Women across Pakistan, meanwhile, continue to face an old ultimatum: they can either claim citizenship of the state or membership of the community. It turned out that it was about minimising honour crimes asylum claims. I argued that no authority in Pakistan had ever asked for this. They said it was in keeping with the local culture. South African visa regulations required me to get written permission from my husband allowing me to travel alone. In the search for authenticity, a sort of neo-archaeology of the indigenous, a hybrid reality is created. Other things that look new, hence modern, are old conventions - women in leadership positions for instance. Some things that indicate the old authentic pre-modern are new - the hijab for instance. ‘We’ masks the injustices that the ‘I’ uncovers.
It is in this context that honour killings, forced marriages, use of women in conflict mediation (swara) and child labour occur, where the detriment of the individual is to the benefit of the group. They don’t conceptually differentiate between personal and family interests. Even now, across rural Pakistan I find women unable to use the singular ‘I’ it is always ‘us’ and ‘we’. The collectivities, the tribe, the caste, the ethnicity, the biradari, the village, the family, were all sustained by a political economy that made joint livelihoods and identities necessary. The move from the collective as a unit to the notion of individuals was nothing less than an inversion of the earth’s poles that apparently happens every couple of millennia. The hostility to human rights as a framework is the aftershock of a seismic change. For others, the velocity of social change is signalling the ‘qayamat’ they believe can be stalled by calcifying women in status quo. Gang rapes, public stripping and parading, circulating videos of coercive pornography are not just bodily violations but have an important function of broadcasting public warnings. Not only is ‘customary’ violence like ‘honour’ killings increasing, but emerging forms are breaking with the past patterns of confining violence against women to the privacy of ‘chaar divaari’. The state is extending social protection to the poorest of women and offering incentives for their economic participation.Īnd there’s the blowback. Laws have been introduced that regulate the private domain such as prohibiting anti-women customs, addressing domestic violence, allowing divorce and dismissing the consent of guardians. They have entered gender-bender fields from corporations to parliament, from sports to driving trucks. Fertility rates are declining and the age of marriage has been moved forward. More women are studying and working outside homes and making marriage choices than ever before. Global economic, political and material integration will not subsume us as long as women as transmitters of identity are kept uncontaminated.īut now the inner sanctum has been breached.
So men would wear pants, speak English and seek employment and representation, while the women would study religion and morality inside the home and raise children inculcating in them the value of traditions. Women and through them, the home, were the last bastion against modernity.Ī solution was needed that allowed benefiting from colonial engagement while also keeping cultural purity and personal identity intact.
Liberating laws were in tandem with obstructive bureaucracies, the consolidated state simultaneous with decimated lifestyles. Initially ushered in through colonialism, in people’s experience, with mass schooling came mass arrests with long-distance roads came long-distance weapons with premium on rationality came the dismissal of tradition. Women and through them, the home, were the last bastion against modernity. It explains the moral panic around women though. I didn’t figure out that it was an abbreviation for ‘modern’ till much later. While growing up, I thought ‘mod’ was an Urdu word that meant disreputable women. The world they know is actually crumbling. THE obsession with women is evident in Friday sermons across the country, in the Council of Islamic Ideology’s fixation on regulating women’s bodies, in society’s vigilance of women and in the preoccupation with women’s dressing, holding it responsible for earthquakes and expediting the Day of Judgement.īut those predicting that women’s behavior will trigger the end of the world are not entirely wrong.
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