ABSTRACT
An enormous range of trauma fiction emerging on and about Pakistani women offers insights into various kinds of structural violence rife against them. Qaisra Shahraz’s dauntless sui generis The Holy Woman (2001) also captures the plight of Muslim women married to the Quran in Pakistan, under the compulsive feudal tradition of Haq Bakhshish. The novel allegorizes the bleakness of these Quran Brides’ lives and their impossible escape from enforced marriage caused by cultural indoctrination. This chapter reconstitutes such women’s psychological trauma through the protagonist’s experience involving her initial defiant behavior followed by coping strategies post-marriage to the Quran. Therefore, to validate its arguments this chapter engages in sustained dialogs with Judith Herman’s theorization of psychological trauma (1992) in relation to suppressed women’s loss of faith on family, society, and religion that augment their sense of alienation and then their efforts to their quasi-recovery. Moreover, it draws upon the concepts of “insidious traumata” (1995), “ritualized violence” (2017), and gendered ideology and political and patriarchal interpretations of Islam informed by R.W.Connell’s (2009) concepts of “hegemonic masculinity” and “patriarchal dividend.”
