Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International

Education

ISSN: 0305-7925 (Print) 1469-3623 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ccom20

Love marriage or arranged marriage? Choice,

rights, and empowerment for educated Muslim
women from rural and low-income Pakistani
communities

Ayesha Khurshid

To cite this article: Ayesha Khurshid (2020) Love marriage or arranged marriage? Choice,
rights, and empowerment for educated Muslim women from rural and low-income Pakistani
communities, Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education, 50:1, 90-106, DOI:
10.1080/03057925.2018.1507726

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/03057925.2018.1507726

Published online: 17 Sep 2018.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 2046

View related articles

View Crossmark data

Citing articles: 4 View citing articles

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=ccom20
COMPARE, 2020
VOL. 50, NO. 1, 90–106
https://doi.org/10.1080/03057925.2018.1507726

Love marriage or arranged marriage? Choice, rights, and

empowerment for educated Muslim women from rural and
low-income Pakistani communities
Ayesha Khurshid
Educational Leadership & Policy Studies, Florida State University, Tallahassee, USA

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
Using ethnographic data collected with Muslim women teachers Muslim women; gender
from rural and low-income communities in Pakistan, this article empowerment; women’s
shows how empowerment for these educated women meant access education; arranged
marriage; Islam
to different forms of power within families and communities. The
focus on the issue of choice in marriage reveals how the participants
conceptualised empowerment as practice of rights that entailed right
choices; choices that produced positive long-term benefits in terms
of making new opportunities and roles available to them within their
contexts. Through focusing on the lived experiences of educated and
professional Muslim women in a specific cultural context, this analysis
presents a critical analysis of the gendered concepts and practices of
choice, rights, and empowerment. It disrupts the global narrative that
mobilises the image of Muslim women as victims of their culture and
presents education as a tool that empowers Muslim women against
their patriarchal families and institutions.

Introduction

We are educated women, we know that Islam has given us the right to choose our
husbands but we do not feel the need to practice this right. The parents who have educated
us can also make best decisions for us when it comes to marriage.

Mariam, a 24-year-old woman teacher from a rural and low-income community in

Pakistan, made this statement while discussing how she as an educated woman viewed
‘arranged marriage,’ the local cultural practice of parents and families arranging mar-
riages for men and women. She was among the few women in her community who had
received high school and college education in Pakistan and had a paid job outside of
home. She saw herself as an empowered and resourceful woman who was providing an
important service to her community through educating girls who otherwise could not
access quality education. She spoke about how education enabled women to learn about
and practice their rights, especially the rights given to them by Islam. However, despite
being aware of her ‘Islamic’ right to choose a spouse, Mariam did not see much use in

CONTACT Ayesha Khurshid akhurshid@fsu.edu Educational Leadership & Policy Studies, Florida State
University, 1114 W. Call Street, Stone Building, Tallahassee, 32306, FL, USA.
© 2018 British Association for International and Comparative Education
 COMPARE 91

practicing that right. She felt more comfortable with her parents finding the ‘right’
person for her.
Mariam’s approach to the practice of rights in marriage echoed the experiences and
opinions of her female colleagues who participated in my ethnographic study. My
project focused on the issues of women’s education and gender empowerment in
rural and low-income Punjabi villages in Pakistan. These villages with very low literacy
rates were located in close proximity of each other and shared socioeconomic, ethnic,
linguistic, and cultural features. The women participants of my study worked at the
community schools supported by an international development organisation that pro-
vided education to girls from marginalised communities in Pakistan. Just like Mariam,
these participants were among the first and very few women in their communities to
have received education and to have paid jobs outside of home. Currently the majority
of the girls in these villages are enrolled in schools. However, it was very rare for girls to
attend schools at the time when the participants received their education. The gendered
norms of public mobility in these villages still restricted women’s presence in male-
dominated public spaces. However, women rarely, if ever, stepped outside of home
without being accompanied by male relatives when the participants commuted to
school on daily basis. The families of the participants faced stern opposition from
their communities for allowing their daughters to violate this cultural norm. They
responded to this resistance by referring to the Islamic teachings that had made it
compulsory for both men and women to receive education. It was often the male elders,
in most cases participants’ fathers, who stood up to the community and refused to
deprive their daughters of their ‘Islamic’ right to receive education.
The participants shared this history as stories of triumph in which they were able to
access education against all odds. For them, education enabled them to learn about and
practice their rights as Muslim women. They felt that women could be empowered only
through modifying ‘unIslamic’ cultural norms such as the one that restricted women’s
access to education. However, when it came to practicing the right to choose a husband,
the participants did not view it as being inherently connected to their empowerment
even as they acknowledged that Islam had given them that right. These educated and
professional women framed education as well as the choice in marriage as their Islamic
rights. However, they associated access to education but not choice in marriage to their
empowerment. This was particularly intriguing as the participants believed that educa-
tion empowered women to challenge practices that denied them equal rights.
This approach to the practice of rights seems counterintuitive in the context of global
and international development discourses that posit Muslim women as victims of their
patriarchal cultures and education as the tool to empower them to transform their
societies. Empowerment for Muslim women, in these discourses, is defined as practice
of individual rights; rights that are denied to them by the institutions of family,
community, and Islam (Abu-Lughod 2009; Mahmood 2005). In this context, arranged
marriages, marriages arranged by the parents and families, are approached as one of the
patriarchal values that deny Muslim women the right to choose a husband (Aguair
2013; Mohammad 2015). Arranged marriages have also become the site to examine and
confirm the empowering and transformative nature of education as educated Muslim
women are expected to challenge this cultural norm. In January, 2016, the British Prime
Minister, David Cameron, justified a $31 million initiative to ‘empower’ Muslim
92 A. KHURSHID

immigrant women living in the UK through presenting it as a project that would

counter oppressive practices such as arranged marriages in Muslim communities. The
policy was designed to educate Muslim women in order to help them integrate into
British society. These educational resources, according to the Prime Minister, would
become a tool for Muslim women to challenge traditions such as arranged marriage
that are imposed on them by the ‘menfolk’ as well as by their families and societies
(Mason and Sherwood 2016).
The international women’s education and empowerment discourses, such as the one
mobilised by the British Prime Minister, would assume that educated Muslim women
such as Mariam and her colleagues would express their empowerment through rejecting
the cultural practices of arranged marriage. The lived experiences of the participants of
this study, however, complicate this narrative as the right to access education as well as
the right to choose a husband were understood as rights given to women by Islam. The
ethnographic analysis of these lived experiences reveal a complex conceptualisation and
performance of the relationship between the practice of rights and empowerment. This
relationship is a departure from the dominant discourse of empowerment as practice of
individual rights, and reveals a context-specific discourse of rights and empowerment.
In this ethnographic paper, I explore this relationship between the practice of rights and
empowerment through investigating how these educated and professional Muslim
women understood and practiced the right to choose in marriage. The issue of choice
in marriage is a particularly productive site as arranged marriages have consistently
been mobilised in global discourses as a sign of the oppression of Muslim women
(Mohammad 2015). Second, the participants’ engagement with this issue provides
critical insights into the conceptualisation of rights and empowerment.
Through focusing on the issue of choice in marriage, this article shows how and why
the participants viewed empowerment as practice of selective, and not all, rights. I argue
that this concept of empowerment as practice of some rights was informed by a notion
of right choice. The participants approached right choice as being distinct from choice,
as a mere expression of free will, for providing them access to power within their
families and communities. In this narrative, whereas the participants approached all
rights as expression of choice, they believed that only the practice of rights that were
informed by right choices empowered them. The participants believed that it was
education that enabled women to make the right choices and practice rights in a
productive manner.
The following discussion situates the ethnographic analysis in critical feminist
scholarship that shows how empowerment can serve as a complex, tentative, and
context-specific notion and highlights marriage as a productive site to examine the
complex relationship between practice of rights and empowerment. This feminist
scholarship critically engages with the global discourses of education and empowerment
through approaching gender as a discursive category. The discussion disrupts the
universalist discourses of education and empowerment through highlighting the lived
experiences of the educated and professional Muslim women who define empowerment
as access to power within the institutions of family and community. The article
concludes by examining how these lived experiences can inform international education
researchers and policymakers interested in the issues of education and gender
empowerment.
 COMPARE 93

Muslim women: choice, rights, and empowerment

In the aftermath of 9/11, Abu-Lughod (2002) shared this lineage of Western interven-
tions in Muslim countries in the name of ‘saving’ or ‘liberating’ Muslim women: ‘When
Lord Cromer in British-ruled Egypt, French ladies in Algeria and Laura Bush, all with
military troops behind them, claim to be saving or liberating Muslim women’(3). She
explored how empowering Muslim women has justified Western colonial, military, and
political campaigns for the Muslim societies ranging from the British colonisation of
Egypt and French colonisation of Algeria to the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2002.
The contemporary international development discourses and global feminist movement
also present Muslim and Third World women as ‘authentic’ victims as compared to
Western women who are better positioned to practice rights (Abu-Lughod 2009;
Chatterjee 1989; Kapur 2005; Mohanty 1984). The image of Muslim women as choice-
less victims of their families and communities and of Islam itself confirms the status of
Muslim societies as the ‘other’ against which the West and Western modernity are to be
defined and understood. These abstract ideas of Muslims and Islamic practices have
been used to explain and rationalise political, cultural, and military conflicts (Asad
2003; Said 1979).
The liberal project of modernity that has shaped these discourses rests on the notion
of empowerment as the practice of choice and free will (Mahmood 2005). In this
discourse, the ability to make choices is presented as an intrinsically human and a
universal trait, and as something that institutions such as education can enable people,
especially women, to practice in their lives. The practice of rights that leads to
empowerment is defined as the ability to make choices based on free will (Abu-
Lughod 2009). The assumed universality of the concepts and practices of choice, rights,
and empowerment is evident in examples such as the one in which Burkini, a swimsuit
that covers the whole body, was banned on some French beaches. The discourse that
mobilised burkini as a symbol of the violation of the rights of Muslim women rather
than as a legitimate expression of the choice made by Muslim women to fully cover
their bodies was readily available because of the particular subject positions assigned to
Islam as well as to the West.
These universal notions of choice, rights, and empowerment are problematised by
feminist scholarship that approaches gender as a constructive, performative, and discur-
sive category (Butler 1999; Hooks 1982; Mahmood 2005; Riley 1988). They focus on daily
lives as sites for gender construction rather than approaching gender as a pre-determined
category. This scholarship approaches gender as a socially organised performance that
can be transformed in day-to-day interactions as well as in the broader culture. It, thus,
posits gender as well as choices, rights, and empowerment as socially embedded notions
rather than universal concepts and practices. In addition, it also approaches the construc-
tion and performance of gender as well as of choices, rights, and empowerment as sites
for contradiction and contestation.
This feminist scholarship emphasises the need to tell complex stories that highlight
the non-homogeneity of the lived experiences of actors such as Mariam who have
become the subjects of global projects. It also complicates the narrative around educa-
tion being a universally empowering institution and process. Instead, it emphasises the
need to pay attention to how educational processes can provide insights into choice,
94 A. KHURSHID

rights, and empowerment as socially embedded processes. For example, Guinee (2014)
examines such socially embedded nature of empowerment for women from low-
socioeconomic and caste backgrounds in India. Whereas the parents motivated their
daughters to acquire education against all odds, they also expected women to support
the family. In this context, empowerment for these educated professional women
emerged as the ability to support the family rather than supporting themselves as
individuals. Abu-Rabia-Queder (2008) explains the same process for Bedouin Muslim
women who were the first in their communities to have received education. Access to
higher education imparted much power to these women in their personal and economic
lives. They modified certain gendered norms while adopting others as they gained
respect in their community despite their refusal to conform with some community
norms. For these women, empowerment did not imply exerting power against the
institutions of their families, communities, and Islam. Instead, it implied being in
dialogue with these institutions to empower themselves.
This complex and context-specific impact of education was further explained in
research by Ijaz and Abbas (2010), who examined how the first and the second-
generation Mirpuri-Pakistani Muslim immigrants in the UK approached the education
of their daughters. The first generation tried to preserve their Mirpuri culture through
restricting women’s access to education. The second generation took on a stricter
Islamic identity while emphasising the need to educate girls as an Islamic right. In
this case, Islamic, versus a particular cultural, orientation enabled women to access
education.
Interestingly, the nation-making project in Pakistan has always positioned education,
specifically for women, as being central to the development of Pakistan as an Islamic
state (Saigol 2004). Thus, the narrative mobilised by this group of first-generation
immigrants in the name of Pakistani ‘culture’ was primarily a response to their
racialised minority status. Ironically, the Western donors tend to activate the same
discourse about the Pakistani culture as an impediment to women and girls’ education.
Through presenting this issue as a matter of access, these global actors tend to overlook
how the impact of education in postcolonial contexts like Pakistan is shaped by gender
and class relations (Khurshid 2016, 2017).
In this global context, the issue of choice in marriage has become a site to mobilise
the subject position of Muslim women as victims of patriarchal Islam rather than
poverty, structural inequality, political instability, or conflict. The practice of arranged
marriages,1 marriages arranged by the families, is conflated with forced marriages, and
is often employed as an example of how Muslim women are denied the right to practice
their individual choices (Aguair 2013; Mohammad 2015). In popular media and policy
discourses, arranged marriages are perceived as Islamic traditions even when these
marital arrangements are common among other groups such as Hindus, Sikhs, and
Buddhists (Penn 2011). These discourses mobilise arranged marriages as a flashpoint to
highlight the suppression of Muslim women even when arranged marriages are prac-
ticed differently in different regions, and can provide substantial freedom to couples to
negotiate their roles.
In this discourse, access to education is meant to empower Muslim women to
exercise choice in areas such as marriage as they step away from the patriarchal
institutions such as arranged marriage. This conceptualisation is an embodiment of
 COMPARE 95

the popular discourse that connects education to the ability of Muslim women to assert
their individual choices and rights against the social norms in their societies. In this
case, Muslim women’s assertion of choice in marriage and rejection of arranged
marriage is expected to confirm their status as educated and empowered actors.
However, Mariam and other participants in this study approached the issue of choice
in marriage as something that neither confirmed nor denied their rights as empowered
women. Through focusing on the lived experiences of these educated and professional
women from marginalised communities in Pakistan, this article investigates how the
right to choose in marriage highlights a context-specific construction and performance
of choice, rights, and empowerment.

Methods
This article emerged from a larger study that examined how a woman-centred transna-
tional development organisation that I call the Institute for Education and Literacy
(IEL) defined, developed, and implemented policies and practices to educate and
empower women from marginalised communities in Pakistan. (I use pseudonyms for
the organisation and the research participants.) The IEL is headquartered in the USA,
with chapters in major cities across the USA, Canada, and the UK. Workers at the
headquarters and chapter offices are primarily female volunteers from the Pakistani
diaspora, who are either recruited by IEL officers or seek out the IEL on their own. The
staff in Pakistan, mostly women from urban middle-class backgrounds, are generally
educational or development professionals and are paid for their work. The IEL has
offices in Islamabad and other regions of Pakistan with staffs of 60–70 people. The
organisation manages over 200 girls’ schools with over 16,000 students in low-income
communities throughout Pakistan. It has recruited and trained over 600 women from
the same communities to work as teachers at its schools.
I initially conducted ethnographic research over 16 months from 2008 to 2010,
focusing on IEL staff, teachers, and community members in Pakistan. I followed up
during the summers of 2011, 2012, and 2013. I collected interview and participant
observation data from 32 women teachers working at IEL schools in Pakistan. I met the
majority of these participants during a training workshop held at IEL’s Islamabad office
in 2008. I approached the teachers to request their participation in the study at the end
of the session, and everyone I contacted agreed. I believe that the local culture of
politeness and hospitality may have influenced such a positive response. It is important
to mention the participants did not feel forced to be part of the study as the IEL did not
ask or request their participation.
For this article, I focus on the lived experiences of two of these participants. I chose
these two participants because their views and experiences represented the themes that
emerged during my work with other participants. This focus provides in-depth insights
into the complexity of the lives of the participants who are some of the first and few
educated women in their communities. The experiences of these two participants is
particularly informative to investigate the issue of choice in marriage as one of them
had an ‘arranged marriage,’ the marital arrangement that all of the married participants,
except one, had entered. The second participant had what she and other participants
called ‘love marriages.’ She was the only participant who had chosen her spouse. This
96 A. KHURSHID

marriage took place with her family’s approval but the fact that she liked her husband
before her family had arranged their marriage qualified it as a ‘love marriage.’ I choose
these two participants because their divergent experiences in marriage can help us
examine how the participants understood and practiced the notions of choice, rights,
and empowerment.
I conducted at least two semi-structured interviews, each lasting 60 to 150 minutes,
with each participant in Urdu, the national language of Pakistan. The open-ended
questions focused on a broad range of topics, such as personal history, family relation-
ships, and the women’s work as teachers, as well as their perceptions of women’s
education and the role of women in their community. I explored issues brought up
by the participants in detail, especially during the second interview. Most interviews
took place at their schools when they were not teaching and some took place in their
homes. All of the interviews were audiorecorded. I transcribed and translated them in
English. I also conducted participant observation in family settings of the participants,
during formal and informal meetings with other teachers, IEL staff, parents, and
community members. I took handwritten notes during these meetings and transcribed
a more detailed description of each event immediately afterward.
I approached each interview transcript as an independent conversation focusing on
participants’ particular understandings of women’s education and of their relationships
with family and community. Emergent themes were coded during the first stage of
analysis.

Educated women make the right choices: Safia’s story

‘Educated women make the right choices,’ said Safia, headmistress of an IEL school.
When asked to explain, she stated:
My father sent his daughters to school when no one else in our family or in our
community was willing to educate their daughters. He could see that education would
make her daughters honourable and wiser when others thought that letting girls step out
of home would bring shame to the family. Today we [Safia and her sisters] have shown to
the people how education helps women make the right choices.

Safia believed that she and her sisters’ actions were the right choices because they
reflected the value of education for women. These right choices proved how her father
was right in educating his daughters despite intense opposition from their family and
community. Safia and her sisters received post-secondary education at a time when very
few girls in their village attended school after elementary grade. Today the majority of
the girls in Safia’s village are attending high school and some have even entered college.
However, things were very different for Safia and her sisters when they went to high
school and college. Their community and even some family members strongly disap-
proved of the sisters commuting to and back from school on daily basis. The commu-
nity members feared that such ‘unsupervised’ mobility for women would lead to
extramarital relationships between young men and women. A woman’s engagement
in an extramarital relationship or even any suspicions in this regard brought shame to
the whole family and at times led to violent disputes between families or different
kinship groups. However, in current times educated women were seen as being capable
 COMPARE 97

of preserving the honour of their families and communities through avoiding unne-
cessary interactions with men. This shift in the gendered norms and perceptions, Safia
believed, was an outcome of the right choices that educated women like Safia and her
sisters had made. They demonstrated to the families and communities that education
enabled women to protect the honour of the families on their own, and how educated
women did not need to be monitored by their families and communities. She explained:

When we [Safia and her sisters] started commuting on our own to college in the city, our
father said to us ‘I trust you.’ This simple statement deeply shook us. It echoes in my mind
even today. He supported us to attend college at a time when people did not like women
leaving home. People were not used to seeing women waiting at the bus stop. But he
trusted us even then. How could we ever think of doing anything that would hurt him?

Safia talked about how she and her sisters used to be the only women in public spaces in
their village when they commuted to high school. They received a lot of attention as
well as scrutiny in their village to the city. Safia and her participants always refrained
from interacting with men even they were in the city where nobody knew them. They
were mindful of their father’s trust who had educated them even others warned him
against it. Safia talked about how her education made her aware of the importance of
not acting on ‘juvenile desires’ when she received positive attention from men in the
city. She believed that education had enabled her understand the consequences of such
actions not only for their family but also for other women. Any misstep on her part
would have also ruined the chances of other girls in her community to receive educa-
tion. The community would have blamed education for such ‘immoral’ behaviour, and
would have denied other girls access to schools. This wisdom paid off as today Safia and
her sisters were respected not only by their family but also by the community. Safia was
allowed to take up a job after finishing her higher education, something that was highly
unusual in their village. Recently she started commuting to a neighbouring village to
work as the headmistress of a new IEL school. Whereas a large number of girls were in
school in Safia’s rural, the issue of women taking up employment outside of home was
still very contentious. Men were seen as responsible for providing economic support to
their families. The families in her own village encouraged young girls to be more like
Safia and her sisters, who were seen as confident, respectful, and productive members of
their families.
Safia believed that making these right choices was empowering and yet a challenge, a
challenge that only educated women could deal with. Another important choice that
she made that had empowered her was regarding her marriage. For Safia, the ‘choice’ of
marrying her husband was right but not an easy one. Safia’s marriage to her cousin was
arranged by her family. It was not the ‘perfect match,’ in Safia’s words, as her husband
was around 15 years older than her and had dropped out of high school. He had built a
small but successful real estate business. Safia wanted a spouse who was at least as
educated as she was. However, she agreed to this arrangement as the ‘girls in her family
did not say no to their parents.’ Whereas young men in her community were at times
able to convince their parents to allow them to marry a woman of their choice, it was
unheard of for the women to do the same. Just like an extramarital relationship, her
refusal to embrace her family’s decision would have reflected badly on the value of
education for women: ‘How could I embarrass my father after what all the opposition
98 A. KHURSHID

he put up with to educate me?’ she stated. Safia believed that her decision to marry her
husband made it possible for her younger cousins to continue their education.
Ironically, all of her cousins also agreed to the marriages arranged by their families
even when all of the arrangements were not the ‘perfect’ match in Safia’s opinion. When
I asked why these young and educated women were reluctant to say no to their parents,
Safia said:

Well they are wise to know that this is the right choice. Their in-laws will respect them and
their own families will continue to support them through thick and thin. Marriages are not
easy, why make them more difficult by not having our family support us?

In these rural families, marriage was seen as a union of families that were related or were
part of the same kinship group. Marriage was seen as an institution that established or
strengthened the bond between families that needed each others’ support. For the most
part, women lived with their husband’s family and were expected to become part of the
family. The families tried to ensure that their daughters were treated well by their in-laws,
and often intervened to resolve any conflicts in that regard. Thus, even as women
formally became part of their husband’s families, the support from their own families
was central to earning the respect of their in-laws. Women marrying against the wishes of
their own families not only brought ‘shame’ to their families but were also seen as being
more vulnerable and completely dependent on their in-laws. The wisdom of the right
choice here was that arranged marriages were expected to ensure more freedom for
women after marriage as women were trusted and respected for listening to their families.
Women’s own families also continued to support them after marriage, and helped them
resolve any issues they might have with their in-laws. For example, Safia’s father sup-
ported her decision to take up the IEL job despite it being in a different village. This
support finally convinced her husband and in-laws, who had some reservations about
Safia commuting a long distance on a daily basis. It was also true for a number of other
participants as their parental families had played a significant role in convincing their
husbands and in-laws to let them work as teachers. This support would not have existed
had Safia exercised her rights in choosing a husband. Thus, having family support
enabled married women liked Safia exercise some difficult choices regarding employment
and public mobility. This access to new roles and opportunities made Safia’s decision to
marry her husband the right choice. This choice became the right choice because it did
not involve merely an expression of what Safia wanted at that particular point. Instead, it
involved wisdom to assess her responsibilities as a daughter and as one of the first
educated women in the community as well as an understanding of how this decision
would enable her to access other forms of power. For example, Safia was able to work
with the support of her mother-in-law who took care of her three-year-old son while she
was at school. Her husband had arranged private transportation for her to commute to
the school on a daily basis. Safia strongly believed that all of had become possible because
she had proved herself to be someone who could be trusted to take on new roles while
embodying the values of her family and community.
The issue of ‘choice’ in marriage is particularly insightful in examining the under-
standings and performance of the right choice. Safia as well as all the other women
participants, talked about their ‘Islamic’ right to choose a spouse. However, almost all
the participants chose not to practice that choice. Unlike extramarital relationships,
 COMPARE 99

which were viewed as a huge taboo, the issue of choice in marriage was more vague.
The parents who had educated their daughters at a time when most of the families were
not willing to do the same had used Islam to justify their choices. Safia’s father was also
inspired by the Islamic teachings in making the decision to send his daughters to school
despite strong opposition from the community. Islam was also the framework that the
women teachers like Safia used to convince their husbands and in-laws to allow them to
work and to convince other parents in the community to send their daughters to
school. This discourse of Islamic rights was, thus, readily available to the women to
use to support their ‘choices’ in marriage or reject the marriages arranged by their
parents. However, participants like Safia believed that making a choice against their
family’s wishes could harm their family’s honour as well as other women’s conditional
access to education, employment, and public mobility. Making such a choice could also
disempower women in the long-run through curtailing the choices that become avail-
able to them. Thus, whereas part of this right choice was the sense of responsibility
towards the family and other women, part of it was an active calculation of the potential
impact exercising this choice could have on the future lives of the women. Safia stated:
Well some women elope to get married [against their family wishes]. They have the right
to marry whomever they want. I am educated, I know Islam has given women that right.
But does that make it a right choice? I do not think there is anything wrong with it but I
also know what happens when women take this step. Their parents and families are not
able to face anyone. And what happens to women themselves? Nobody respects them, even
their husbands and in-laws do not respect them. Their lives are ruined too. But you know
what? I have never heard about an educated woman doing something like this. Education
enlightens us, makes us wise. We do not do such things.

Safia articulated why she did not think opposing parents’ decision was the right choice
when it came to martial arrangements, even when Islam had granted women the right
to choose a spouse. However, practicing that right could be extremely harmful not only
to the families but also to the women themselves. She believed that education made
women aware of their Islamic rights and also instilled wisdom in them to understand
when to practice their rights. Safi believed that educated women were able to make the
right choices as education had enabled them to understand the consequences of their
decisions and choices.
For Safia, making the right choice in the case of marriage meant agreeing to the
decision made by her family despite having reservations about it. This non-choice
became the right choice because it enabled Safia to receive support form her family,
husband, and in-laws to practice choices regarding issues such as employment and
public mobility that she deemed very important. This right choice also maintained the
family honour and supported the educational aspirations of the other women in the
family and community. This notion of right choice reflected the experiences of the
participants as well as the decisions made by them to empower themselves. All the
participants with the exception of one described their marriages as arranged by their
families. Some of them had the same reservations as Safia about the men chosen by
their families whereas others were satisfied with the choices made by their family. Some
of them enjoyed happily married lives whereas other struggled with their husbands and/
or in-laws. What was common among all the participants, however, was their under-
standing of the notion and value of making the right choices. None of them regretted
100 A. KHURSHID

accepting their parents’ choices, even if it did not lead to happy marriage, because it
meant receiving their family’s support to take up jobs, help with childcare, and flex-
ibility regarding other choices.
This discourse of right choice also revealed a mode of regulating oneself to align the
choices and non-choices with a complex process of change that shifted some gendered
norms while reproducing others. For example, the participants modified gendered
norms and practices around women’s education, employment, and public mobility in
their families and communities. Women’s sexuality and choice in marriage, on the
other hand, remained sticky issues that were impervious to these changes. The same
families that supported the participants to challenge the gendered norms of public
mobility to receive education and to work outside of home were resistant to any
changes in this regard. Educated women like Safia and her sisters were expected to self-
regulate themselves to embody these values as they took on new roles. For the
participants, the discourse of the right choice thus implied an awareness of these
complex and multilayered processes as well as an embodiment of wisdom that made
the practice, or non-practice, of choice in marriage the right choice.

I chose my husband but what difference does it make? Rabia’s story

This discourse of right choice provides insights into how the women participants who
saw themselves as empowered and independent women understood and embodied the
issue of choice in marriage. The participants accepted their parents’ decisions even if
they had reservations about it. The only participant who described her marriage as a
‘love marriage’2 was a 33-year-old Rabia. Rabia and her husband were cousins, and
developed liking for each other as teenagers. They were able to interact with each other
because their families lived in very close proximity and socialised with each other
almost on daily basis. Rabia’s husband told his parents about his liking for Rabia
when Rabia was still in college. It was not preferable but still acceptable for men to
express their liking for a woman, especially if she met the requirements of being from
the same family and kinship network. In this case, the husband’s parents agreed right
away as Rabia was from their family. They sent the marriage proposal to Rabia’s family
who also happily accepted it. The marriage, thus, was arranged without any hurdle even
when many members of the family were aware of Rabia and her husband’s liking for
each other. Their ‘liking’ was not viewed as objectionable as it did not involve any
romantic or physical relationship. Rabia had received a few other proposals too but she
believed that her liking for her husband was one of the factors that convinced her
parents to accept his proposal.
Rabia had been married for eight years and had a six-year-old son and a three-year-
old daughter. She saw herself as an empowered woman who was living a life of her
choice. She felt that it was education that had made her aware of her rights and had
enabled her to practice those rights. She said:
An educated woman speaks up because she knows what her rights are . . . her rights as a
woman . . . as a Muslim. I see it at our school – mothers who are not educated never visit to
inquire about their children. It is often the grandmothers. Now what do the grandmothers
know? That is the difference; educated women are able to make decisions for themselves.
They cannot be silenced or pushed aside easily.
 COMPARE 101

Rabia did not approve of the common practice in her village of grandmothers, rather
than mothers, visiting the school to inquire about the students. It was more acceptable
for the elderly grandmothers rather than young mothers to commute in public spaces
without a male relative. In addition, the young women, especially the daughters-in-law,
were expected to take care of the household chores and often could not spare time to
visit schools. In most cases both grandmothers and mothers were not educated.
However, the grandmothers, primarily because of lack of exposure to media or other
informal learning opportunities, did not comprehend the information given to them at
schools. However, they still did not feel the need to include the mothers in these
meetings. Rabia believed the inability of the mothers to visit schools deprived them
of the right and authority to effectively parent their children. She felt troubled that most
of the mothers remained silent despite having strong reservations about it. Rabia
believed that education would have enabled these mothers to realise that they had to
the right and the choice to be more actively involved in their children’s schooling.
Rabia felt that her experiences as an educated woman were in stark contrast from
the lives of the majority of women in her village. As an educated woman, Rabia
made decisions not only for her own children but also for her nephews and nieces.
She was the only woman in the family with a Bachelor’s degree and a job as a
teacher. The family trusted her to guide the children and young adults in her family.
She was particularly proud of the fact that even her older brothers asked her for
advice to raise their children. The age and gender hierarchies in the village had
extended a superior status to her older brothers. However, Rabia’s position as an
educated woman had disrupted that traditional structure and had enabled her to
participate in decision-making processes. Rabia’s distinction as an educated woman
also extended to other parts of her life. For example, women in her village often did
not shop for themselves. All the families did their shopping in a close-by city.
Women were not allowed to make such trips to the city on their own because of
the gendered norms of public mobility. Men often took care of shopping when they
visited the city for another purpose and thus did not want to take women along. As
a result, most of the women did not get to choose their clothes, shoes, or other items
of daily use. Rabia saw this as an ‘unfair’ situation as it reflected a ‘lack of choice’ for
women even in their daily lives. She spoke with joy about how she did not have to
‘rely on any man’ for such trips. Unlike other women, she went to the city with a
female cousin or friend to shop for herself and her family. Rabia was seen as capable
of making such trips on her own because she was used to travelling to the city to
attend teacher trainings. Rabia said:

People worry that women would be lost in the city, what if they cannot find their way back
to the bus stop or are not able to change the buses? These women are very shy so they
wont ask for directions. And they can’t read the sign boards about directions.

Rabia did not need to be accompanied by a man as she felt comfortable taking the
public transportation and interacting with people on her own in the city. The ability to
make such trips was very important for Rabia as she felt empowered by her ability to
choose what she and her children used in their day-to-day lives.
For Rabia, the ability to practice choices in her day-to-day life as well as about decisions
such as her children’s education demonstrated her empowerment as an educated woman.
102 A. KHURSHID

Ironically, the choices that Rabia mentioned as an evidence of her empowerment did not
include her love marriage. Her practice of choice in marriage seemed like an example of the
right choice as it did not violate the honour norms as her family had arranged the marriage.
This absence of choice in marriage as a sign of empowerment was particularly intriguing as
the international development and education discourses present choice in marriage as an
important aspect of gender empowerment. I wondered if Rabia felt that her choice in
marriage was not as significant as it had aligned with her parents’ wishes. In other words, it
was not a ‘real’ choice because it did not challenge any structures. This approach to the issue
of choice and agency was shaped by the feminist discourse that conceptualises agency as an
opposition of the structures of power. Rabia’s understanding, however, provided a critical
insight into the issue of choice as enabling one to exercise agency to gain power, in the
structure. Rabia laughed on hearing my question about her feeling empowered by the fact
that she, unlike most of the uneducated and educated women in her village, could marry a
man of her choice. She said ‘Come on, marriage is marriage. It’s all the same once you are
married.’ She further elaborated:

Well, what difference does it make if I chose my husband? My parents would have also
chosen someone good for me. Of course I have rights as a Muslim woman but my
marriage is not going to work just because my husband and I liked each other, right? I
am not going to have more freedom because we wanted to get married. My marriage
works because I know how to make it work.

Despite being in a love marriage, Rabia did not see the issue of choice in marriage as an
indicator of a good marriage or of her empowerment. She believed that Islam had given
her the right to choose her husband. However, she did not believe that being married to
a person of one’s choice meant more ‘freedom’ or more choices or a good life. Her love
marriage did not mean much when it came to the reality of her life. She believed that
her parents would have chosen someone good for her too.
Rabia did not connect her choice in marriage to the right choice the way Safia did. For
Rabia, the issue of choice in marriage was not particularly the right choice but it did not
extend her agency or the ability to live a life of her choice. This did not imply that it was the
wrong choice. Instead, it was an expression of wisdom, which would have turned a simple
choice into the right choice. For example, unlike Safia, Rabia’s decision for marriage did not
involve any deliberations about the impact of this decision on Rabia’s future ‘freedom’ or its
affect on family honour or on other women of the family. Her family might have arranged
her marriage to the same cousin even if they did not like each other.
For Rabia, the right choice was her decision to sustain a marriage that had grown
turbulent over time. Rabia developed differences with her husband over what she called
‘irresponsible’ behaviour. She felt upset that he did not show any interest in exploring
how to best use their inherited land, something that could have economically secured
them. He also paid no heed to Rabia’s suggestions regarding different issues. Rabia said:

My husband works one day [on their agricultural land] and rests for two days. I even take
care of the livestock at home. But I do not fight with my husband because it is not going to
solve anything. My in-laws are happy with me because I am very respectful and caring
towards them. I would have left my husband long ago, had I not been educated. But what
kind of life I would have after that? I have a good life today. I can do whatever I want to
because I wisely make my choices.
 COMPARE 103

Rabia, her husband, and their two kids lived close to but separately from Rabia’s in-
laws. Rabia’s husband worked as a farmer on the family land. Whereas Rabia’s daily
routine was very hectic, including working as a teacher and taking care of all the
household chores as well as livestock, her husband worked whenever he wanted to.
He also refused to do grocery shopping and take care of livestock, that tasks that
were generally seen as the responsibility of the men in the village. Rabia and her
husband had intense fights in the initial years of their marriage. During that time,
Rabia considered leaving her husband but eventually decided to stay in the marriage.
She realised that returning to her parents’ home would invite ridicule and blaming
from the community members and even from some members of her own family. She
would not be seen as a ‘wise’ woman for leaving a man who did not have any
extreme flaws. Her husband was unreasonable but not abusive, something that would
have justified the separation. Rabia used to be a ‘hot tempered’ and being the
youngest in her family was also used to being pampered by her family, especially
by her father. However, she realised that she had to change her temperament and
expectations if she wanted to stay in her marriage: ‘I used to get so angry at my
husband for being so lazy when I had to work so much. But now I do not get that
upset. I am happy that I can do whatever I want to,’ she explained. Rabia realised
that she would become dependent on her brothers and would need their permission
to do everything if she left her husband. Rabia stopped questioning her husband as
such discussion led to fights and did not change anything. She let him do whatever
he wanted to do and instead took on additional responsibilities to run her house-
hold. This led to a more peaceful relationship between the two: ‘It was not easy. I
had to constantly remind myself that this will make my life better,’ she added. She
felt that her education enabled her to realise and focus on the long-term impact of
her decision. Her decision to stay in the marriage made it possible for her to practice
choices regarding her employment and public mobility as well as decisions regarding
her. She earned respect from her in-laws and community for taking care of respon-
sibilities inside and outside of home and for the way she transformed her relation-
ship with her husband.
Rabia saw her decision to stay in the marriage and to establish a good relationship
with her husband and in-laws, rather than the decision to marry her husband, as an
expression of the right choice. She did not see choice in marriage as something that
violated or validated her agency. It neither shaped her experiences nor offered her more
‘freedom.’ Instead, it was her ability to understand that staying in this marriage was a
better choice even if the marriage was not good. Making this right choice entailed
managing her feelings, behaviour, and actions. This decision proved her wisdom as an
educated woman and made it more likely that her husband, in-laws, and her own family
would support her choices. She shared how her husband did not question her if she
decided to visit a friend on her way back from school. He did not become upset if she
got late on one of her shopping trips to the city. He also did not object to her
management of the household expenses. Similarly, her in-laws completely ‘trusted’
and supported her. She saw this freedom, choices, and opportunities regarding her
professional and personal life as a result of her making the right choice.
104 A. KHURSHID

Conclusion
In a global context where ‘Muslim womanhood’ has become the site for global projects
and reforms, this ethnographic article examines what it means to practice choice and
rights in the lived experiences of educated and professional Muslim women from rural
and low-income communities in Pakistan. The analysis complicates the notion of
education as an inherently or universally empowering process and institution, and
reveals empowerment as a socially embedded context. It shows how empowerment
for these Muslim women happens in dialogue with, rather than in opposition to, their
families, communities, and Islam. This conceptualisation is a departure from the
notions of empowerment as an expression of free will or choice. For example, the
participants explained their decisions regarding marital arrangements as legitimate
practices of choice, the right choice, only if these decisions enabled them to access
different forms of power. Ironically, this right choice at times meant not choosing a
husband or accepting someone chosen by the family despite having reservations about
him. On the other hand, choosing a spouse was not seen as the right choice if it did not
empower the individual. In short, a choice became the right choice only if it provided
women access to power within their context.
For the participants, practicing rights translated into empowerment only when it
provided them new opportunities and roles within their contexts. They did not view
empowerment as an assertion of individual will or rights against their culture or the
institutions of family and community. Instead, they saw empowerment as an outcome
of the knowledge and skills of educated women to claim and negotiate new roles to
access and practice power within their families and culture. This issue reveals how
participants’ conceptualisations of empowerment involved access to power within
institutions, rather than merely practice of rights.
This analysis provides insights how Muslim womanhood for the participants of this
study was an intersectional, rather than merely a religious, entity. Being Muslim
reflected a specific gendered and class-based subject position for these participants.
Through claiming this Muslim entity, the participants were able to access certain rights
and forms of power situated within the gendered institutions of their families and
communities. While recognising the reliance of these women on the institutions of
family and community, this article analyses how these participants made sense of and
engaged with these forms of choice and power. I do not speculate about if and how
these women would have made different decisions had their families accepted them
marrying across ethnic, kinship, and caste lines. These questions, while bringing the
gendered and disciplining nature of families and communities to light, cannot be
answered within the scope of this study.
This ethnographic analysis has important implications for researchers and policy-
makers interested in the issues of education and gender empowerment. It reveals how
these processes operate as local and are informed by the cultural, religious, and socio-
economic contexts. In addition, it also reveals Muslim womanhood as a discursive
category shaped by multiple factors and not merely by a global vision of Islam. For
example, the entities of the participants as Muslim women were shaped not by some
static and universal teachings but by Islam as a lived experience. This finding is
particularly relevant for global educational projects that aim to empower Muslim
 COMPARE 105

women through equipping them to practice rights against their culture and religion.
The findings of this study reveal the complex workings of culture and religion that can
simultaneously empower and regulate women.

Notes
1. The practices of arranged marriage are not the same as forced marriages. Marriage
arranged by the parents or by the family does not imply that it is against the consent
and/or choice of the women or men.
2. Love marriage was the term used by the participants to refer to the marriages where men
and women liked each other before getting married. It could indicate a formal relationship
or merely a liking for each other. These marital arrangements were rare and were
approved by the families only in the cases of right kinship, caste, and class relations.

Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the leaders and staff of the IEL who made this research possible. A very
special thanks to the IEL teachers, their families, and members of the communities who
welcomed me into their homes and lives. I am grateful to my mentor Myra Marx Ferree for
her critical feedback and support throughout my research process.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

References
Abu-Lughod, L. 1998. “Introduction.” In Remaking Women, edited by L. Abu-Lughod.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Abu-Lughod, L. 2002. “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?” American Anthropologist 104:
783–790. doi:10.1525/aa.2002.104.3.783.
Abu-Lughod, L. 2009. “Dialectics of Women’s Empowerment.” International Journal of Middle
Eastern Studies 41: 83–103. doi:10.1017/S0020743808090132.
Abu-Rabia-Queder, S. 2008. “Does Education Necessarily Mean Enlightenment? the Case of
Higher Education among Palestinians-Bedouin Women in Israel.” Anthropology & Education
Quarterly 39 (4): 381–400. doi:10.1111/j.1548-1492.2008.00029.x.
Aguair, M. 2013. “Arranged Marriage: Cultural Regeneration in Transnational South Asian
Popular Culture.” Cultural Critique 84: 181–213.
Asad, T. 2003. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press.
Butler, J. 1999. Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge.
Chatterjee, P. 1989. “Colonialism, Nationalism, and Colonialized Women.” American Ethnologist
16: 622–633. doi:10.1525/ae.1989.16.4.02a00020.
Guinee, N. 2014. “Empowering Women through Education: Experiences from Dalit Women in Nepal.”
International Journal of Educational Development 39: 183–190. doi:10.1016/j.ijedudev.2014.07.007.
Hooks, B. 1982. Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism. London: Pluto Press.
Ijaz, A., and T. Abbas. 2010. “The Impact of Inter-Generational Change on the Attitudes of
Working-Class South Asian Muslim Parents on the Education of Their Daughters.” Gender
and Education 22 (3): 313–326. doi:10.1080/09540250903289444.
Kapur, R. 2005. Erotic Justice: Law and the New Politics of Postcolonialism. London: Glass House.
106 A. KHURSHID

Khurshid, A. 2016. “From Gender Party to Gender (In)Equity. Women’s Education among Rural
Communities in Pakistan.” International Journal of Educational Development 51: 43–50.
doi:10.1016/j.ijedudev.2016.08.001.
Khurshid, A. 2017. “Does Education Empower Women? the Regulated Empowerment of Parhi Likhi
Women in Pakistan.” Anthropology & Education Quarterly 48: 252–268. doi:10.1111/aeq.12198.
Mahmood, S. 2005. Politics of Piety. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Mason, R., and H. Sherwood. 2016. Cameron ‘Stigmatising Muslim Women’ with English
Language Policy. The Guardian, January 18. http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jan/
18/david-cameron-stigmatising-muslim-women-learn-english-language-policy
Mohammad, R. 2015. “Transntional Shift: Marriage, Home, and Belonging for British-Pakistani
Muslim Women.” Social & Cultural Geography 16 (6): 593–614. doi:10.1080/14649365.2014.998268.
Mohanty, C. 1984. “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses.”
Boundary 12 (3): 333–358. doi:10.2307/302821.
Penn, R. 2011. “Arranged Marriages in Western Europe: Media Representations and Social
Reality.” Journal of Comparative Family Studies 42 (5): 637–650.
Riley, D. 1988. ‘Am I that Name?’: Feminism and the Category of ‘Women’ in History. London:
Macmillan Press.
Said, E. 1979. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books.
Saigol, R. 2004. “Enemies within and Enemies Without: The Besieged Self in Pakistani
Textbooks.” Futures 37 (9): 1005–1035. doi:10.1016/j.futures.2005.01.014.