Shaping Women's Lives: Laws, Practices & Strategies in Pakistan.(Book Review)

edited by Farida Shaheed, Sohail Akbar Warraich, Cassandra Balchin, and Aisha Gazdar. Lahore: Shirkat Gah Women's Resource Centre, 1998.

This is a wonderful book. Some of Pakistan's most outstanding lawyers, researchers, and activists have brought together in-depth information about the legal, social, cultural, and religious conditions facing Pakistani women. The volume is at once a collection of research-based articles and an activist manual, presenting experiences of organizational and educational efforts, and pointing to steps and strategies for change. Through painstaking effort the author-activists have gathered great amounts of data about political and legal history, local culture and practices, Islamic law and ideology, and personal cases, so that their publication can serve as a useful reference volume. In addition, they have applied their astute feminist and sociological analytical skills to these data, to uncover the social forces and dynamics making it so difficult for Pakistani women to pursue equitable treatment and opportunity.

The international network, Women Living Under Muslim Laws (WLUML), formed the "international action-research programme" on Women and Law (W as L) in the Muslim World responsible for this book. Fueled by the belief that women in the Muslim world often lack knowledge about laws and the bases for norms and customary practices influencing their lives, making it difficult for them to be challenged and to bring about change, researcher-activists in the Women and Law Programme planned research and policy projects in some two dozen countries. Realizing that it is not only law per se which places parameters around women's lives, they pay close attention to custom and culture: "The W as L was designed to elucidate how customs, law and culture intertwine to define women's lives and how the dynamics of religion and politics intersect with this" (xiii). Women in Muslim societies often see no alternative to inculcated gender concepts, planners realized: "Underlying the W as L is an understanding that women internalize the imposed definition of womanhood and furthermore, presuming this to have religious sanction, believe it to be the final and only possible definition of being a woman" (xiii). Religious sanctions and community and family pressure make it very difficult for women to question gender constructions, W as L members believe. They believe that patriarchal society and political figures have used Islam and women's imposed responsibility to personify Muslim, character and identity to control and exploit women. They are apprehensive about how rising fundamentalists trample on women's rights in the pursuit of political power. They see the myth of one homogenous Islamic world as preventing women from seeing alternative realities. Thus, they aim to show the diversity of "Islamic" beliefs and practices in various Muslim countries. They see as an important demystification tool the demonstration that so-called Muslim practices can actually vary widely. In fact, some practices seen as Muslim in one country can be seen as antithetical to Islam in another society. Because of the lack of knowledge available to women and the isolation in which women struggle for better lives, another main aim of W as L is outreach and education. If women learn about the options of women in other parts of the world, they will realize that the gender beliefs and practices in their own area are actually not "natural," inevitable, divinely established, and unchangeable. Examples of strategies used in one setting to improve women's rights may be encouraging and also applicable elsewhere (xiii, xiv).

Three main areas of concern guide W as L's work. Researchers emphasize women in the family. It is in the family, they believe, that imposed gender definitions most immediately confront women. "(T)he converging influences of customs, culture and law most vividly come together (xiv)" in the family. Furthermore, it is in personal status law, dealing with the family, that religious justification is most often brought to bear. Thus, it is in the family that "that the culturally specific articulation of patriarchy is most visible in the Muslim world" (xiv). Secondly, the research has focused on "women as citizens" through an examination of their place in the constitution, work, education, and economic activities. A third area of concern deals with the bodily integrity of women, including sexuality, and the reactions of family, state, and society to women's transgressions or assumed transgressions.

In Pakistan, Shirkat Gah--Women's Resource Centre conducted the W as L project, beginning in 1992. In this amazingly far-reaching and comprehensive effort, lawyers conducted archival legal …