The Urdu novelist and short story writer Intizar Hussayn, in his story “Ihsan Manzil,” describes the anxiety produced in a northern Indian Muslim community when a magazine arrives addressed to the daughter of a respectable household. Set in the early part of the 20th century, the story depicts how the Muslim woman's name on the envelope, exposed as it was to the whole world, became a metaphor for modernity, the public, and the outside penetrating Muslim moral boundaries and domestic ethos. Similar to Hussayn's incisive depiction of changes within Indian Muslim households, Gail Minault gives us a sense of how religious reform, expanding opportunities for education for both genders, and colonial modernization in the first half of the 20th century undermined and challenged traditional aspects of middle-class Muslim life in northern India.