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Secluded Scholars: Women's Education and Muslim Social Reform in Colonial India. By GAIL MINAULT. Oxford India Paperback Edition. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999. xiv, 359 pp. $14.95 (paper).
Muslim women in India have recently appeared in public discourse largely as the subject of intercommunal conflicts and as markers of the intransigence of Muslim personal law, the most prominent cases being Shah Bano's plea for maintenance and the issue of triple talaq. Gail Minault's study of nineteenth-century debates within Muslim communities over women's education challenges both the characterization of Indian Muslims as a monolithic community insistent on religious rigidity and women's confinement, and of Indian Muslim women as passive, repressed, and ignorant.
Like other historians of colonial India, Minault starts with the ways in which women figure "in the colonial encounter of cultures" (p. 2), particularly the use of images of oppressed women used to justify imperial control, and resistance and collaboration from colonized communities. She focuses on the Muslim "professional and bureaucratic middle class" who see themselves as the new sharif or noble groups, replacing the old aristocracy of birth-educated, cultured, and at the forefront of social change while preserving cultural identity (pp. 4-5). She analyzes the ways in which...