Completed book is a baby lost, says British novelist Shahraz

It is impossible not to fall in love with Bano. In fact, Shahraz fell in love with the very idea of a holy woman, a woman married to her faith in a wealthy district of Pakistan.

Holy women are a cultural construct of well-to-do families in Pakistan, who do not have male heirs and do not want their properties be divided and lost through marriages. Bano's story flourished in Shahraz's mind after she watched a BBC documentary about this tradition. Shahraz was writing her first novel then, but the irresistible call of Bano made her abandon that novel, never to be turned to again, and start writing “The Holy Woman.”

“The Holy Woman” traces Pakistani pseudo-religious customs within the narration of a young woman's desperate love story. As opposed to common Western perceptions about Muslim marriages, Bano is not forced into an arranged marriage, but is forced into celibacy. Being a holy woman, Bano tries to make peace with her imposed reality and finds solace in religion and religious studies. During her studies she travels to India, Indonesia, Egypt and the Arabian Peninsula, giving the reader the chance to observe customs and lifestyles in different parts of the Muslim world. This is a deliberate act of the writer. “The reason why I wrote this book is to introduce the Muslim world to the West and raise awareness about Muslim women's psychology and identity,” Shahraz told Sunday's Zaman in an interview during a recent visit to İstanbul.

She was here upon an invitation from the Journalists and Writers' Foundation to speak about her best-selling books at the first of a new luncheon series open to public participation.

Shahraz is a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a member of the Royal Society of Literature and a recipient of the Arts Council Award. Her novels have been translated into several languages. “The Holy Woman” won the Golden Jubilee Award. Her drama series “The Heart is It” won two TV Awards in Pakistan. Shahraz wears several hats. She is currently working on a nonfiction book based on interviews with a number of Muslim women from all over the world. She is amazed to have observed that in Indonesia and Singapore most marriages are love marriages, despite the common perception of arranged marriages. “They are quite happy. They are enjoying their lives,” she says.

But this doesn't mean that there are no problems at all. She was astonished to find that followers of a Yemeni man brought female circumcision to India, for example.

Although Shahraz asserts that she does not include herself or her acquaintances in her novels, her femininity and secondary professions as a teacher and a scriptwriter inevitably have their effect in the final product of her pen. As a female writer, Shahraz could not avoid amalgamating her femininity with authorship. That is why she identifies her novels both as a “baby” and as “torture.”

“Torture” came with her third book, which is about immigration and displaced people's identity issues. “Don't look for it for about two or three more years,” she says in desperation.

In Shahraz's narrative technique, the visual aspect attains an important place. Shahraz claims that she tries hard not to mix her role as an author and a scriptwriter, but the minute details of scenes and the settings she describes in her books give a sense of watching rather than reading. The reader can easily imagine a film set while reading “Typhoon.” This dominance of the visual aspect contradicts the invisibility of the women in the public sphere. Veiled women lose their visibility in public, but Shahraz compensates for this with a visual manifestation of the surrounding world as seen from her characters' eyes. “They are not seen, but they see everything,” one is tempted to say.

Although Shahraz does not totally agree with the idea that the visual aspect of her two novels is a result of her experience as a screenwriter, she says that there is a possibility that “The Holy Woman” will be adapted into a movie in India soon.

Shahraz's novels and her experience writing her novels present a similar pattern of “hatred turning into love” and “love turning into torture.” In “The Holy Woman,” Bano is required to wear a headscarf, as her role as a holy woman necessitates this, and she hates this piece of cloth. “[It makes her] feel claustrophobic,” Shahraz comments. But by the middle of the novel she becomes comfortable with the veil, and at the end of the novel, she feels naked without her headscarf. “This perfectly represents the overall psychology of a Muslim woman,” Shahraz claims.