Forging the Ideal Educated Girl: The Production of Desirable Subjects in Muslim South Asia / Edition 1 available in Paperback, eBook
Forging the Ideal Educated Girl: The Production of Desirable Subjects in Muslim South Asia / Edition 1
- ISBN-10:
- 0520298403
- ISBN-13:
- 9780520298408
- Pub. Date:
- 07/03/2018
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- ISBN-10:
- 0520298403
- ISBN-13:
- 9780520298408
- Pub. Date:
- 07/03/2018
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
Forging the Ideal Educated Girl: The Production of Desirable Subjects in Muslim South Asia / Edition 1
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Overview
In Forging the Ideal Educated Girl, Shenila Khoja-Moolji traces the figure of the ‘educated girl’ to examine the evolving politics of educational reform and development campaigns in colonial India and Pakistan. She challenges the prevailing common sense associated with calls for women’s and girls’ education and argues that such advocacy is not simply about access to education but, more crucially, concerned with producing ideal Muslim woman-/girl-subjects with specific relationships to the patriarchal family, paid work, Islam, and the nation-state. Thus, discourses on girls’/ women’s education are sites for the construction of not only gender but also class relations, religion, and the nation.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780520298408 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 07/03/2018 |
| Series: | Islamic Humanities |
| Edition description: | First Edition |
| Pages: | 218 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.40(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Girls' Education as a Unifying Discourse
In 2012, Malala Yousafzai, a Pakistani girl then fifteen years old, was shot in the head by a member of Tehrik-e-Taliban (Pakistan), a tribal-political group. Malala's father, Ziauddin, owned and operated a school, where she was also a student. The rise in recent years of a particular segment of Taliban leaders in Swat had made it difficult for him to keep the school running. In order to save their livelihood as well as afford children the chance to attend school, the father and daughter had started speaking up against the mounting extremism in their region. Malala had been writing a blog for BBC Urdu under a pseudonym since 2009, and had participated in two videos produced by the New York Times documenting the difficulties of living under the Taliban regime. The father's and daughter's actions were interpreted as besmirching the name of the Taliban and a few members of the group took it upon themselves to silence her.
Although Malala recovered shortly after the shooting, the news of this incident has since received significant attention. Educational development and aid organizations, heads of nation-states, and nongovernmental groups have rallied around Malala to express support not only for her but also for the education of girls more broadly in Pakistan and beyond. Malala was offered an opportunity to meet with Ban Ki Moon, the then United Nations secretary general, and address the United Nations general assembly; she met with President Obama to highlight the importance of education for girls; Gordon Brown, the former prime minister of the United Kingdom and later the United Nations Special Envoy for Global Education, issued a petition entitled "I am Malala" to promote universal access to primary schooling for girls. Malala secured a book contract for her coauthored autobiography, I Am Malala (2013), a children's version of which was published in 2014, and a film in 2015. In October 2014, she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts for girls' education. In October 2017, she published an illustrated book, Malala's Magic Pencil.
Elsewhere, in April 2014, a militant organization that called itself Boko Haram kidnapped approximately three hundred girls from a boarding school in Chibok, Nigeria. We learned that this fringe group was composed of Muslim men. Analysts and lay people started speculating about the origins of Boko Haram, their links to Somalia, and their intentions. Several journalists translated the organization's name to "western education is a sin." It was believed that these girls were kidnapped because they were in school, which seemed logical enough — as Malala's case had recently demonstrated, Taliban / Muslim militants / Boko Haram were against girls' education. Except for a couple of articles detailing the grievances of Boko Haram related to the legacies of British colonialism in Nigeria, the entanglement of the United States in the persistent poverty in the region, and so on, no additional details about the kidnapping or the group surfaced. In the immediate aftermath of the kidnapping, the conversations focused predominantly around whether or not military intervention by the United States would be a good strategy. However, after some time, the issue was assimilated into calls for girls' education, which became the primary framework through which it was discussed. For instance, in the opening sentences of an opinion piece published in the New York Times in May 2014, Nicolas Kristof establishes a direct link between the kidnapping of the Nigerian girls and their education, calling on audiences to assimilate this new event in previously circulating certainties about the subjugation of (Muslim) girls in places like Pakistan and Afghanistan:
When terrorists in Nigeria organized a secret attack last month, they didn't target an army barracks, a police department or a drone base. No, Boko Haram militants attacked what is even scarier to a fanatic: a girls' school. That's what extremists do. They target educated girls, their worst nightmare. That's why the Pakistani Taliban shot Malala Yousafzai in the head at age 15. That's why the Afghan Taliban throws acid on the faces of girls who dare to seek an education. Why are fanatics so terrified of girls' education? Because there's no force more powerful to transform a society. The greatest threat to extremism isn't drones firing missiles, but girls reading books.
Besides the gross misdirection in his commentary — since Boko Haram had been known to target state and international symbols, such as attacking the United Nations headquarters in Abuja in 2011, and had been involved in several instances of killing and kidnapping boys and men — Kristof draws sturdy connections across distinct events from Nigeria, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, and articulates girls' education as not only the cause of violence but also the solution. Julia Gillard, former Australian prime minister, makes similar linkages: "There have been some truly shocking incidents that have caused us to have tears in our eyes and sharply intake our breath — what happened to Malala, what has happened with the Nigerian schoolgirls — that powerfully remind us that in some part of the world, getting an education is still a very dangerous thing for a girl. ... It's [education] being targeted because it's powerful."
Likewise, Gordon Brown in his commentary entitled "Girl Power" for Project Syndicate begins by discussing the kidnapping of the Nigerian girls and the military support required by the Nigerian government, but quickly moves on to violence against women in countries as diverse as Pakistan, Bangladesh, Morocco, India, Ethiopia, Mozambique, and South Africa, concluding with a clarion call for girls' rights and opportunities:
The Chibok girls — kidnapped simply because they wanted an education — have become a powerful symbol of this wider struggle for girls' rights. They are not the only symbols. There are also the Indian girls who were recently raped and hanged, the Bangladeshi girls now declaring child-marriage-free zones, the Pakistani girls demanding their right to education, and the African girls — from Ethiopia and Morocco to Mozambique and South Africa — demanding an end to child trafficking and genital mutilation. All of them are now more vociferous in demanding support for a world in which patriarchs no longer determine their rights and opportunities. It is their struggle, and they are increasingly leading it.
In the course of a few sentences, issues as complicated and contextual as rape, child marriage, kidnapping, hanging, trafficking, and genital mutilation are fused together and transformed into concerns to be addressed by the international human rights regime and its advocates, patriarchs such as, such as Gordon Brown himself. The particularized issues and victims are erased to create an abstract, homogenous collective of "girls" who are demanding their rights, specifically education.
There is a systematicity across these narratives. Radically specific forms of violence are assimilated into preestablished maps of meaning, where brown and black girls are articulated as perennial victims of angry black and brown men and backward cultures and traditions. Differences of race, nation, and class are omitted, and a larger-than-life figure of "the girl in crisis" is constructed. If we know one (Malala), we know them all (Nigerian girls). If we design a development intervention for one, we can apply it to all. And, what better intervention is there than formal schooling, which promises deliverance not only from ignorance but also poverty, terrorism, child marriage, and genital mutilation? Education can thus empower girls to fight their own wars by reshaping themselves, asserting their choices, and demanding their rights. A graphic featured in the 2011 Nike Foundation's Girl Effect report and later displayed at the World Bank building in Washington DC and the Department for International Development building in London illustrates this point vividly. In it, a brown or black girl in a school uniform, effecting an almost super-heroic gesture, deploys her book as a shield and her pen as a weapon to single-handedly attack a dragon, named "poverty."
Such representations of girls abound in the textual and visual archives of contemporary girls' education and empowerment campaigns: Girl Effect, Girl Up, Girl Rising, G(irls)20 Summit, Because I Am a Girl, Let Girls Learn, Girl Declaration. Education appears as the social practice that can not only save girls, but also miraculously empower them to confront historical and structural issues of gender-based violence, poverty, and terrorism. This almost messianic promise of education is accompanied with a sturdy economic rationalization that educated girls will be able to enter the labor force, pull themselves out of poverty and contribute to the national GDP. Indeed, when asked about the purpose of the Malala Fund, the then CEO, Shiza Shahid, responded: "The Malala Fund ... believes in a world where every girl is in school, and empowered with the skills to improve her life and be a change-maker in her community." When probed further about why the fund focuses on girls' education, she elaborated: "We believe that girls are the most powerful force of change in the world. If you can invest in a girl between the ages of 10 to 14, before she is married and becomes pregnant, you prevent her from falling into poverty. You would also give her choice — choice over when she gets married, when she has children, and the ability to earn an income."
What we have then is an ideal, empowered, educated girl who is capable of producing radical change at multiple levels — personal, familial, and national. This book attempts to interrogate these sedimented knowledges about "the girl" and her education by unraveling a specific modality of this figure: the Muslim woman/girl.
THE MUSLIM WOMAN/GIRL
Contemporary campaigns about girls' education are not idealistic notions without a historical and geographical place. Edward Said notes that "every idea or system of ideas exists somewhere, it is mixed in with historical circumstances." Looking for the place of ideas directs attention to the "embodied locus of social experience." The recent global rallying around girls' education has been in relation to specific populations and nations in the global South, where it is assumed that poverty, terrorism, and gender-based violence are an effect of the lack of girls' access to schooling. Since schooling is viewed as a sign of modernity and progress, lack of access often signals a lack of awareness and a disengagement with modernity. Oftentimes, the composite figure of the Muslim woman/girl emerges as an example par excellence of this backward femininity — she is threatened by religion, tradition, patriarchy, and local customs, is ill-equipped to survive in the modern social order, and is thus unable to fulfill her potential. It is this passive feminine figure that was invoked by Laura Bush in 2001, when as first lady of the United States she cited the plight of the Afghan women as one of the rationales for American military intervention: "The fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women." Earlier during the Gulf War, the American government and media made extensive use of the maltreatment of women to represent the moral, cultural, and political deficiencies of the Islamic world, warranting the 1991 operation against Iraq.
Most recently, during his election campaign, the current U.S. president, Donald Trump, activated the trope of the oppressed Muslim woman by criticizing Ghazala Khan, the Pakistani-American mother of U.S. Army Captain Humayun Khan, who was killed in 2004 in Iraq. Khan and her husband appeared at the Democratic National Convention, during which he spoke but she was quiet. Trump remarked, "If you look at his wife, she was standing there. She had nothing to say. She probably ... maybe she wasn't allowed to have anything to say. You tell me." Trump pointed to prevailing knowledge about Muslim women's oppression to add fodder to his prior claims about Islam being alien to American values and his calls for banning Muslims. Khan later said that she was too emotional to speak on stage. Subsequently, President Trump issued an executive order on "Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States," which also invoked violence against Muslim women to garner support for greater policing and regulation of Muslims in America. The Executive Order commits the Trump administration to publicly make available news about the "number and types of acts of gender-based violence against women, including honor killings, in the United States by foreign nationals." It thus deploys the trope of "honor killings" to cast foreign-born immigrants — primarily from Muslim countries — as suspect.
The discursive trope of the oppressed Muslim woman/girl is quite malleable and can be grafted onto any girl from Muslim-majority countries or the Muslim diaspora. We already know Malala's story. In another instance, in 2016, Nicholas Kristof wrote an article entitled "Meet Sultana, the Taliban's Worst Fear," which tells the story of Sultana, a girl from Afghanistan who under the Taliban-dominated south struggles to acquire an education. Hers is an inspiring example of courage and tenacity. She figured out ways to study at home, creatively using online applications, thus defying the Taliban's injunctions. This is a story of a Muslim girl who, with the support of her family, found creative ways to subvert local configurations of patriarchy in a conflict zone. But that is not how Kristof relates the story. Instead, we learn about the efforts of an American professor, Lawrence M. Krauss, and a student, Emily Robert, who are impressed with Sultana and try to get her admitted to a community college in Iowa. In Kristof's version, it is the withdrawal from her family and country, and movement toward the 'land of the free' and a community college education that is the ultimate achievement of justice for Sultana. He, thus, calls out the U.S. administration for not awarding girls like Sultana an American visa. Earlier, he had documented the struggles of Mukhtar Mai, a Pakistani woman from Merawala who was gang-raped but triumphed against the atrocities by launching a campaign for girls' education and human rights. Her story too — in the way Kristof tells it — confirms the regressive nature of Islam, Muslims, and Pakistanis, and bolsters the human rights agenda.
There is, then, a persistent and almost predictable storyline about the figure of the Muslim woman/girl. Malala, Sultana, and Mukhtar Mai simultaneously represent the oppression of Muslim women and girls and the emancipation from local cultures and traditions that is possible through education. The subject position of the "educated hence empowered girl" has been installed as the ideal toward which all Muslim girls must aspire. What we are left with, then, is a sturdy binary that pits Muslim girls against empowered girls, a binary that is invoked and solidified across multiple discursive fields from development and humanitarian campaigns to literature and news media.
I have been frustrated and challenged by what seems to be an impossible task of interrupting this storyline. Several years ago, I started examining the politics of race, gender, and religion in the deployment of the figure of the girl-in-crisis in girls' education and empowerment campaigns such as Girl Effect, #BringBackOurGirls, and #IamMalala. I was reminded of how this girl resembles her predecessor, the "Moslem woman" or "Musalman woman" who, too, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in colonial India, emerged as a figure to be saved from backward cultural practices of purdah, seclusion, early marriage, and religious superstitions. Colonial administrators, Christian missionaries, as well as Muslim social reformers — for different reasons — claimed that education would save/civilize/reform these women. Christian missionaries established schools for girls and initiated zenana-visitation programs. The colonial administration established book prizes, encouraging local authors to write books in the vernacular for girls. Muslim reformers wrote didactic texts to educate women and girls, guiding them away from "superstitious" rituals and toward the "correct" practices of Islam.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Forging the Ideal Educated Girl"
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Copyright © 2018 Shenila Khoja-Moolji.
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