and a religious and culturally informed private
sphere. Far from emptying politics from the realms
of religion or culture, and vice versa, the colonial
state did much to bring these spheres closer
together and reshape them in the process. Instead
of being relegated to the private sphere, religious
and cultural differences were orchestrated in the
public arena by social groups competing for gov-
ernment patronage.
Women were central to this orchestration, in par-
ticular to the redefinition of a Muslim male middle-
to upper-class identity. Concerned with projecting
and preserving their distinctive religiously informed
cultural identity, the Muslim ashraf (literally,
“respectable”) classes were anxious to protect their
women from the “evil” influences of the colonial
“public.” This anxiety was shared by Muslims who
were products of theological seminaries as well as
so-called reformers ready to incorporate aspects of
modernity in order to engage more effectively with
Western colonialism. The cherished model of
womanhood was that of the literate but domesti-
cated, wise but chaste, intelligent but submissive
wife, a conception that stood in stark contrast to
the other major image of woman – the prostitute
who lured respectable men into temptation and
ruined them, financially, morally, and psychologi-
cally. The shattering experience of partition in 1947
only hardened the Muslim ashrafclasses in their
opinion that an unprotected woman was the source
of immorality, irreligiosity, and social degradation.
A few gestures were made to prove the Islamic
bona fides of the new state. The West Punjab
Muslim Personal Law (Shariat) Application Act of
1948 superseded custom by conferring inheritance
rights on women, including agricultural land.
Apart from legal loopholes that allowed families to
circumvent the law, giving women the right to
inherit landed property, this was a class rather than
a gender concession. Adopting the colonial state’s
restricted view of the Sharì≠a, the managers of
Pakistan were prepared to consider social legisla-
tion on behalf of women dealing with marriage,
divorce, and the guardianship of children. Middle-
and upper-class women at the vanguard of the
movement to secure women’s rights used this open-
ing to good advantage. The crowning achievement
of women’s rights activists was the Family Law
Ordinance of 1961, which granted women rights in
marriage, divorce, and guardianship. It was a fit-
ting conclusion to a debate that had concentrated
on issues of personal law at the expense of broader
social and economic entitlements in the public
sphere.
pakistan 729The Family Law Ordinance became one of the
main targets of attack by the anti-women’s rights
lobby, threatening as it did the personal autonomy
of Muslim men by bringing the protected space of
the home under the direct scrutiny of the state.
While opposing the rights of women as equal citi-
zens, this lobby had no qualms about appropriating
another key legacy of Western colonialism – the
modern nation-state. For Pakistani women the
problem has been worsened by authoritarian rulers
looking for legitimacy by making women the focal
point of state-sponsored Islamization. In the late
1970s and early 1980s, the military regime of
General Zia ul-Haq introduced wildly discrimina-
tory legal measures against women. This period in
Pakistan’s history marked a departure from the
colonial pattern of confining the legal discourses
of Islam to the personal domain. The Hudood
Ordinance made rape and adultery indistinguish-
able. Along with the law of evidence, which re-
duced the worth of a woman’s testimony to half
that of a man, Zia’s Islamization program created
parallel systems of law, complicating the already
inadequate mechanisms of assuring civil and crim-
inal justice. In a sense, while the crusaders for dem-
ocratic and women’s rights like the Women Action
Forum (WAF) were engaged in rearguard action
to defend the small gains made since the 1960s in
the area of personal law, a military ruler under the
banner of Islam colonized a significant part of
the public space where the battle for equal political,
social, and economic rights ought to have been
fought in the first place.
Successive governments have continued to in-
voke an Islamic national identity that overrides all
differences. Together with the prolonged denial of
democratic rights, the state’s ideological posture
has prevented a resolution of the nexus between
gender and class and gender and community as well
as between gender and nation – a failure exacer-
bated by the fact that in Pakistan, as in other parts
of the world, it is largely the class origins of those
at the vanguard of the “feminist movement” that
have shaped the articulation of women’s issues at
the level of the state. Concerned more with rights
denied them than the economic entitlements of
their less privileged sisters, women belonging to the
upper and middle strata have done a better job of
defending their class interests than they have those
of their gender. Educated, urban, middle- and
upper-class in the main, these women have for
the most part worked within the state’s restricted
definition of the women’s question as one pertain-
ing to issues of personal law – marriage, divorce,