SHAHLA HAERI, No Shame for the Sun: Lives of Professional Pakistani Women, Gender, Culture and Politics in the Middle East Series (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2002). Pp. 463. $49.50 cloth, $24.95 paper

Extract

Shahla Haeri would like to know why Muslim women who are accessible and visible in their own societies remain invisible in the West. Why have they failed to capture the interest of anthropologists, the media, and the public, in contrast to veiled Muslim women? Dismayed that despite the growing academic literature on Muslim women much of it still focuses on the veil and peasant women, Haeri seeks to document the lives of professional Pakistani women. While anthropologists have become more self-reflexive and critical of their relationship to their subjects over the past few decades, Haeri challenges them to rethink their focus on the subaltern. Deliberately focusing on educated and professional women of similar status to herself, she proposes a new ethnographic model, “shared ethnography,” which she demonstrates through her interviews with six Pakistani women, a methodology emerging from dialogues and collaboration with her subjects. Seeking to make professional Pakistani women visible, the title of the book, No Shame for the Sun, refers to women out in the public sphere, unabashed and in the sun, despite the multiple structures that render them invisible—be they veils, gender-role expectations, or academic discourses.