This book is a detailed and sensitive ethnographic study of the Al-Huda movement in Pakistan, an Islamic “school turned social movement” (p. 1) that is drawing urban women to its classrooms and lectures. Sadaf Ahmad's motivation for doing this research was to understand why women, especially from the middle and upper-middle classes, are flocking to Al-Huda schools and centers. She was both curious and troubled by the expansion and influence of Al-Huda's religious teachings since the early 1990s. In order to understand why these women are engaging with Islam through Al-Huda and also their journey into “piety,” Ahmad spent almost a year with women who attended classes at the main Al-Huda school in Islamabad. She also visited different dars (regular gatherings to read and discuss the Qur'an) held by various women.
Ahmad discusses her position as a Pakistani woman studying other Pakistani women in her home city of Islamabad. She is very up-front about the ethical and practical questions that she asked herself while carrying out this research. She illuminates the personal challenges that ethnographic research can entail and the particular challenges that a “native anthropologist” encounters. Most women were generous and willing to work with Ahmad; only a few were hostile, even questioning the basis of her research as a fellow Muslim Pakistani.
Ahmad presents the larger context of Islam in Pakistan by describing the diverse indigenous practices of Islam. She discusses the historical influence of Deobandi Islam in Pakistan, the increasing Islamization of the state and culture, and how Al-Huda fits into this recent religious trajectory. She describes the “technologies of expansion” (p. 40) used by Al-Huda to spread their teachings on “the one ‘true’ Islam” (p. 40) and to reach a larger audience in Pakistan, beyond the realm of the urban upper classes. Ahmad's main argument is that the less diversity there is in a society, the easier it is for an organization like Al-Huda to create a unitary subject who believes in their ideology of a unitary religious consciousness.
Al-Huda creates pious subjects by using techniques of discipline and “pedagogies of persuasion” (p. 77), through which women internalize the ideologies, values, and beliefs of the school. Ahmad draws on Michel Foucault's work on the “technologies of the self” (p. 67) to explain how women use techniques of self-discipline and self-reflection in their transformation into pious subjects. Part of this transformation includes an institutionalization of veiling. Ahmad reveals the tension between patriarchal structure, agency, and resistance in her nuanced explanations of how “the adoption of veiling is the rule rather than the exception. The variation lies in what veiling means to women” (p. 170).
Ahmad argues that this school is a social movement because its ideology has spread beyond the urban upper classes in Pakistan to rural areas and other countries. Although the majority of students in the one-year course do transform, she cautions that not all women internalize Al-Huda's message completely. A woman's faith and previous exposure to other Islamic discourses play an important role in how much they transform. There are detailed descriptions of the transformative process from various women's points of views. However, I was left wondering whether the women involved in Al-Huda also saw themselves as a part of a social movement and how they envisioned the future of Pakistan.
Ahmad examines the heterogeneity of various dars in Islamabad. She uses a comparative approach to shed light on why women choose to attend Al-Huda dars instead of other dars in the city. The teaching in the dars is not always as strict as in the Al-Huda classrooms, and women attend them for a variety of reasons: for some time to themselves, for social networking with other women, and for the du'as (supplicatory prayers) offered by the dars teachers. Students of Al-Huda also play into a religio-nationalistic discourse in which the West is held responsible for the negative and un-Islamic behavior in Pakistan. Ahmad successfully shows how in a society that is in flux, the teachings of Al-Huda provide women with a clear and moral framework for how to live as pious Muslims.
In the concluding chapter, Ahmad leaves us with some very broad and important questions concerning the future of Pakistan, the role of an anthropologist who takes a stand on an issue, and the possible personal repercussions for taking such a stand. In the first chapter, Ahmad discloses a personal story about how she grew apart from a close childhood friend who was attending Al-Huda classes at the same time that Ahmad was conducting her research. In the last chapter, Ahmad reveals that she reconciled with her childhood friend, despite their differences. We are left to ponder her message that even though it is necessary to take political stances on larger institutional structures and processes, our personal interactions should be human and tolerant of people with views different from our own. This book is well written and organized, and it would be an engaging read for students and scholars interested in social movements, Islamic revivalism, women's studies, or Pakistani and South Asian politics.
