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RECENTLY, Yanar Mohammed, a pioneer for women’s rights in Iraq and the rest of the Muslim world, was standing outside her home when she was killed by armed men who sprayed her with bullets. The 66-year-old activist had returned to Iraq from Canada a few days earlier. In her long courageous career, Yanar Mohammed had advocated against ‘honour’ killings, domestic violence and religious extremism. She had established safe houses in Iraq that saved hundreds of women from exploitation and abuse. In an interview in 2022, she spoke about the continued hardships of women who had survived enslavement and abuse by IS. As she put it, at least 10,000 women were victims of IS.
I began this column on the topic of International Women’s Day (March 8) with news of this grotesque assassination because it defines the kind of woman that is hated in many Muslim countries, including Pakistan. It is no secret that advocating for women’s issues is dangerous work in these countries. Yanar Mohammed and others like herself received hundreds of death threats. This trend continues. If you are a woman speaking up for women in the Muslim world, threats issued by men appear on your Instagram, email, SMS messages, etc. The activists learn to ignore them and look at them as part of the grim consequences of opening one’s mouth in a society that does not want women to speak up.
Sometimes it results in death. Whether it is a revered feminist like Yanar Mohammad or a teenage TikTok star like Sana Yousaf, who was killed by a man at her home in Islamabad last year, women become the targets. The existence of a woman who does not recognise any man as her superior is somehow a threat too big to bear. Whether she is criticising female exploitation by terrorist groups like IS or rebuffing advances, she is seen as errant in refusing to bow to men’s will.
In many cases, Muslim women have been targeted on account of hard-line interpretations of religion. Based on these interpretations, society objected to women in the public sphere and in leadership positions. The trend thus was to use religion to insist on cultural curbs. Even those working outside the home were not spared although the very first Muslim woman Hazrat Khadija was a business woman.
Social media is replete with abuses against women.
Similar objections were made to women choosing their own marital partners or petitioning for divorce, despite the fact that there are clear religious injunctions against forced marriages and there is permission for a woman to petition for divorce. And yet, free-will marriage and divorce are both cited as examples of ‘waywardness’ in patriarchal societies. Over time, however, work by religious scholars, some of them women, have exposed the fallacy of rigid interpretations of faith. The consequence is that among educated Pakistanis these old tactics of constraining women are losing their hold.
But much hatred still exists. Instagram reels and TikTok clips are replete with abuses, jibes and various other forms of hatred against women. This year, if marches are held to celebrate International Women’s Day, social media will erupt in abuse once again — making fun of women, alleging that their actions are merely performative, cursing women who adopt the feminist label, etc. This will pour out of the mouths of even those men who believe they have ‘progressive’ views.
Of late, the distinctive thing about the vocabulary of backlash against women has been that it is almost entirely borrowed from the West. Pakistani men who spend a considerable time online have become influenced by misogyny peddled by men like Andrew Tate. This new flavour of vitriol sees women as gold diggers, stupid and generally lesser humans. Most importantly, it sees the oppression of women as essential to the supremacy of men. This new Western form of anti-feminism draws on men’s feelings of real or imagined powerlessness in a Western world where they are having to renegotiate what it means to be a man.
Even though Pakistani men do not live in a Western world where women have amassed enough economic power to be self-sufficient, they have still adopted the hate-filled commentary that men in the West have to offer. This new wave has reinforced the existing women-hating discourse in the Muslim world. So this International Women’s Day, any Pakistani woman posting anything about women’s rights, about being vocal, about the problems that Pakistani women are facing in light of global militarisation and local oppression will be subjected to hate-filled messages whose style and content are borrowed from American and European woman-haters.
All Pakistani women can do is to remember the strength of women like Yanar Mohammed who refuse to be daunted. They choose to stand in front of their homes, real or virtual, and speak the truth.
The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.
Published in Dawn, March 7th, 2026
