Sherry Rehman, politician
“Women today have more to fear than even in Zia’s time.”
Sara Javeed, Consultant
“When I drive, I don’t smoke now. I don’t want people accosting me.”
Rehana Hakim, Editor, Newsline
“It’s open season on the women of Pakistan.”
Moneezae Jehangir, TV journalist
“There’s a feeling of discomfort...Pakistani women are vulnerable.”
Rabab, Model
“Earlier, we had lots of shows in Oct-Dec. There’s less work now.”
Just the other day Tahera Abdullah was driving
down the spiffy Margalla Road in Islamabad, the
windows rolled down to enjoy the evening breeze.
A development worker, her silvery hair could tell
anyone she’s 50 plus. Tahera stopped at the
traffic signal; an eight-year-old boy accosted
her: didn’t she know Islam required her to cover
her head? Tahera immediately rolled up the
window. "How do you argue with an
eight-year-old?" she asks. But the encounter with
Pakistan’s religious extremism, at once
frightening and puerile, has prompted Tahera to
choose sweating inside the car over letting in
the breeze. "We women are feeling more threatened
today," she says.
The streets of Islamabad are menacing women,
compelling them to be what they are not, what
they have never been. Consultant Sara Javeed
realised this when she lit a cigarette in her car
recently. "I quickly stubbed it. I don’t want
strangers asking me why I’m smoking. This is the
new me," she says dolefully. Sara feels the
emerging extremism could Talibanise Pakistan. "I
don’t want to live in such a state," she declares.
You can hear the winds of extremism whistle
eerily even in Parliament. This week, Pakistan
People’s Party (PPP) leader Sherry Rehman, as
progressive as she’s glamorous, wrote to the
speaker of the lower house asking him to stop her
monthly stipend as she wasn’t anyway being
allowed to speak on vital issues. "I’d never want
to wait for anything to happen to me personally
before I stood up to speak for women who are
today in a far more dangerous situation than even
during Zia-ul Haq’s times," she says.
Sherry should know, she has experienced the
destructive passion of the country’s religiosity.
Two months ago, she was in a truck leading a PPP
procession. An assailant stabbed her in the neck
with a sharp object, to express his anger against
women in politics. "The person who attacked me
hasn’t been apprehended yet,“she said.”We are
in a state of anarchy today. It’s a dangerous
retreat of the state. There’s simply no check on
the vice and virtue vigilantes."
The shadow of vigilante groups comprising
madrassa students lurks in streets, in bazaars,
on university campuses, even in public transport.
They may be invisible, but you know they are
watching you. Hajra Ahmed runs the capital’s
popular English-medium school, Khalidunia. She
now never goes out in sleeveless clothes; even
then she takes care to wrap the dupatta around
her shoulders. "I live on the university campus
where it’s now rare to see a normal woman as all
of them have taken to wearing the hijab.
Ironically, it’s becoming more and more
conservative on the campus."
The progressives haven’t become renegades
overnight. They are simply scared, certain the
state won’t protect them from the ’weirdos’.
I talked to several women for this story. They
spoke angrily, mournfully. Yet some didn’t want
to be photographed, a few didn’t wish to be
named, others refused to disclose where they
work. Truly, it’s just not the time to be a
liberal woman in Pakistan.
The eddies of conservatism have always been
present in the federally administered tribal
areas (FATA). It gathered momentum when the
Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal, an umbrella group of
religious parties, was swept to power in the NWFP
and Balochistan. Conservatism has now turned into
a storm that is sweeping through the cities,
sucking into its swirl even the capital city.
Popular columnist Dr Farrukh Saleem recently
quoted Taliban commanders to paint a grim
picture: 61 female teachers killed and 183 girls
schools bombed this year in NWFP.
Initially, nobody bothered, not even the radical
chic, as long as the storm only rumbled in the
outbacks bordering Afghanistan. It was
inevitable: what else can you expect in areas
peopled by Taliban sympathisers! In February this
year, the storm reached a hundred miles from
Islamabad: a girls school in Kohat was bombed. On
February 4, a notice was pasted outside a high
school in Dara Adamkhel: "We have decided to bomb
the school building. If a student shows up and
dies as a result, she will be responsible for her
own death." Three hundred of the 500 girl
students dropped out. On February 23, the
extremists managed to shut down a clutch of
English-medium schools in Peshawar.
The storm hit Islamabad early March, through a
showdown between the government and the students
of Jamia Hafsa, a seminary attached to the Lal
Masjid that had been earmarked, along with a
dozen others, for demolition. Burqa-clad girls
took over a public library, compelling the
government to retract its decision. Emboldened,
they raided a house claiming it was a brothel;
music and TV shops were stormed; a Shariah court
established; the clerics of the Lal Masjid issued
edicts on the Islamic way of living.
Islamabad cringed.
But the deadliest shards of conservatism have
been reserved for women. As Dr Saleem wrote, "Men
needn’t worry. It’s all about women. It’s all
about crushing the already ’battered half’...it’s
all about keeping them illiterate." To make them,
as he argued, Pakistani men’s idiots. He added,
"The Pakistan army needn’t worry either. When was
the last time you saw a general in a burqa?"
The burqa became a symbol of the military-mullah
alliance in Lahore last week when the popular
play Burqavaganza, a production of Ajoka Theatre,
was banned. Why? Because the play had displeased
the MMA. Ajoka’s Madeeha Gauhar is livid: "The
banning of Burqavaganza exposes the facade of
Musharraf’s enlightened moderation." Theatre
critic Sonuya Rehman says that "by depicting men
and women in the burqa, the play only tries to
bring to light issues such as gender
discrimination, intolerance and fanaticism".
Surprisingly, the play was also banned in Lahore
which, like Karachi, is yet to experience the
searing heat of fanatacism. TV journalist
Moneezae Jehangir says Lahore has witnessed less
moral policing than Islamabad. “But, yes,” she
adds, "there’s a feeling of discomfort. Pakistani
women are vulnerable because the state negotiates
with those threatening us." Moneezae says a
Pakistani woman’s experience is linked to her
class background. "A woman stepping out of a
Mercedes is less vulnerable than the one getting
out of a rickshaw. But the real issue is, where
does the mullah get his power from?" she asks.
Karachi isn’t yet under the mullah’s spell, but
the city’s ramp-scorcher, Rabab, says, "For the
last two years, there has been less work.
Earlier, between October-December, we’d be
flooded with shows." Nighat Chaodhry, a Kathak
dancer of repute, also lives here. Her brush with
religious extremism dates back to 1996: a fatwa
was issued against her because she claimed to get
her real satisfaction in dancing. "You see, the
mullah feels satisfaction can come only from
prayers,“she explains, adding,”I haven’t yet
been impacted directly this time round." When
told that the Lal Masjid has issued a fatwa
asking dancers to migrate to India, Nighat
becomes livid, "Is it the law, I ask you? The
religious parties and others are using the Lal
Masjid because of the judicial crisis. "
The Karachi-based editor of Newsline magazine,
Rehana Hakim, feels firing the mullah’s passion
is his mistaken perception that Pakistanis are no
longer practising Muslims. "People here have been
always religious,“she points out. And, anyway,”Can you, for example, reverse the mushrooming of
TV channels?" Rehana can only ignore the Lal
Masjid’s edicts against working women because, as
she says, "I have to support myself and go to
work." The editor has a cautionary message for
the establishment: "If the government is using
the Lal Masjid as a diversionary tactic, then the
government should realise that these people are
like the genie which once out of the bottle can’t
be put back. Are these fanatics winning the
battle for the soul of Pakistan? The group that
faces the gravest danger from these extremists
are women. It’s open season on the women of
Pakistan."
This worries Islamabad’s Amber Mahmud, an
international NGO worker, mostly because she
feels you can’t predict the extent to which the
extremists will go. “It’s scary,” Amber says.
"Can you dress in salwar-kameez? Or will you have
to cover your head as well? Will they then impose
a ban saying only your eyes should be showing?
Will they attack women who are working or taking
their kids to school?"
But not every Pakistani woman is quiescent,
accepting of the curbs on her freedom. Shirin
Mazari, director-general of the Institute of
Strategic Studies, was initially shocked at her
children’s refusal to visit their favourite CD
shop, fearing the rabid extremists’ wrath. She
knows their fear, as those of others, arises from
the assumption that "if the state is unable to
protect the ordinary person from the violent
extremists then there is little choice but to
either stay indoors or fall in line with this
extremist diktat". Shirin didn’t want them to
believe they are helpless; she persuaded them to
revise their decision. She explains, "The visit
was necessary because one does not want to submit
to the tyranny of a crazed minority simply
because the state has chosen to indulge their
extremism."
Encouragingly, in a recent nationwide protest,
burqa-clad women came out on the streets in NWFP,
demanding that the government impose the rule of
law and check the extremists from running amok.
Perhaps they are apprehensive of losing the
little rights they still enjoy. "No religion in
the world allows their faithful to use sticks in
places of worship," commented Tribal Women
Welfare Association chairwoman Dr Begum Jan (in
reference to the stick brigade at Lal Masjid).
Author Ayesha Siddiqa, who has just published
Military Inc, has taken to constantly looking
over her shoulder when she cycles around in
Islamabad. Yet, she argues, underlying the
artificially created stress in the system
(because of the game the government is playing
with extremists) is also a story of class
conflict. The elite must appreciate that
extremism is not just one single category in
which religious zealots challenge the way people
dress and conduct themselves.Siddiqa asks, "How
about other kinds of extremism such as kidnapping
and killing of people, or denying them their
right to food, clothing and shelter? How many
times did the begums of Islamabad protest in
support of the people of Balochistan where
malnourishment is a huge problem, where people
have died because of the battle between the
nationalists and the government? Is it possible
for the elite to truly appreciate the concept of
political liberalism?"
Indeed, a society unable to protect the weak must
necessarily become a victim of extremism of one
type or another. But this can’t be of solace to
those losing their freedoms, to girls who won’t
go to school, to women who want to live their own
way.