The encounters between the West and the Muslim world, the stories and beliefs about each other that these encounters have generated, and the self-definition in response to these beliefs as women have articulated and fought for their rights over the past 500 years are documented in Elora Shahabuddin's Sisters in the Mirror. She identifies “the West” by looking mostly at British records until 1945 and then adds US perspectives. The Muslim world is represented by Bengali Muslims in South Asia, who have received less attention than Arab and North Indian Muslims in the historical record. In both places, Shehabuddin traces the writing of feminists and writing about women in the “other place.” In doing so, she shows how feminists in the West and in the Muslim world have built their ideas about women's roles and possibilities in a complicated dance with their sisters in the mirror.

This project builds on the work done by theorists such as Edward Said, Saba Mahmood, Lila Abu-Lughod, and Joan Scott, who have all shown how Western knowledge about the Muslim world was constructed as a means of more effectively exercising colonial domination over Muslim people. These scholars show that contemporary panics over Muslim immigration, terrorism, and women's rights are the means by which patriarchal gender roles are consolidated in the West and foreign intervention is justified. That is, we have ample evidence that “knowing the other” is an old project that has a continuing impact on our world. While Mahmood offers her own reflections on feminism as an insider-outsider, most of the other authors in this tradition focus only on the Western gaze. Shehabuddin offers a corrective to this vision by excavating the stories that Muslim observers and feminists tell about the West and how the West sees them. In this project, her goals align with those of Fatima Mernissi, Uma Narayan, Chandra Mohanty, and my own work on transnational feminism. These scholars document transnational dialogues among non-Western feminists or women's rights activists who are aware of Western feminist categories of analysis, even if they reject their terms in whole or in part.

A central argument of this book is that geopolitical developments importantly shape how women in Bangladesh are seen by Westerners. In the very beginning of the colonial encounter, they are objects of fascination and assumed to be sensuous and mysterious based on preexisting ideas about Ottoman harems. Some of the first women to visit and write about Bangladeshi women saw them as different, but no more oppressed than British women were in their own society. As colonial authority is consolidated, a narrative about these societies as primitive and in need of reform develops, and the oppression of Muslim women is seen as a measure of their degradation and a justification for the imperial use of force. In the postcolonial Cold War era, there is a return to more curiosity about difference and a greater ability to see that Bangladeshi feminists can speak for themselves. By the end of the Cold War, and intensifying after 9/11, a discourse of oppressed Bangladeshi women returns to center stage.

Showing how these stories have changed over time is a major contribution of this book. It also offers hope that we can move beyond the current impasse, where most Bangladeshi feminists do not recognize themselves in the mirror that Western feminists hold up to them. And perhaps Western feminists will recover their ability to see clearly how differences in cultural context are a way to see their own patriarchal oppression with greater depth. In doing so, these transnational “sisters” will be able to see each other and themselves without distortion in the mirrors each side holds up.

Shehabuddin offers us a wide variety of voices from Bangladesh and the West in chronological order. Some of these are personalities whom feminist readers may be familiar with already—Rokeya Hossain or Angela Davis, for instance. The book shows how Davis's involvement in United Nations–sponsored research projects and her own experiences of marginalization in the United States helped her adopt a stance of empathetic listening and sisterhood. This contrasts with the historical positioning of white Western feminists, who assumed that they are in a more advanced and liberated position vis-à-vis Bangladeshi women. We are also introduced to less well-known figures such as Faizunnesa Chaudhurani, Sufia Kamal, Shireen Huq, Florence McCarthy, and Taslima Nasreen, who travel and reflect on what they see in other societies. Their voices show the range of opinions and analysis that has informed Bangladeshi-Western entanglements.

The only story missing from this book is that of Elora Shehabuddin herself. The book concludes with short profiles of Bangladeshi American feminists, but the omission of her own positionality is a missed opportunity to include her role in holding up mirrors to both Western and Bangladeshi feminists and anti-feminists. Shehabuddin's narrative offers a way for both sides to understand themselves and each other more clearly—thus by writing this book, she becomes part of the story herself.