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About the author: Jamsheed K.
Choksy was born in Mumbai, India on January 8, 1962, and received his
initial schooling in Colombo, Sri Lanka. He undertook his undergraduate
studies at Columbia University, NY, where in 1985, he received his B.A. in
Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures with a minor in Biology. The focus
of his Ph.D. work was on history and religions of the Near East and inner
Asia. He obtained his doctorate degree from Harvard University in
1991. During the years 1991-1993, he was a visiting Assistant professor in
the department of history and the international relations program at
Stanford University. From 1993-1994, Jamsheed was a member and a fellow of
the national endowment for the humanities at the school of historical
studies in the institute for advanced study, Princeton university. He was
awarded a John Simon Guggenheim memorial foundation fellowship in
1996–1997. He held an Andrew W. Mellon fellowship at the center for
advanced study in the behavioral sciences, Stanford university, during
2001–2002. Currently, he is a professor in the department of central
Eurasian studies and the department of history and an adjunct professor in
the department of religion studies at Indiana university. He has also
served as the chairman of the department of Near Eastern.
About the book:[i]
This monograph reflects the strengths and weaknesses of a work done by a
historian of religion whose central concern or disciplinary training does
not extend to gender studies. Choksy brings the remarkable range of his
scholarship to do a superb job of examining doctrinal, theological and
ritual developments over time in the relationship between evil, good and
gender.
The context for this analysis is the
Zarathushti attribution of malevolence and benevolence to the feminine,
the masculine, the female and the male. However, when Choksy extends this
theme to include socio-religious development during modern times, he loses
his vision of how the “images of the female and male in theology, were
fundamental in defining both women’s and men’s cultural roles and
statuses.” Specifically, the monograph contains five chapters and a brief
introduction. The introduction provides a review of the main thesis of the
volume. Basically, Choksy lays out the dichotomy between evil and good as
‘interlinked religious concepts’, with its origins attributed to spiritual
entities who act in opposition to each other as advocates of these dual
principles. In many societies, gender came to be associated with evil,
and Choksy elaborates on this connection in the context of the Zarathushti
religion. Male clerics subsequently transformed this concept into
yielding demonic female spirits.
At the same time, Zarathushti beliefs did not
exclude the feminine from goodness. In fact, Mazdean rites included
several female spiritual beings who played important roles in expelling
evil and serving as the role models for mortal women. At the outset,
Choksy acknowledges that this study places a heavy reliance on the source
materials that the religion of Zarathushtra provides. This approach
provides him a forum to guide the reader to specific primary sources,
focussing for the most part on texts, artworks, coins and other items that
explore the implications of the religion’s attitudes towards
gender-related issues. At the same time, the heavy reliance on scholars
who are intimately involved in Zarathushti studies leads to a lack of
critical analysis – a benign explanation – for some of the religion’s
questionable beliefs and traditions that
affect women. The problem could have been avoided by relying more heavily
than the author prefers on theoretical paradigms drawn from other
disciplines to search for reasons and the development of theory to explain
Zarathushti belief systems. Unfortunately, the author wants to shy away
from viewing “gender-related issues of the past as misogynist,” and in
doing so, does not differentiate between a misogynist and a broader
feminist perspective that would have allowed him topresent a more nuanced
picture.
Chapter 2 provides a straightforward
discussion of the rise of the religion – the life of the prophet,
scriptures, dualism and the feminine, spiritual entities, the sectarian
sacred history, worship and death rituals and the emigration of
Zarathushtis to India and their subsequent dispersion to other countries.
Chapter 3 takes us into the domain of female
demons and beneficent female spiritual beings, clarifying the
gender-specific linkages of notions like deceit, sexuality and avidity
that are part of the faith’s symbolism of the demonic female entities,
while the divine female divinities are depicted as working to ensure that
cosmic order is upheld. Choksy stresses the point of the faith’s dualistic
system, and how this orientation accommodated the contrasting notions of
order and disorder and simplified the acceptance of the connection between
evil and the feminine.
Chapter 4 elaborates on the male dominated
religious and societal world views that feminine as a gender were weak
willed and easily led astray by the devil’s menagerie. Choksy illustrates
this Mazdean belief by referring to the myth of the Bundahishn regarding
the act of the first woman, Mashyana, whose image was projected upon
women to reinforce the belief that women, acting independently, will
always end up creating the conditions that produce evil. The main emphasis
in this section is the tie between pollution and evil, including the
threats posed by menstruation and childbirth, plus a discussion of the
feminine connection between evil and good in the afterlife.
Chapter 5 is a historical excursion into
antiquity and the middle ages for a search of the available records that
might divulge the socioreligious aspects of Zarathushti women’s lives. The
pre-modern period saw very little significant change in the male dominated
secular order, leading to the conclusion that despite some ability to
engage in gender appropriate work, the old dichotomy between evil, good
and gender continued to restrict women’s functions in the spiritual life
of the community.
Finally, as stated before, the problems with
the book are most evident in Choksy’s concluding chapter on socioreligious
development during modern times. The emphasis on “images of the female
and male in theology” (italics mine) that is supposed to be “fundamental
in defining cultural roles and statuses” is often lost in the amount of
coverage that he devotes to statistics on the effects of western-style
societal influences that might have been responsible in bringing about
some secular changes.
Consequently, Choksy fails to stress strongly
enough that a relatively egalitarian ideal that might govern societal
sex-role behavior might not provide a bulwark against continuing negative
images of women in the religious texts and traditions. As a result, the
chapter paints an overly rosy picture of women’s “social and religious
liberalization” without any mention whatsoever of some acrimonious issues
that have affected Zarathushti women’s spiritual lives. For example, the
status of Parsi women married to non-Parsis, the status of their children,
their legal status as Zarathushtis, etc., are all subjects of vital
concern that deserve particular coverage here since quoting scriptural
traditions seems to be the accepted way of justifying the legitimacy of
these gender-related religious laws.
Instead of tackling these thorny issues,
Choksy backs away from a topic that is nothing but vital in view of the
book’s central concern with gender by making some general, non-threatening
comments such as the “increase in the frequency of marriage across
confessional communities” has succeeded in “bringing new issues and
concepts into familial settings.” A newcomer to the field could read this
statement and have no inkling whatsoever about how these socioreligious
developments have discriminated consistently against Zarathushti women.
In general, Choksy seems more at ease in
dealing with material from the past, and in drawing out the religious and
social functions of these ideas such as the effects of the decline of
diabology in diminishing perceptions of the negative images of Zarathushti
women. This is not surprising since by discipline and training, he is a
historian of religion whose interest lies in furthering discussion of
“continuity and change in the history of religions.” It is in this
capacity that this book should be read and appreciated for its impressive
scholarship and contribution towards furthering the cause of Zarathushti
studies.
[i]
This book review appeared in the Summer 2003 issue of the FEZANA
journal and has been reproduced with the consent of Dr. Ketayun Gould
and Mrs. Roshan Rivetna, the editor of FEZANA journal.
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