing them from “other” women in the community and enabling them to act
in their own self-interest. Thus, embedded agency for the participants in
this context meant deployment of education to claim empowerment
within, rather than against, the institutions of family, community, and
Islam. Second, whereas the Islamic modernity project provides a produc-
tive context for examining parhi likhi subjectivity, the analysis shows how
Islam was one of multiple institutions that these women engaged with to
define their status as modern educated Muslim women. This discussion
helps us move away from the “oppressed Muslim woman” trope to better
understand how Islam, gender, and class are simultaneously deployed in
the making of parhi likhi subjectivity within a particular context.

Conclusion

In the post-9/11 era, Muslim women are increasingly cast as the

“other”; they are portrayed as oppressed by their culture and in need of
rescue by the West. This image is connected to an understanding of Islam
as a set of outdated traditions and is used to justify military and develop-
ment interventions in Muslim countries (Abu-Lughod 2002; Ahmed 1992;
Mahmood 2005). Women’s education is presented as a tool meant to sup-
port Muslim women in modernizing and democratizing their families and
communities. Given this global context, this research asks how education
as a universal tool produces gendered, class-based, and religious subjec-
tivities, by introducing both new opportunities and regulations for Muslim
women in rural communities in Pakistan.
This article makes a threefold contribution to gender theory. First,
using ethnographic data, it challenges facile assumptions of women’s
education as an inherently beneficial project, and instead examines the
ways in which education intersects with gender, class, and religion in the
production of new subjectivities (parhi likhi) in Pakistan. These subjec-
tivities open up new possibilities for gender equality while reinforcing
other gender norms. These new subjectivities are complex as they
respond to the global discourse of women’s education and women’s
rights by mobilizing an indigenous understanding of women’s education
as an Islamic right and responsibility, instead of a Western import. The
Islamic modernity project simultaneously constructs gender, class, and
118  GENDER & SOCIETY / February 2015

education by enabling educated Muslim women to step into male-domi-

nated public spaces while prescribing the middle-class subjectivity nec-
essary for women to become good Muslims and productive members of
society. The women participants of this study mobilized this gendered
and class-based hierarchy when they presented themselves as “good”
Muslim women while distancing themselves from women whom they did
not see as parhi likhi.
Second, this article speaks to the literature on Western imperialist
modernity projects, particularly those involving Islamic states and com-
munities (Abu-Lughod 1998; Adely 2009; Ahmed 1992; Chatterjee 1989;
Kandiyoti 2005; Mahmood 2005). I employ Abu-Lughod’s call for contex-
tualized research by showing the complex configurations of religion, gen-
der, and class among educated women in Pakistan. One of my major
findings is that unlike the prevalent perception, Islam and modernity are
not seen as oppositional, but rather are accessed simultaneously through
notions of what constitutes the gendered subject. This is an important point
for scholars to consider when examining gendered relations among reli-
gious communities: namely, to not assume that religion is constructed as
“pre-modern” in these contexts, but to look more closely at how these
dynamics are context-specific. Another finding argues for the need to
examine “Islam” and “culture” as context-specific configurations rather
than linear or dichotomous institutions or relations. It shows how Islam and
local culture at times overlap with each other and at other times are fraught
with tensions as they shape the lived experiences of the participants.
Third, this article contributes to existing scholarship on “doing gender”
(Butler 1999; West and Zimmerman 1987) and “embedded agency”
(Korteweg 2008; Messner 2000; Trautner 2005; Utrata 2011) by showing
their workings in a particular social and historical context. I unpack
notions of gender performativity by examining how it is validated, facili-
tated, and constrained in a particular context by the institutions of family,
community, and Islam. For example, certain forms of power became
available to parhi likhi women only when they embraced other patriarchal
structures. However, this embracing did not necessarily signal oppression
but rather embedded agency as well as a perception of liberation that did
not constitute challenging these structures. Instead of describing a linear
narrative of women’s access to labor markets, health care, rights, mobility,
and leadership positions through academic knowledge and credentialing,
this article uses lived experiences of the participants to highlight women’s
education as a contested terrain shaped by the intersections of local and
global influences. This article thus shows how women teachers who enact
 Khurshid / Islamic Traditions of Modernity 119

a middle-class, modern Muslim subjectivity are not “victims” of their

culture but active agents who stand in tension with as well as shape power
hierarchies in their contexts.

Notes

1. Parhi likhi is the Urdu term used to refer to educated women, whereas
parhay likhay is often used as a gender-neutral term to refer to both educated men
and women.
2. I use South Asian Muslim modernity project and Indian Muslim modernity
project interchangeably because of their similar use in the scholarship. Pakistan
shares this legacy with India and Bangladesh.
3. I theorize my observations as participant observations since I was invited to
participate in the formal and informal discussions that teachers had with each
other as well as with the IEL staff. In addition, I was also asked to help students
with different tasks as I observed teachers in their classrooms.

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Ayesha Khurshid is an Assistant Professor of International and Comparative

Education in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at
the Florida State University. Her research focuses on gender and education,
Islam and modernity, and international development and transnationalism.