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March 7, 2004
Victimized but fighting back
Shahla Haeri explores the life of professional Muslim women in Pakistan
A Few years ago I met a woman professor at a university faculty party in the eastern United States. In the course of our conversation, she learned that I had just returned from Pakistan, where Benazir Bhutto had been democratically elected prime minister for the second time (1993). She asked, rather incredulously, “How is that possible? Isn’t she a woman? Isn’t Pakistan a Muslim society?”
“Yes, she is a woman,” I said. “And yes, Pakistan is a Muslim society.” It does not automatically follow that because Pakistan is a Muslim society, no woman can be elected a prime minister or that no Muslim man will ever vote for a Muslim woman.
What is culturally and historically specific to Pakistan that made it possible for a young Muslim woman to be elected prime minister, not only once but twice? Is women’s leadership incompatible with Islam?
In the late 1980s, as a human rights activist was interviewing me on the status of “Muslim women”, he used the term Muslim women frequently, generally, and indiscriminately. It seemed as if he did not see me as an Iranian Muslim woman belonging to a particular society with a particular history and coming from a particular class, educational, and professional background. Which Muslim women was he talking about? He seemed profoundly innocent of the actual geographical, historical, cultural, and ethnic boundaries within and among Muslim societies.
Did he think Iranian women, diverse though they are in class, education, and ethnic identity, are really the same as Pakistani women or, for that matter, Saudi Arabian, Algerian, Afghani, or Malaysian women? How could the realities of the everyday lives of such a vast and diverse group of women, within and across the Muslim world, be viewed so uniformly and understood so unproblematically?
I asked him whether he would use such an essentialized — and meaningless at this level of generality — term when speaking, say, about Latin American women. Would he feel just as knowing and comfortable in referring to them as “Christian women”?
“No,” he said.
“Why not?” I asked.
“Because, uh...,” he said. “Well, there is something peculiar about Islam!”
Is there something peculiar about Islam? Is Islam the leveller of diversity and difference that he perceived it to be? Islam is, of course, a world religion that transcends many cultural boundaries and territorial borders. But can one begin to understand different cultures merely by looking at their shared religion? Islam is declared constitutionally to be the state religion of both Pakistan and Iran. Are there no differences between Islam as practised in Iran and Islam as practised in Pakistan? Is there all religion and no culture in Muslim societies? What is the underlying power mechanism that gives an apparently rational observer the right to claim such categorical knowledge of the “other’?
When Sajida Mokarram Shah, a woman whose story is included here, lost her young husband in a tragic car accident in 1983, she and her four young children were expected to move into her brother-in-law’s house and live under his supervision. The well-established tradition of levirate or widow inheritance among the Pathans/Pakhtun in Peshawar dictated this move. Although social custom has long endorsed levirate and legitimized it in the name of religion, Islam does condemn the custom and instructs Muslims to avoid “inheriting” widows against their will.
Educated and from an upper-middle-class background, Sajida resisted family pressure — from both her own family and her husband’s family — and adamantly refused to allow her husband’s brother to take control of her and her children. By going against the custom and asserting her autonomy, she threatened both her affinal relations and her own kin with the prospect of dishonour, although she had the explicit support of religious doctrine. Among the Pathans, whose identity is “defined explicitly in terms of marriage and control of women” and where women have “so little autonomy or control over their lives”, her behaviour was perceived as scandalous, indeed subversive. Her family, most pointedly her father, shunned her.
One may ask how it was possible for Sajida to defy cultural tradition in a society where “nothing is stronger than custom”. Conversely, if religion is the all-powerful source of the socio-moral order, how could such clear Islamic injunction be rejected in favour of social custom? Why is there so much resistance to women’s autonomy and independence? Are contestory elements built into religion that in fact can be empowering to Muslim women?
I am always taken aback when, despite my efforts to explain the “phenomenon” of hopelessly passive, veiled Muslim women, a majority of my students retain their stereotypical images and beliefs of women in the Muslim world. The sensitivity they — and many scholars — show regarding the differences of race, class, and ethnicity in their own communities does not seem to extend to their views of their Muslim sisters. The cultural and historical diversity of Muslim women’s lives and the specificity of their experiences and activities escape them, even as I — an unveiled, educated, professional woman — stand before them.
Somehow they do not seem to hear or see me as a reality different from their tenacious image of “Muslim women” as passive, victimized, and veiled, if at times sympathetic. I have wondered how analytically and politically useful this mega category of obedient “Muslim woman” is, how it was created historically, and how it has been sustained popularly for so long, so stubbornly. How is it that my students, colleagues, and many others in the larger society seem to ignore my presence and that of many other women in my situation and so resolutely hold on to images of women they have never actually met? How did I become invisible? I have puzzled over the management and dissemination of knowledge in the West and the apparent resistance to learning about the differences and similarities among and within Muslim societies and Muslim women. To understand this puzzle, I finally decided that the anomaly of educated, professional Muslim women needed to be addressed.
Popular perceptions become particularly difficult to dislodge because some Muslim states themselves — such as Saudi Arabia, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Algeria — have produced enough news to encourage images of brutalizing Islam and of victimized Muslim women abroad. These states enforce and propagate their own unitary image of “the Muslim woman”....
Muslim states are, of course, not uniform in their approach to addressing and redressing the legal, political, and social inequalities of their women citizens. These states more often than not are contested entities in the Muslim world, hardly representing a democratic and majority point of view. The harsh measures taken by the Taliban in the name of Islam in Afghanistan ironically seemed to alert the Iranian Islamic Republic to its own puritanical absolutism and to its untenable claim to the “truth” of Islam. Ayatollah Khamenei, Iran’s spiritual leader since 1989, has condemned the Taliban for their anti- and un-Islamic behaviour, in particular their attitudes toward women.
Many Muslim women undoubtedly have been victimized (as is more or less true in most societies) and veiled, a fact that should not be trivialized. But the institution of veiling, purdah (as it is known in South Asia), though dominant in Muslim societies, is neither the source of women’s victimization in the Muslim world nor exclusively a Muslim institution. The custom of sex segregation or purdah is a well-established tradition in northern India and is prevalent among both Muslims and Hindus.
But the symbolism of the veil, the motivations for wearing it, its styles and gradations — from a loosely draped scarf to a complete cover — vary tremendously within and across Muslim societies. Some women wear a veil to demonstrate religious conviction, some to be distinguished as respectable, others to remain anonymous or safe, and still others to cover their poverty. Some wear a veil out of respect for local custom, and still others are forced to do so under the threat of punishment. Veiling is also primarily an urban phenomenon, and many peasant and tribal women, though modestly dressed, do not wear a veil.
That women are veiled does not necessarily mean that they are miserable, victimized, or inactive, though of course some may very well be. This stereotype is called objectively into question by the fact that in the late twentieth century many Muslim middle-class professional women chose to veil themselves, particularly in Egypt and Malaysia.
More challenging is the presence of veiled Iranian women leaders in the Parliament, who observe veiling more and more strictly the closer they are to the foci of power. Although Iranian women have been forced to wear “Islamic veiling” in public since the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1979 — and many resent having to do so — they are participating more than ever in their own society’s political and social life.
The active presence of Iranian women in the public space is not, I must say, because of gender-friendly policies of the Islamic regime, but because of women’s own determination and sustained challenges to the regime to respect its own rhetoric and to fulfil its promises of gender parity. Gender parity is still a distant dream for Iranian Muslim women, but many of them have turned the veiling requirement into a licence to appear in public, to resume professional careers, and to demand changes in personal laws and in political and professional institutions.
Even in such situations, however, a professional woman’s choice to veil is perceived as a further confirmation of passivity of women and oppression of religion or as an anomaly and a paradox, rather than as an empowering act.
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The dearth of literature, media reports, and visual portrayals of the social and political activities of professional women from the Muslim world is a puzzle until we consider these frames of reference. Why has this category of Muslim women who are accessible and visible in their own society — and often contested because of it — remained invisible in the West? How is it that their discourse has been heard so rarely outside of their own societies? Why have middle class urban professional Muslim women failed to capture the imagination of anthropologists, the media, and the public, as their veiled sisters seem to have done so completely?
The evolving global power structure has confronted Muslim states with the daunting tasks of economic reconstruction and democracy, sovereignty and citizenship, religious revivalism and xenophobia, human rights and gender equity. Against this background, social analysis is challenged to breathe fresh perspectives into the research epistemologies of the Muslim world....
In the past one hundred years or so, the Western literature and public media have represented Islam primarily as a historical, monolithic, omnipotent, and, in that sense, “exceptional” — that is, different from other world religions. Embedded in such representation are the assumption of victimization of Muslim women and a gradual amnesia regarding the history of the diversity of women’s experiences in the Muslim world prior to the Enlightenment. In particular, women’s agency is denied, and religion is perceived to be the major if not the only cause of the oppression and victimization of Muslim women.
In this work, I try to decenter the dominant methodological and epistemological tendencies that portray the Muslim world as village or tribe and Islam as the hegemonic socio-moral order in the Muslim world. I suggest we approach religion as only partially hegemonic and in tight embrace with culture, particularly with the deeply entrenched moral code of honour, izzat, in Pakistan. Further, I suggest we should pay equal attention to the life and experiences of people like ourselves and conduct research among equals in the face of global socio-historical currents that have demanded greater similarities and uniformity in the midst of claims to national sovereignty, ethnic diversity, and plurality. From this perspective, anthropologists are challenged to renegotiate critically the nuances of similarities between the “self” and the “other”, rather than primarily to focus on the differences.
To understand the often paradoxical and ambivalent responses to social change in the Muslim world, I contend that we ought to document, demonstrate, and analyze the impact women have had on their societies, just as we have done regarding the impact of women in the Western world — for example, in work on the suffragette movement. If one were to compare the literature on Muslim women with the writing on women in the United States, it becomes clear that the women who are the subject of the latter study are for the most part middle class and educated.
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I do not intend to be an apologist for misogynous practices that continue to oppress women in the Muslim world, but I also find it problematic to single out Islam as the champion of world oppression of women. Here lies a dilemma I have had to contend with, one that I think is the source of both my personal vulnerability and my professional strength. As a “translator” of Pakistani and Iranian cultures and as a Muslim feminist anthropologist, I find myself in the unenviable position of fighting on two or more fronts simultaneously: being critical of social injustice and violence against women “back home”, while trying to cut through layers of entrenched misunderstandings, misconceptions, and stereotypes abroad.
As professional women become active players in Pakistan and in much of the Muslim world, the contestations over who has the legitimacy to define, interpret, and control the sacred text and cultural traditions have intensified. Although relatively small in numbers and diverse in their professional pursuits, these women are involved in politics, are knowledgeable about their society, and are aware of the contested discourse of religious legitimacy and political alliances nationally and of the rapidly changing configurations of gender power, and knowledge internationally.
Excerpted with permission from
No Shame for the Sun — Lives of Professional Pakistani Women
By Shahla Haeri
Oxford University Press,
Plot # 38, Sector 15, Korangi Industrial Area, Karachi
Tel: 111-693-673
Email: ouppak@theoffice.net Website:
www.oup.com.pk
ISBN 0-19-597716-5
454pp. Rs650
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