Moral Regulation Pakistani Women

M O R A L R E G U L AT I O N I N A P O S T C O L O N I A L N AT I O N - S TAT E Gender and the Politics of Islamization in Pakistan

Saadia Toor College of Staten Island, City University of New York, USA

................ Islamization modernity moral regulation nation-state Pakistan sexuality

This paper looks at two instances of ‘moral panic’ in the recent history of Pakistan. As women are the repositories of national culture, their moral and sexual regulation is arguably coextensive with state formation. However, in countries like Pakistan, this process cannot be understood as based on some pregiven ‘Muslimness’; rather, Islamization itself is contested terrain and not the only source of meaning, with local tribal traditions and complex class alignments equally at play. This is demonstrated in the first case that I discuss: General Zia ul-Haq’s military regime’s enactment of a series of laws in the1980s
the Zina Ordinance and the Laws of Evidence
aimed at controlling women’s sexual, social and political status. A direct consequence of these policies and their implementation was the launch of a counter-attack against the regime by urban middle-class women who formed an umbrella organization of feminist groups and individuals, deploying innovative forms of cultural protest in a situation where direct public action was severely restricted. The second example, popularly known as the ‘Saima love-marriage case’, which occurred during the democratic years of the 1990s, also reveals how contending social classes and cultural forces mediated their struggles for hegemony through the bodies of women (and men). At issue throughout the discussion is the need to reorient

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1 In their path-breaking work on culture and state formation, Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer define moral regulation as ‘a project of normalizing, rendering natural, taken for granted, in a word ‘‘obvious’’, what are in fact ontological and epistemological premises of a particular and historical form of social order. Moral regulation is coextensive with state formation, and state forms are always animated and legitimated by a particular moral ethos’ (1985: 4).

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common-sense approaches to the victim figure of Islamic fundamentalism, especially at a time when Islam has globally become the sign of illiberalism and the justification of new imperial agendas.

This paper makes a preliminary argument about the relationship between women, Islam and the Pakistani nation-state by looking at two instances of ‘moral panic’. My analysis is embedded within a framework which understands ‘moral regulation’ to be coextensive with state formation.1 I argue that the process of ‘moral regulation’ is best managed in modern (postcolonial) nation-states through discourses of nationalism and cultural authenticity, and, since women are interpellated as repositories of culture, tradition and the honour of their family, community and/or nation, control over women’s sexuality (and in some cases men’s) becomes a constitutive feature of the process of state formation. Islam is usually a key ingredient in national identity and culture where Muslim states are concerned, and this is true of Pakistan. However, this relationship is not a simple one; how and to what degree Islam features within nationalist ideologies in the Muslim world is not pre-given by the ‘Muslimness’ of the nation-state under consideration. Moreover, Islam is not the only ingredient, and it is often in the articulation between the different elements of national culture, in the interstices between Islam and local (feudal or tribal) traditions and the contradictions generated by them, that the true story lies. I pose a problematic in which nationalism and Islam feature not as monolithic superstructural ‘ideologies’ instrumentally deployed by power-holders, but as internally contested and contradictory discourses which shape subjectivities, structure social relations and legitimate forms of power (Corrigan and Sayer 1985; Foucault 1980; Gramsci 1988). What we need is historically grounded scholarship which can highlight the fact that Islam itself has always been a contested terrain. I thus strongly argue that while their specificities should not be ignored, states in the Muslim world should be approached as examples of the more general case of the postcolonial nation-state, which is, ultimately, a particular kind of modern nation-state. There is a tendency, particularly in this post-9/11 era of sanctioned Islamophobia, to understand the increasing importance of Islam in public life within Muslim societies (and among Muslims in the West) as ‘atavistic’ and/or evidence of Islam’s ‘essential’ inability to deal with ‘modernity’ (identified with ‘the West’)
when in fact it is precisely a result of the condition of modernity itself, complete with its contradictions and discontents (see, for example, Asad 1993, 1999). We have only to look at the

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2 See Abu-Lughod (1993), Kandiyoti (1991), Moghadam (1994). On nationalism and gender/sexuality, see Mosse (1985) and Parker et al. (1992). On the link between gender and nationalism within the Indian subcontinent, see Butalia (2000) and Hussain et al. (1997).

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USA today to be reminded that the resurgence of the religious right, the creation of ‘moral panic’ and the resultant focus on women’s bodies and regulation of ‘deviant’ sexualities are not the purview of ‘Third world’ or Islamic societies alone (see Asad 1993), nor can they be explained by theories of incomplete modernization. Tentative attempts at a synthetic understanding of the relationship between gender/sexuality, nationalism and the state have been initiated within postcolonial feminist scholarship, and specifically within literature on Islam and gender.2 In her introduction to one of the pioneering texts within this field, Gender, Islam and the State , Deniz Kandiyoti proposes that ‘postindependence trajectories of modern states and variations in the deployment of Islam in relation to different nationalisms, state ideologies and oppositional social movements are of central importance to an understanding of the condition of women’ (1991: 2). In fact, as I argue through this paper, the reverse is equally true: the construction and regulation of norms of gender and sexuality are crucial to processes of state formation
understood as relations of ruling
and their legitimation (Smith 1990). ‘National culture’
and the processes which underlie its production, enforcement and contestation
thus provides the conceptual link between work on gender and nationalism, and gender/women and the state. In their monumental work, Corrigan and Sayer argue that the ‘state’ is as much ‘the concentrated and organized force of society’ . . . in the cultural sense as in the economic, concerning wider forms of regulation and modes of social regulation through which capitalist relations of production and patriarchal relations of reproduction are organized. (1985: 5)

If the ‘state’ as an ‘idea’ is deconstructed and understood primarily as a claim to legitimacy then the construction, invocation and deployment of a normative ‘national culture’ can be understood more clearly as a means to secure that legitimacy (Abrams 1988). Since both ‘nationalism’ and ‘culture’ are deeply gendered discourses, the field of ‘national culture’ is a particularly treacherous one for women. In fact, postcolonial feminist work has noted how these gendered discourses have ‘precipitated . . . iconic forms of womanhood, which, in metaphorizing women as symbolic bearers of national identity, have rendered the materiality of women’s lives and bodies all the more vulnerable to forms of violence and violent exclusion’ (Banerjee et al. 2004: 126). In this paper I focus on two instances of the state’s engagement in moral regulation
in the first case, through a programme of ‘Islamization’, in particular the passage of a set of laws designed to control women’s sexuality; and in the second, through the case of a ‘runaway love marriage’. Legislation sets limits for the social imagination through the construction/imposition of

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3 Ironic, then, that Pervez Musharraf is invested in pitching himself as a progressive through his pet project of ‘enlightened moderation’.

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a normative ideal; further, and more subtly, legislation functions as a powerful discourse of control which imposes rule by interpellating subjects. Women’s bodies are central subjects of this legislation. For instance, the Zina Ordinances passed by General Zia ul-Haq in the early 1980s, which I address in detail below, had a direct impact on women, especially those of the lower classes. But they also indirectly legitimized feudal/tribal gender norms which had earlier existed in uneasy contradiction to secular constitutional law and in some cases actually contravened Islamic law. Legislation, and the juridico-legal process in general, is part of a larger project of moral regulation embodied in the discourse of ‘national culture’, which is itself a synthesis of various contradictory elements. In the case of Pakistan, matters can be further complicated by the fact that there are at least three different legal systems in effect at any given time: the Pakistan Penal Code, the Shariat, as interpreted by the Federal Shariat Court, and customary law applied by various feudal and tribal jirga s. Let me now turn to my first case
that of the military regime of General Zia ul-Haq who deposed the popularly elected Z. A. Bhutto in 1977 and stayed in power until 1988. Overwhelmingly, military regimes in postcolonial Muslim countries have tended to be agents of secularism and modernization: the earlier regime of Ayub Khan in Pakistan, and those of Gamal Abdul Nasser in Egypt and Kemal Ataturk in Turkey are some illustrative examples. Relatively speaking, they have also had the most progressive agenda vis-a`-vis women.3 Yet, General Zia’s regime was characterized by an explicitly non -secular and violently gendered agenda. The Nizam-i-Mustafa (literally, ‘social order of the Prophet’) promised by General Zia was to be ushered in through a programme of ‘Islamization’, which specifically targeted women’s already limited rights. Paradoxically, arguably the most brutal and intolerant period of Pakistani history saw the genesis of its most vibrant women’s movement. Perhaps this is not surprising, since women were the group whose interests seemed most at stake in the Islamization programme. In an atmosphere where dissent of any sort was not only not tolerated but illegal , their public and vocal resistance is remarkable. The cornerstone of the Islamization programme was returning women to the domestic sphere, captured by the slogan chaadar aur chardiwari (literally, ‘the veil and the four corners of the home’), yet women poured into the public sphere like never before
in rallies, marches and protests. Zia ul-Haq’s regime was the most explicit and sustained effort in Pakistani history to impose a hegemonic nationalist project using ‘Islam’ as the articulating principle. Although earlier regimes had also made use of Islam, Zia attempted to secure his power through the propagation of an explicitly misogynist ideology and by proclaiming a mission to revitalize society by correcting the immorality of women. In doing so he invoked a distorted

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4 For a detailed analysis of the Hudood Ordinances and the Islamization programme of Zia ul-Haq see Hussain et al. (1997) and Jahangir and Jilani (1990).

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relationship between Islam and the origins of the Pakistani nation-state, articulating a vision of a national culture based on a rigid and orthodox interpretation of Islam. Women’s groups challenging the regime were accused of having no roots in the culture of the nation
of being part of a ‘Westernized’ elite alienated from Pakistani society. I have argued elsewhere (Toor 1997) that this period in Pakistani history reflects the growing hegemony of the urban petite bourgeoisie against what it saw as a morally bankrupt national bourgeois class. It is no accident that the movement against Bhutto (an alliance between this petit-bourgeois class and the landed elite), which culminated in Zia’s coup, was couched in moral terms. The effectiveness of Zia’s discourse of Islamization is evident in its circulation at the level of the everyday or of ‘common sense’ (Gramsci 1988). The regime managed to change the terrain on which questions of cultural and social life
especially with regard to women
could be debated. As the more recent case of Saima Waheed will show, Zia’s legacy has cast a long shadow on Pakistan. As a nationalist ideology, the discourse of Islamization privileged the adult Muslim male as the ideal citizen of the Pakistani nation-state while disempowering women, limiting their public visibility and mobility as well as their legal rights (Saigol 1995). Martial law regulations were passed which banned all criticism of General Zia, his government and its policies, while censorship laws ensured compliance (Niazi 1986,1994); women were allowed to appear on the government-controlled media only when absolutely necessary and then with their heads covered at all times. Through cultural institutions, formal media policies and public statements by the general himself, the regime sought to construct a new Islamic ‘national culture’, free of obscenity and ‘Hindu’ and/or ‘Western’ elements, and of the decadence which had characterized the previous government of Z. A. Bhutto. Any alternative imaginings of nation, culture or subjecthood were thus made crimes against Islam and, by implication, the state (Toor 1997). The Islamization programme included a broad set of priorities and policies, which did not comprise an internally coherent project. But it was at its most consistent when it came to laws concerning women, which reveals the importance of the articulation of cross-class patriarchal interests to the regime’s ideological agenda. At its heart were a series of laws, such as the Zina Ordinance and the Laws of Evidence, which aimed to compromise women’s social, political and legal status.4 The Zina Ordinance was a set of ‘Islamic’ laws delineating the bounds of ‘legal’ sexual activity. Zina in Arabic means ‘illegitimate sex’, and the ordinance covered adultery, fornication and rape, making each a crime against the state. There was no provision for rape within marriage, and the law required the testimony of four adult Muslim male witnesses of ‘good moral character’ to support a

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......................... 5 My highlighting of WAF’s class basis should not be taken as a crude critique of the movement such as those
typical of critics on the right and left, in Pakistan and elsewhere
which serve to dismiss feminist struggles as the preoccupations of ‘Westernized’ and ‘bourgeois liberal’ women. But to present WAF as an undifferentiated feminist/women’s movement without mentioning the class origins of its main members would be politically irresponsible and theoretically problematic. Among other things, it would obscure any meaningful understanding of the movement’s politics, strategies and effectivity. A comprehensive look at the movement becomes imperative as WAF enters its twenty-sixth year, along with its original nemesis, the Hudood Ordinances. 6 Dance, for instance, became a highly politicized
and dangerous
act.

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charge of rape. In cases where a woman actually filed charges, the legal proviso made it impossible for her to prove rape; at the same time, her admission of illicit sexual intercourse left her open to prosecution by the state under the Zina Ordinance. Cases of the abuse of this law began to mount, with women from the lower-middle and lower classes proving most at risk. While the Zina Ordinance made women disproportionately vulnerable to reprisal by the state and
by creating a public atmosphere where women did not feel safe
by men in general, the Laws of Evidence and Compensation reduced their legal status to half that of men. Incidents of the public harassment of working women and domestic violence escalated. Thus Islamization as a strategy of control worked both at the formal level and, increasingly, at the level of signification. A group of upper-middle-class women initially in Lahore, Karachi and Islamabad came together to form the Women’s Action Forum or WAF
an umbrella organization for feminist groups and individuals which launched a concerted attack on the regime’s policies.5 Women’s groups took to the streets to protest against the regime’s discriminatory laws; they were batoncharged and arrested. Their protest and activism against a regime bent on restricting their access to the public sphere had a symbolic importance and was an extremely effective counter-hegemonic move. They also resisted the state’s attempts at interpellation through various forms of cultural production and performance.6 Poetry, in particular, came to constitute an important site of women’s dissent and the contestation of the politics of Islamization. The state’s declaration of a monopoly on the definition of ‘Islam’ created severe problems for a politics of opposition. Poets such as Fehmida Riaz and Kishwar Naheed appropriated a long tradition of political poetry in South Asia to articulate a unique vision of self and society which functioned as a sharp critique of the Pakistani state and its version of Islam. Since the manner in which they did so is best explicated through their poetry itself, I will quote at length from Riaz’s hard-hitting ‘Chaadar aur Chardiwari’: Sire! What will I do with this black chaadar? Why do you bless me with it? I am neither in mourning that I should wear it Declare my grief to the world Nor am I a Disease, that I should drown, humiliated, in its darkness Neither a sinner nor a criminal that I should set its black seal on my forehead no matter what ... Sir, be kind enough don’t give me this black chaadar

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7 See Ahmad (1990) for the Urdu original of this poem. Please note that the translations from the Urdu original are my own.

8 Because women are understood as the property of their family or kin group within patriarchal societies, a woman’s decision to choose her own marriage partner may result in retaliation against both her and the man in question. In fact, the ‘traditional’ code of honour killing requires that both of the accused
man and woman
be killed by the woman’s male kin. However, this does not apply in ‘modern’ variants.

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instead, cover with it the shroudless corpse in your chambers ... Listen to her heartrending shrieks which raise strange specters that remain naked despite their chaadars ... These are the concubines! ... They are the handmaidens ... These are the honourable wives who wait, queue upon queue to pay the dues of conjugal life ... End this spectacle now Cover it up The black chaadar has become your necessity, not mine.7 The importance of this poetry as a mode of protest is illustrated by the fact that Naheed was charged with obscenity and suspended from her government job, while Riaz was forced into exile in order to escape arrest for sedition. The same poem by Fehmida Riaz ends with the assertion of a new and confident womanhood and rejection of her interpellation by obscurantists as an always already sexed being: My existence on this earth is not a mere symbol of lust My intelligence shines brightly on the highway of life The sweat that shines on the brow of the earth is but my hard work The decaying corpse is welcome to this chaadar and these four walls My ship will move full-sailed in the open wind I am the companion of the new Adam who has won my confident friendship. While the narrator of Riaz’s poem takes for granted her new agency in choosing a companion, my next case involves a woman who was prosecuted by her own family precisely for exercising her legal right to make this choice. The ‘Saima love-marriage case’, as it came to be known, provides another lens through which to consider the struggle for hegemony between social classes in Pakistan, mediated through the bodies of women (and men).8 In February 1996, almost ten years after the mysterious death of General Zia and Pakistan’s return to democracy, 22-year-old Saima Waheed married against the wishes of her parents, leading to a contentious legal battle which

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9 This part of my essay is immeasurably indebted to Neelam Hussain’s wonderful and complex analysis of the ‘Saima case’ (1997).

10 This process of registering the marriage with the local Union Council, although legally required under the Muslim Family Law Act, is rarely followed in practice. The fact that Saima and Arshad registered their marriage shows that they were taking no chances of having it declared unlawful.

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gripped the country and generated a ‘moral panic’ around the issue of women’s status within ‘Islam’ and Pakistani society. In Neelam Hussain’s words, ‘[w]hat were the reasons that transformed a young woman, who merely exercised a legally sanctioned and fundamental right to make a marriage of her own choice, into an icon of national anxiety’? (1997: 200).9 After all, as was established without ambiguity in a precedent-setting case decided a few months before Saima’s, an adult Muslim woman in Pakistan had the religious and legal sanction to contract marriage on her own behalf, without the intercession of a wali , or legal guardian. And such ‘runaway marriages’ are hardly news in a society which is characterized by significant gender segregation and the institution of arranged marriage; they become, in effect, a means for young men and women to assert some modicum of control over their lives. Saima was not a legal minor at the time of her marriage, neither was she a stereotypical Muslim/Pakistani woman oppressed by and/or rebelling against the weight of tradition. In fact, far from being a victim of chaadar aur chardiwari , she was a graduate of one of the oldest educational institutions in Lahore, the Lahore College for Women, where she had been a member of the debating society. Although the Lahore College is a women’s college, extra-curricular activities such as intercollegiate debating competitions are not segregated events
and it was at one such event that she met her husband, Arshad Ahmad. Ahmad had a master’s degree in English and taught at a government college in a small provincial town, supplementing his income of Rs 5,000 a month (less than US$100) by giving private lessons. Saima’s pocket money alone
which she received as a director of her father’s company
was double Arshad’s monthly income. Despite the fact that this was not an arranged marriage, or perhaps because of it, the couple adhered as closely as possible to prescribed procedure; she informed her parents of her desire to marry Arshad, and his parents formally proposed marriage to her family. However, when it became clear that her family were not only rejecting the proposal but intended to marry her elsewhere, Saima took decisive action. She and Arshad married in the office of a friend of his
a lawyer
with all the required legal and religious protocol, and had the marriage duly registered with the local Union Council.10 Saima returned home immediately afterwards, probably to defuse any allegations of premarital sex by her family or anyone else, and some days later broke the news to her family, expecting that they would capitulate in the face of a fait accompli and agree to a formal public ceremony. However, despite all the careful planning and execution, she had clearly underestimated her family’s reaction; far from receiving any kind of sanction, however grudging, for her marriage, she was beaten, drugged and deprived of food for several days. She finally managed to escape and elicit the services of Asma Jahangir, a prominent women’s and human rights lawyer and a

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11 The name of Jahangir’s centre is formed from the initials of the first names of the four women lawyers that founded it.

12 The latest and most revealing example of this was, of course, General Pervez Musharraf’s remarks about Mukhtaran Mai, possibly the bestknown survivor of a gang rape ordered by a village council. A complete narrative of her case is available at Bhttp://en.wiki pedia.org/wiki/ Mukhtaran_Bibi

13 In the sense in which Raymond Williams (1981) talks of ‘emergent cultures’.

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veteran of the Zia period. Jahangir, along with her sister and other feminist lawyers, runs AGHS, a legal aid centre for women, and Saima was put up in Dastak, the women’s shelter administered by AGHS.11 Again, standard procedure was followed
her family were contacted and notified of their daughter’s whereabouts, and lines of negotiation were opened. They responded by subjecting Ahmad’s family to physical harassment and by filing an FIR (First Information Report) with the police, challenging the legality of Saima’s marriage to Ahmad. The subsequent legal and public debates that developed around the ‘Saima case’ deployed predictable stereotypes of the ‘good’ (obedient) and ‘bad’ (agentic) woman. As Hussain succinctly puts it, ‘[t]he asexual, obedient woman, viewed through the lens of ideologically classed and gendered notions of appropriate behavior, was vociferously upheld as a central marker of morality, decency, shame and national, specifically Muslim identity’ (1997: 202). Against this, Saima’s exercise of a right granted to her by both secular and religious law was understood and projected as quintessentially transgressive and hence shameful both at the familial and national level. This act of moral depravity on her part was connected to the ‘loss of cultural purity caused by the combined influences of neo-imperial designs and the treachery of their local collaborators’, the latter, of course, being an open reference to feminist activists in general and her lawyer, Asma Jahangir, in particular (ibid.). Asma Jahangir has, over the years, become the beˆte noire of conservative forces in Pakistan due to her uncompromising dedication to human rights. Not surprisingly, she is often accused of ‘destroying’ Pakistan’s reputation abroad (as well as encouraging young Pakistani women to turn against their familial duties and thus leading them to ruin). This, of course, is the flip side of the construction of women as the repositories of tradition and culture within patriarchal systems: active and articulate (i.e., agentic) women cannot but become liabilities for the patriarchal kin systems within which they are embedded
whether the kin system in question is the immediate family, the tribe or the nation. Thus it is not surprising that such women in Pakistan
and there are many
are always interpellated within public discourse as threats to ‘national reputation’ and ‘national honour’, and their transgression in some way mapped onto the unwelcome and undue influence within Pakistani society of the ‘upper-class woman’, understood as ‘Westernized’ and therefore morally degenerate.12 The ‘moral panic’ generated by the ‘Saima love-marriage case’ thus provides us with an interesting lens into the anxieties of class and the contradictions of ‘emergent patriarchies’ in contemporary Pakistani society.13 As I state above, when it came to the legality of the marriage, Saima’s case was fairly straightforward and easily resolved by recourse to legal precedence alone. And in fact, the Lahore High Court did validate her

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14 I say purportedly, of course, because in several key respects the judgments and public discourse ran contrary to established Shariah law on the issue.

15 All of this has, of course, become even more complex in the aftermath of the September 2001 World Trade Center attack and the Islamophobic ‘war on terror’. As has always been the case throughout Pakistani history, the government’s official position as an ally of the USA runs contrary to the feelings of ordinary Pakistanis.

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marriage on legal grounds, albeit through a split verdict. The most interesting aspect of the case, however, lies in the actual judgments of the three judges, which expose the complexities of patriarchy within Pakistani society and the extent to which the law itself is a contested space. The case was argued, and ultimately judged, not within the terms of existing Muslim family laws in the Pakistan Penal Code or the Shariat
both of which are unambiguous in their understanding of the rights of adult Muslim women with regard to marriage
but on the undesirability of filial disobedience, to the extent that the judgments of both Justice Chaudhry and Justice Ramday, while diametrically opposed in the end, expressed the desirability of making parental authority judicially enforceable. Although both judgments talk of this obedience in general terms
the rights of parents with regard to their children
it is clear, given the context of the case, that the anxiety they express is not a generalized one but a very specific gendered anxiety over female (sexual) agency. Given that the issue at stake was whether or not the marriage of an adult Muslim woman required the consent of her wali , it was intrinsically gendered in so far as it brought into question the limits of her sui juris status. A materialist feminist analysis of the case shows the development of a specifically moral discourse which strategically deployed notions of the licit and illicit as a means of establishing and perpetuating a masculinist (purportedly Muslim) social order.14 The discourse abounds in the familiar postcolonial binaries of East/West, tradition/modernity, public/private, sacred/profane. These need to be understood, first, in the context of Pakistan’s colonial history and its contemporary postcolonial condition (that of a people struggling to forge an identity in a society undergoing rapid social and economic change); and second, vis-a`-vis the power strategies of the socially ascendant fundamentalist classes engaged in a Gramscian struggle for hegemony within Pakistan, forging alliances with the older elite while at the same time seeking to displace them.15 Class struggle is always already a gendered process, both discursively and materially
a fact not often noted in either Marxist or feminist writing. The attempt of one rising class or class faction to replace another is simultaneously about the clash between different and competing patriarchies or patriarchal arrangements. This class context also highlights the status of women within kin networks, where they function as commodities to be exchanged, and the role of marriage in consolidating class power (see Rubin 1975). Hence the idea that marriage is too important to be left to the men and women concerned. These, then, are the factors which turned an ordinary ‘rich girl, poor boy’ love story into a battleground for the consolidation of class and patriarchal power. This battle for hegemony was mediated through the interlocking and mutually constitutive discourses of Islam and nationalism, which are themselves, first and foremost, projects of ‘moral regulation’ that strategi-

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16 The ‘Saima case’ also showed how state apparatuses, social institutions and the community colluded in maintaining both legal and social control over women’s sexuality
from the discursive construction of her legal and religious right as an inexcusable transgression on her part, to police harassment of Arshad’s family, to their refusal to take action against a member of the Ropri family found with a Mauser inside the courtroom, and so on. For details, see Hussain (1997). See also the Human Rights Watch World Report 1998 (section on Pakistan): Bhttp: //www.hrw.org/ worldreport/Asia09.htm.

17 Asma Jahangir and her sister Hina Jilani have both been the subject of death threats from various reactionary quarters
representing interests both religious and feudal/ tribal. The depth and intensity of their hatred of Asma in particular became explicit in the aftermath of the murder of Samia Sarwar, one of their

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cally deploy normative ideas of gender and sexuality. Saima’s family were part of the new moneyed elite which had risen to power under Zia ul-Haq in the late 1970s.16 The Ropris were ‘an influential family with strong connections in the ‘‘right’’ places
the administration, judiciary, army and the establishment’ (Beena Sarwar, cited in Hussain 1997: 216). They belonged to a highly conservative Sunni sect of which her father and uncle were prominent leaders. Thus the decision by a daughter of the house to publicly violate the norms of this new, upwardly mobile orthodoxy was no laughing matter. The fact that she elicited the support of Asma Jahangir and chose to live in the women’s shelter run by her law firm was to add insult to injury.17 If her family’s reaction to her wedding had not forced Saima to engage legal council, and the council in question had been anyone but Asma Jahangir, her case would probably not have entered the public sphere. She would not have been turned into a symbol of courageous resistance for some, and unforgivable treachery and a threat to social order for others. It is significant that the actions of Saima’s family were not just aimed at what they obviously saw as an ‘encroachment’ (on their property) by a member of a lower class; they were aimed at the immoral (because ‘Western’) feminist as represented by Asma Jahangir. After all, it must be remembered that the case was one of alleged abduction brought by Saima’s father against Jahangir and not, for example, Arshad or his family. This fear of emasculation by the ‘uppity’ and depraved woman is therefore also a class anxiety; in their struggle for hegemony, the upwardly mobile class represented by the Ropris sees Jahangir as a representative of the ‘Westernized’ and ‘morally bankrupt’ bourgeois class. The public discourse around the ‘Saima case’ illuminated once again the ways in which gender and patriarchy complicate class analysis. Thus the lines that were drawn with respect to the case did not fit the binary of ‘liberal’ versus ‘conservative’ (or even ‘fundamentalist’); even socially progressive individuals who supported Saima’s actions on principle were heard expressing insecurity about the precedent it set for their own daughters. The case is thus a fascinating lens through which to view the field of struggle between different patriarchies, highlighting as it does the very Gramscian way in which these sometimes contradict and sometimes reinforce one another. In fact, if anything, this case illustrates the premium placed on controlling female sexuality across class lines. In its breach of the public
private divide, the ‘Saima case’ revealed how, in fact, ‘the public’ and ‘the private’ are themselves discursive constructions which enable and organize patriarchal ‘relations of ruling’. An adult (Muslim, Pakistani) woman’s legally and religiously sanctioned right to marry a man of her own choice turned from a ‘family’ affair (usually consigned to the sphere of the private and held to be beyond public, specifically state , surveillance) into a contentious public issue. The extent to

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......................... clients, by her family members in Hina’s office at AGHS. Samia’s parents and uncle subsequently absconded to Peshawar. Not only were they not arrested or charged by the state, but they registered a counterFIR (First Information Report) against Asma and Hina, claiming that they were responsible for their daughter’s murder by leading her astray (Samia had been in the process of filing for a divorce from her husband against her family’s wishes). Several members of the National Assembly condemned the two sisters in explicitly misogynist and violent terms, while defending ‘honour killings’ as an important aspect of Pakistani culture and ‘Islam’. See, for example, ‘Honour killings: human rights defenders face death threats while killers walk free’, Bhttp://www.hri.ca/ tribune/view Article.asp?ID 2455. See also Hussain (2006).

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which the nation is ‘imagined’ and organized as a kin group (complete with the state as paterfamilias ) became abundantly clear through the ways in which the public debate over this case was constructed around Pakistani nationalism. An analysis of the public discourse around the case also reveals the ways in which specific signs and symbols organize people’s thinking and enable private interests to acquire a public significance. Marriage was rearticulated as a social and not a civil contract, in contravention of Islamic law. Conjugality and hence licit sex could only be that which was sanctioned by paternal consent in the figure of the wali ; thus the act of marriage without and in contravention of this consent was configured as effectively (if not legally) illicit , even if sanctioned by Islamic law. The phrase ‘lover-husband’, coined by the media when referring to Arshad, neatly captures this paradox. Saima’s case also offers a fascinating glimpse into the habitus of her particular class and its relationship to an increasingly global capitalist modernity. Saima’s father was not just aware of her presence at nonsegregated intercollegiate events (despite the gender segregation that was the norm within the family); by all accounts he took intense pride in her achievements. She owned a car and a mobile phone
both symbols of mobility and autonomy, as well as wealth and social status. Daughters of the Ropri family were not denied access to other accoutrements of wealth, such as swimming and riding, both activities associated with the Westernized upper classes. Their dress code was also unconventional: they wore jeans and T-shirts at home and even when outside, under the hijab . Thus the ‘fundamentalist’ (if there is such a monolithic figure) does not unequivocally despise the West or ‘modernity’ in the form of commodities, cultural and other. But all these accoutrements were given to Saima to enhance her father’s social status, in particular by making her a more desirable commodity on the marriage market which her father could expect to deploy to his strategic advantage, given that marriages in Pakistan (as elsewhere) are still very much about cementing relations between men . The minute she challenged his authority, these markers of privilege were summarily taken away, as was her mobility. Saima, on the other hand, understood her education as a means of asserting her independence. In an interview she said: I am not a goat or sheep to be sold off to the highest bidder, and if they didn’t marry me to Arshad, I would marry him anyway . . . I had decided to leave home long before I met Arshad, and just wanted to finish my education so that I could be able to support myself. I didn’t like the way our women are treated and I didn’t want to be like them. (cited in Hussain 1997: 221)

The fact that her father exposed his daughters to the accoutrements associated with Westernized modernity and the ‘depraved’ upper classes as

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18 Justice Chaudhry in his judgment presented such cases of ‘runaway marriages’ as the literal manifestation of the clash of civilizations within Muslim societies, darkly hinting at the dastardly role played by ‘certain’ Muslims who represented ‘vested interests from the west’. See Hussain (1997: 226) for a fuller analysis.

19 On contradictory ideas of female sexuality in Islam, see, among others, Sabbah (1984).

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a means to secure social status highlights the relationship between desire, class and patriarchal interests, especially as mediated by the processes of economic and cultural globalization. Saima’s own articulation of her position can thus perhaps be seen as a neat if ironic illustration of the notion of ‘unintended consequences’! Let us now turn to the actual judgments of the three presiding judges. The case was structured around the master binary of ‘the East’ (specifically the Muslim social order) as a sanctum of family values, versus ‘the West’ as the locus of immorality and the disintegration of the family, when in fact it actually reflected a contradiction between legal Islamic provisions and mainstream cultural values which have little to do with Islam.18 The prosecuting council focused on the importance of protecting male parental rights and the sanctity of the family, while the defence council highlighted the rights of the individual and foregrounded the sanctioned masculinized violence within the family. The anxiety over female sexuality is obvious
both Justice Chaudhry and Justice Ramday referred to Islam as a ‘natural’ religion and to the ‘nature’ of women which requires that their sexuality be controlled.19 Even the shortest judgment
that of Justice Qayyum
which declared that Saima’s marriage was legally valid, conceded its validity only after expressing a shared disapproval of such practices in principle. Thus he finds for the defendant despite ‘sharing the anxiety of my learned brother that Islamic norms of our society and the sanity [sic ] which Islam attaches to a family must be protected and safeguarded’ and agreeing that it was ‘[t]rue enough that runaway marriages are abhorrent and against the norms of our society and must, therefore, be deplored’ (Pakistan Law Digest 1997 : 352). Justice Chaudhry opened his dissenting judgment by invoking institutional authority: ‘We are national judges and as such custodians of the morals of the citizens’ (ibid.: 341). Far from being an independent or balanced narrative, his judgment rehearsed the sequence of events from the perspective of the petitioner, Saima’s father. Thus, among other things, he stated that Saima was ‘allegedly’ abducted by Asma Jahangir and detained at the women’s shelter run by her law firm (ibid.: 313). The substitution of ‘abduction’ for a voluntary act deprives Saima of agency while simultaneously and paradoxically criminalizing her actions (despite the ambiguity hinted at by the word ‘allegedly’) simply for being counter to her family’s wishes. And let us not forget the irony of a petition of abduction brought against the legal counsel she had engaged, namely Jahangir. This was an obvious attempt at the discursive elision of the one unambiguous fact in the case: technically Saima had been perfectly within her rights under Islamic law and the Pakistan Penal Code. This fact was expressed in Justice Qayyum’s judgment where, despite sharing his learned colleague’s deep disapproval of ‘runaway marriages’, he finds that the ‘sole question which arises for determination is as to whether a Muslim adult girl

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can marry without consent of her Wali’ and that his ‘answer to the above question has to be in the affirmative’ given that ‘I have despite my best efforts not been able to discover any principle on the basis of which it can be held that Nikah of sui juris Muslim girl without consent of her Wali should be invalid’ (ibid.: 352; emphasis added). The contradiction between clear injunctions of the law which recognize the sui juris status of an adult Muslim woman, and the ‘moral imperatives’ which require that the agency granted by this status be undermined, leads these ‘national judges’ into treacherous territory. Thus, Justice Chaudhry declared in his judgment that in Islam marriage is a social and not a civil contract; the commonly held idea that it is a civil contract was in fact a misapprehension which could be traced back to the period of British colonialism. In fact, rehearsing the words of the counsel for the prosecution, Justice Chaudhry declared that, far from being a civil contract, marriage in Islam was in fact a form of ibadat (worship).20 Brushing aside the arguments of the defence, which pointed out the contradiction inherent in considering women to be sui juris on attaining the age of majority when it came to ownership and control of property but not when it came to the question of marriage, Justice Chaudhry declared that Islam is a natural religion and the unmarried girls are deemed to be under the protection of Wali in the matters of Nikah for the reason that all possible conceivable modes, which may result in Nikah by the female herself, are against decency and against accepted norms of Islamic Society. (ibid.: 317).

Moreover, [t]he runaway marriages offend all norms of Muslim society beginning to end. The proposition would become clear from answer to the question how a girl would arrange her own marriage? There cannot be any other mode but of freely mixing with males and then selecting one of them as future husband. This . . . is not permitted rather than even encouraged by any Fiqa or school of thought because it is against basic teachings of Islam that the people from both sexes should not have free access to each other [sic ]. In other words the beginning is not commendable. (ibid.: 316)

Thus, regardless of what the law (and this is Muslim family law, by the way) says about a woman’s sui juris status, the latter could not be conceded when it came to marriage because this would imply that she had unmediated access to Muslim men who were not related to her
a situation that was simply unacceptable, not by law but by the ‘accepted norms of Islamic Society’. The defence’s ‘justification . . . is too superficial, ignore [sic] norms of Muslim Society and nature of women’ (ibid.: 317). Even where Islamic law is clear on women’s rights, these can be undermined or rejected altogether when they

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become inconvenient or make people uncomfortable, by citing ‘accepted norms’ and the ‘nature of women’. On marriage itself Chaudhry declared: ‘The universally accepted principle is that it should be made known and announced . . . On the other hand, runaway marriage is always kept secret (ibid.). As a social contract, the judgment argued, a marriage is not valid in Islam unless it is publicly announced, so a runaway marriage, by its very nature secret, is necessarily invalid. The judgment concluded that, given the importance of the family in society, parents have a judicially enforceable right to be obeyed. At the very least, this judgment links private and public patriarchies by asserting the role of the state in loco parentis , even when this means that the state is effectively subverting rights which it has itself guaranteed. Justice Chaudhry’s judgment began by addressing ‘the importance of the family in human life’. Drawing variously on texts as disparate as a handbook of sociology, Will Durant’s Age of Faith , an encyclopedia of religion and ethics, and Reader’s Digest , he put forward the argument that the family was the fundamental unit of society, and ‘Islam being religion of nature and covering all human activity from cradle to grave, has taken special care of the integrity, upkeep and preservation of the family’. Marriage, in turn, was a crucial part of the family and was about not simply the union of two individuals but that of two families (ibid.: 326). As such, then, decisions about such an important aspect of social life could hardly be left to the two individuals concerned, and certainly not to the woman: The parents are responsible for marriage of the children generally and girls particularly. The learned counsel for the petitioner correctly referred to Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics by James Hastings to argue that this is not only in Islam but recognized by all religions. (ibid.)

In both Justice Chaudhry’s and Justice Ramday’s judgment, the West features as a self-consolidating Other, its current moral bankruptcy making its history the ultimate cautionary tale. For example, when questioned as to how this moral decline had come about, Mr Khalid Ishaque, one of the advocates for the respondents , stated (according to the text of Justice Chaudhry’s judgment) that it was ‘on account of legislation against divine law’ and that ‘if the marriage breaks the spouses shall share the assets equally’. This had happened ‘of course . . . on the agitation of women ’ and the result was that ‘now men and women are living without marriage bond in order to save property’ (ibid.: 327; emphasis added). It is interesting to note how important it is for Chaudhry to argue that the incorporation of women’s rights actually led to the destruction of Western society. Of course, this is not far removed from the arguments put forth by conservatives within the US itself, a fact reflected in Justice Chaudhry’s reference to an article in a

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recent issue of Reader’s Digest , that platform of conservative family values in a sea of immorality: ‘Doing drugs, abusing alcohol, stealing, getting a young woman pregnant out of wedlock
today, none of these behaviours is the deep embarrassment it should be’, the writer had predictably bemoaned. ‘Many of these children will grow up without the security and guidance of a caring father and mother committed to each other. Once the social ties and mutual obligation of the family disintegrate, communities fall apart’ (ibid.). Even Hilary Clinton’s ‘it needs a village’ speech was approvingly quoted to show that the immoral West itself realized the importance of the family and the community: According to Mr Muhammad Akram Sheikh, Advocate, who heard the speech himself, the response of this touching speech was very positive and for one moment it appeared that the ‘evil empire’ of United States of America is within reach of its lost paradise. Although it has become [sic] sole power but is feeling hollow and deficient because of [sic] collapse of family nucleus . (ibid.; emphasis added)

Moreover, the lesson to be learnt from the moral decline of the West was that the fault lay in the very sort of social change (read: secularism) ‘which is being thrusted [sic] upon Pakistan society in somewhat similar fashion, which is seen to prefaces [sic ] the subsequent explosion of family unit in other societies in west’ (ibid.). Secularism, as embodied in laws passed in response to the demand of the women’s movement, leads to agentic women, which leads to immorality (specifically, fornication and illegitimacy), which destroys ‘the family unit’ and therefore, ultimately, the entire society. Justice Chaudhry was having none of that. He unconditionally dismissed Dr Tanzil-ur-Rehman’s Code of Islamic Law
an authoritative source of Muslim law written by a Muslim modernist
which the defence had referred to in arguing for a Muslim woman’s sui juris status: Suffice it to record here that learned author debated the point without keeping in mind startling results. It was lost sight of the fact that it would lead to a society free from all social and moral values . . . The Muslims did not strive in the past, they are making efforts today and they would never endeavour for such a society in future. The views of the learned author also lost sight of the sufferings of west by following the theory of equality and sui juris. (ibid.: 340)

The very idea of ‘equality and sui juris’ was thus the Trojan Horse which brought down the West and against which Muslims must forever remain vigilant. Given the fundamental importance of the family for society as a whole, and the dangers of letting men and women (but particularly women) make

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independent decisions about something as crucial as their own marriage, Justice Chaudhry felt it necessary to remind parents of their duty to marry the children particularly girls at the earliest point of time. They should not afford opportunity to outsiders in the house or outside to come across the young girls may be visitors, servants, drivers of public conveyance. It is absolutely essential to preserve the purity of the homes and this is why much emphasis has been laid by the Islam that females should not mix up with males . (ibid.: 343; emphasis added)

Chaudhry also declared filial disobedience ‘a major sin’, stating that ‘obedience should and can be enforced by courts’ (ibid.: 345
51). This conclusion creates a theoretical situation in which individuals can never attain majority
at least, not until the death of their parents! Justice Chaudhry does not appear to limit the enforcement of filial obedience to any particular kind of action, or to a specific gender, but it is difficult to imagine a consensus around the idea that adult Muslim men must be beholden to their parents’ wishes in all spheres of their lives. Given his ruminations on the family and marriage, it is clear that in effect the idea is to prevent women from exercising agency, particularly in matters relating to choice of marriage partner. The third and deciding judgment
that of Justice Ramday
was the most interesting and also potentially the most dangerous in its implications for women. Despite ultimately conceding the validity of Saima’s marriage to Arshad, it placed such marriages on the margins of the licit. Through this text, ‘all women became the ground on which notions of Muslim society, masculinity and the family were argued, sexual difference essentialised and new areas of female sexuality criminalised’ (Hussain 1997: 233). Much like the second judgment (Justice Qayyum’s), it set up a moral discourse and, instead of focusing on the details of the case at hand, universalized the issue in a way that revealed the intense anxieties at work. Referring to judgments in other cases presided on by Justices Chaudhry and Qayyum, Justice Ramday notes that in all those cases, each young, unmarried girl had managed to establish contact with a man; this contact then developed into a secret liaison and this secret affair then allegedly culminated into a secret marriage; each girl disappeared from her parental home; apprehending worst of consequences, the family in each case commenced a frantic search for their daughter/sister to ultimately find out, after weeks in some cases and after months in others, that their dear-one has contracted an alleged marriage. (Pakistan Law Digest 1997: 353; emphasis added)

The narrative technique at work here effectively builds up tension through a story of intrigue and the ultimate betrayal of the patriarchal family by the

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transgressive, emasculating woman. The narrative is designed to generate ‘moral panic’ by interpellating all parents as the (potential or actual) victims of their daughters’ (actual or potential) ‘dishonourable actions’. Within the text of this judgment, Islam’s superiority in having recognized women as independent legal entities long before the West is asserted at the same time (and often within the same breath) as the condemnation of Saima for having taken advantage of precisely this recognition: the concept of a young girl or a boy for that matter, venturing out in search of a spouse is alien to the teachings of ISLAM and even otherwise this scheme of HUSBAND-SHOPPING which obviously involves testing and trial of the desired material is fraught and pregnant with dangers and cannot be viewed with favour. (ibid.: 381)

The phrase ‘husband-shopping’ alone reveals the anxiety generated by the inversion of normative relations of power within the marriage market, such that the men become the commodities that women ‘shop’ for. The desired norm, as articulated by Justice Ramday’s judgment, is that family members, ‘males or females’
after being given the required specifications by the ‘boy’ or ‘girl’ in question
‘do the search and even research and then let whatever is available be put before the boy or girl, as the case may be, who should then have the final choice in the matter’ (ibid.). The judgment recognizes a possible conflict between the desires of the partners of the marriage contract and those of the parents where it states that ‘consent of man and woman is an indispensable condition and wali has no right to grant such a consent on behalf of the woman without her approval’, and also that ‘it is not possible for me to hold that the parents or the family could have a right to force someone to marry a particular individual’. Yet, since ‘ISLAM abhors establishment of liaison between men and women and courtships, pre-marital relationships, secret friendships and secret marriages are forbidden in ISLAM’, and ‘the parents and family have a definite importance and place in the social set-up ordained by ALLAH’ and therefore ‘a right to be consulted and their wishes . . . entitled to respect’ (ibid.). The judgment also proposed legislation which would make ‘courtships, secret friendships and secret marriages . . . a penal offence’! Bear in mind that this was a judgment that ultimately validated the marriage, albeit grudgingly. Justice Ramday also devoted a large part of his judgment to a discussion of the ‘DIVINE division of labor’ between the sexes which, far from consigning women to a position of inferiority, actually ensured their equal participation in society by taking into account their nature, and that of men. According to this, it was perfectly natural for women to be enticed by the supposed attraction of the outside world in contrast to their divinely ordained role:

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Curiosity and rebellion is inherent in every human being which is exemplified by the eating of the forbidden fruit. And it is also ingrained in the nature of the mortals that to him or her, grass on the other side of the fence always looks greener. Therefore I am not surprised to find females craving to be left outdoors to become professionals and the men yearning for opportunities to be able to stay at home. (ibid.: 363)

Leaving aside the issue of how many men can be found yearning to be consigned to what is in effect the chaadar aur chardiwari , Justice Ramday ‘understood’ that women and men had these ‘urges’ but claimed that, unfortunately for them, God knew his creatures better and had ordained that they could not be fulfilled
mostly because He also understood that one of the strongest of them was sex: ‘The Creator knew that if the human beings were to be left unchecked and unguided in the manner of sex then the same would lead to disasterous [sic ] results’ (ibid.). After all, everyone was aware of ‘[t]he unfortunate and the unpleasant consequences faced today by the more permissive societies’
‘those societies which could not maintain a proper balance between the extent of the individual’s freedom and the limits to which the individual’s rights extended’ (ibid.: 365, 370). The result was ‘legalisation of carnal intercourse against the order of nature; the so-called marriages between brothers and sisters, unmarried ‘‘wives’’; unmarried ‘‘husbands’’; unwed mothers and parentless children’. Ramday goes on: ‘If this is freedom then I am afraid that this is only a freedom from all civilised norms of society and a freedom to take human beings back into the animal world’ (ibid.). Note, again, the seamless connection between the acknowledgment of individual (read: women’s) rights and complete descent into moral and social decay. Saima and Arshad’s decision to marry without the consent of Saima’s parents
and Asma Jahangir’s defence of their action on the basis of Saima’s sui juris status
is thus equated with blind worship of a morally bankrupt West (itself regretting its loss of a moral compass) which could only lead to the destruction of Pakistani society: ‘Does it behove a person when he is grown-up’, says Ramday, ‘to say that since he or she had become SUI JURIS, therefore she or he did not need to listen to his or her parents any more or even to consult them in any matter concerning him, or her?’ (ibid.: 374). Ramday ultimately ruled in favour of the marriage, not on the basis of the principle that it was Saima’s inalienable right under Islam and the law but because ‘invalidating a marriage entails rather serious and even penal consequences’ (ibid.: 380). Yet Saima and Arshad were forced into hiding out of fear of reprisal from her family as well as threats from religious groups that disagreed with the decision. The judgments in the ‘Saima love-marriage case’ highlight the level of anxiety
to the point of national crisis
produced by female agency (which

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21 ‘Islamization’ and the attempt to institute Islamic law included half-hearted efforts in other spheres such as ‘interest-free banking’, but these were never institutionalized or implemented with the same enthusiasm and consensus as the laws pertaining to women.

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is understood as related to women’s increasing access to the public sphere and ‘free’ movement beyond the sanctity of the home). In this context, acknowledging women’s sui juris status becomes tantamount to granting them complete sexual licence, a possibility which cannot be tolerated even at the theoretical level due to its destructive effect on the social fabric of the nation and of the larger Islamic umma . This threat must be controlled through a collusion of public and private patriarchies
hence the argument about the ‘DIVINE division of labour’ which required a return of women to the protection of the chaadar aur chardiwari and the plea to make filial obedience judicially enforceable. It is crucial to note the deep consensus that underlies the very different judgments over the reprehensibility of ‘love marriages’, and the striking similarities between the contradictory judgments of Justice Chaudhry and Justice Ramday on the questions of women’s rights and status, filial obedience, and the West. The obsessive (and almost comical) references to the moral decline of the West and the reasons for it show how important the West is to the project of moral regulation for the Pakistani nation-state. In a society defined by a history of disenfranchisement of the people by dictatorial regimes (with the support of the US) and a democracy under siege by the pressures of a corrupt ruling class, a heavy debt burden, and predatory and conspicuous consumption/consumerism, cultural identity becomes a contentious issue and (as is invariably the case regardless of the kind of state/ society under question) women’s bodies become sites for cultural politics and the class struggles they embody. The regulation of women and their sexuality becomes the key hegemonic move through which consent across social classes can be secured.21 The openly Islamophobic nature of Bush regime’s ‘war on terror’ and Pakistan’s position as a frontline state in this war has made matters worse by, among other things, increasing the popularity of religious parties. In fact, in the 2002 elections, a coalition of religious parties was elected by popular vote
something which had never before happened in Pakistani history. This has allowed for even more space for religious groups to flex their muscles, and violence against women
particularly in the form of ‘crimes of honour’
is on the rise. At the same time, pressure from the international human rights community has resulted in a national level debate over the Hudood Ordinances which is, not surprisingly, pitched in terms of the essential role of Islam within Pakistani culture. In this essay I have deployed two interlocking interpretations of ‘culture’
as the broad ‘informing spirit’ of a people from a religious, national or ideal perspective, and the ‘active cultivation of the mind’ that involves the arts and expression of the intellect (Williams 1981). Both are part of what Gramsci calls the ‘space of the complex superstructures’ where hegemony is constructed and contested. Women’s poetry, Islamist discourse and feminist activism (whether emanating from the state or civil society) can thus be

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understood as constituent elements in the struggle for hegemony between a petit-bourgeois fundamentalist orthodoxy and progressive-democratic forces in Pakistan. The link to state formation is complete when we understand the role played by the state in moral regulation, and the resistance to this regulatory framework articulated by women through cultural production as well as individual acts of agency, such as Saima’s.

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