Reshaping the Holy: Democracy, Development, and Muslim Women in Bangladesh is a welcome addition to what we know about Bangladesh, Islam, and development practices. Animated by a concern with changing national and rural politics, Elora Shehabuddin contributes to what we have learned by recognizing women as social agents “who perceive, resist, and choose between completing secularist and Islamist attempts to mobilize their support” (p. 13) Through interviews and observations in rural communities, she offers a window on how women interpret and view their relationship to nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and local politics, vie for political recognition, as well as how they vote. Shehabuddin has ably accessed religious leaders of the Jamaat-i-Islami and their women members to illuminate how religious and secular parties use strategies similar to those of NGOs to secure women voters' support.
Divided into six chapters, Shehabuddin grounds tensions between secularists and Islamists in the everyday lives of rural women to reveal how rural status, security, dependency relations, and fear, rather than religious identification alone, explain how people respond to the fatwa. Following a tradition of critical work on purdah and its relationship to religiosity, she also shows how purdah differs across class and region, posing a critical challenge to the Jamaat, which seeks to secure women's support within an idiom of women's proper comportment and dependence on family and kin. This position contrasts with the rhetoric of secular parties that claim support for women's access to education and employment but have yet to provide for their economic and social security.
In the tradition of some feminist political scientists, the next two chapters focus on what we conventionally understand as the arena of the political—parties, social reform movements, and the formal legal structure. Shehabuddin argues that reform struggles are more about modernity than they are about liberating women from the authority of men. She supports this claim by positioning the practices of the colonial state and movements to transform women's legal status against shifts and continuities among various political parties since independence. This view frames her understanding of “rural women's encounters with the state” (p. 75), and, focusing on dower and dowry practices, age at marriage, divorce, extramarital affairs, domestic violence, and rape, she describes what states are, what they do, and how they operate. This rendering assumes a separation between states and subjects/citizens to expose women's lack of faith in the ability of government institutions to protect and serve their interests.
The subsequent chapters expose the centrality of NGOs as strategic agents of development, their targeting of women as key sites of investment, and the significance of education and employment programs as arenas of women's empowerment. Shehabuddin recognizes that government and NGO efforts have failed to meet women's subsistence needs in ways that have led to contestations with rural conservative interests, as well as with religious political parties that vie for formal political power. With a focus on voter mobilization, she examines how parties organize around instrumental, rather than substantive, interests and the ways in which some women creatively manipulate these to meet their practical needs.
Building on her ethnographic fieldwork, we learn how Jamaat women recruiters dupe women in order to garner their support. In one case, Shehabuddin reveals how a recruiter, clutching a rural woman's hands to her chest, sought support for a vote for the Jamaat, but then revealed, when she was leaving, that she held a small Qur'an under her burkha, letting the woman know that she unknowingly had sworn her support on the Qur'an. This had the effect of compelling a vote for the Jamaat “out of fear of the torment of hell for breaking an oath taken on the Qur'an.” But substantive reasons, too, justify women's support for the Jamaat, as they anticipate that a vote for them would ameliorate “the crushing burden of dowry” (p. 181).
In a more limited exploration of mobilization by the Awami League and other secular parties, Shehabuddin finds that women often vote for them out of concern that their mobility and autonomy would be constrained were the Jamaat to secure an electoral victory. These exchanges and others also reveal that women creatively negotiate for the resources offered by different political parties during these mobilization campaigns and generally vote on the basis of their immediate, often short-term, interests.
Most significant about Shehabuddin's contribution is that acknowledging women as agents of politics reveals a complex and astute sense of power among increasing numbers of poor, unlettered Muslim women who now provide, and will surely continue to provide, a significant cadre of independent voices and voters in future elections. Moreover, in this clearly written volume, which is accessible to a broad undergraduate student audience, she shows that an increasing number of such women actively protect their practical and strategic interests and can no longer be ignored by religious or secular political parties as if they were quiescent, uninformed, unsophisticated political actors.
