A Woman Like Her

December 2, 2019
Journalist Maher debuts with an immersive and eye-opening account of the 2016 “honor killing” of Qandeel Baloch, a Pakistani social media celebrity. Raised in a small village in the province of Punjab, Baloch ran away from an abusive marriage in 2009 at the age of 19 and eventually found work as a model and actress. Her social media posts, many of which were considered risqué by the standards of Pakistani culture, garnered Baloch hundreds of thousands of Facebook and Twitter followers. In March 2016, she received death threats for uploading a video promising to do “a strip dance for the whole nation” if Pakistan’s cricket team beat India; a few months later, she sparked further controversy by filming herself in a hotel room with a prominent cleric. On July 16, she was found murdered in her home. After Baloch’s brother Waseem confessed to drugging and strangling her, international news outlets hailed her as a feminist martyr. Maher enriches the narrative with accounts of other Pakistani women confronting misogyny, including a digital rights activist who teaches women how to guard against cyberharassment and the investigator assigned to Baloch’s case. Creatively piecing her story together from TV transcripts, social media posts, and interviews, Maher succeeds in exposing the hypocrisies of Pakistan’s globalized yet repressive society. Though Baloch herself remains somewhat inscrutable, this deeply researched account illuminates the qualities that made her so galvanizing in life as well as death.

December 1, 2019
An investigation of the "honor killing" of a young Pakistani social media star at the hands of her own family. In her first book, Maher (Al Jazeera, Buzzfeed, etc.) delves deeply into the brief life of Qandeel Baloch (1990-2016), discovering a desperate attempt to assert agency regarding her own fate in a society determined to silence her. Baloch, who was born Fouzia Azeem in the poor village of Shah Sadar Din, in southern Punjab, was strangled by her brother, Waseem, in her parents' home. Baloch had been branded the Pakistani Kim Kardashian, and she had perfected a social media persona that gained her hundreds of thousands of followers. But along with the followers, there were also plenty of detractors who believed her too risqué and scandalous for the clannish society in which women had little chance of emancipation. After an early failed marriage, single motherhood, and significant social media success, Baloch, apparently, went too far, baiting the ruling Islamic clerics and moral arbiters and alarming her family--even though she paid her parents' rent and periodically gave money to Waseem. Indeed, thanks to her stardom, Baloch became the family's cash cow. In addition to Baloch's story, Maher examines the parallel experiences of young Pakistani women cast adrift by family and severed marriages. Most of these women must try anything to make a living, including working in the modeling industry, where they are at the mercy of brutal handlers, brokers, and managers. "In the year before Qandeel was murdered," writes the author, "933 women and men were killed for 'honor' in Pakistan"--and "those are only the number of cases that were reported by family and friends." Maher also explores the role of the media in Baloch's death, which provided both an insatiable audience and sanctimonious jury, and speculates on whether justice will ever be served. A compelling account of the tragic fate of a creative woman who might have excelled brilliantly in any other milieu.

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January 1, 2020
Qandeel Baloch, known as Pakistan's Kim Kardashian, was killed in 2016 by her younger brother, who believed that her social media stardom was shaming the family. In A Woman Like Her, journalist Maher uncovers Baloch's journey to national fame and subsequent death, locating the star at the center of a complicated nexus of faith, celebrity, social media, and gender roles in modern Pakistan. Maher offers a nuanced portrait of Baloch in the many roles she tried and discarded over the course of her short life. She situates Baloch in the context of other unconventional Pakistani women she encounters in her research: a young model who struggles to find success without sacrificing her morals; the founder of a digital rights advocacy organization that works to protect Pakistani women who are being harassed and threatened via the internet; a deeply religious female police officer brought in to investigate Baloch's murder. This compassionate and careful book offers a vivid depiction of traditional values clashing with modern moral atmospheres to form Pakistan's rapidly changing online and social landscapes.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)