Book Review: Forging the Ideal Educated Girl: The Production of Desirable Subjects in Muslim South Asia by Shenila Khoja-Moolji
In her review of Shenila Khoja-Moolji’s Forging the Ideal Educated Girl: The Production of Desirable Subjects in Muslim South Asia, Laila Kadiwal describes how the author dismantles homogenous assumptions about Muslim girls that are embedded in Western aid and foreign policies, as well as in Muslim societies’ domestic policies. This book, which takes readers across South Asia and from 19th-century colonial India to present-day Pakistan, presents the educated Muslim girl as a dynamic figure, not the monolithic figure that is often assumed. Kadiwal urges anyone working in education to look at the underlying conditions of why Muslim women are often treated as subjects rather than agents.