Women Icons of Islamic Politics in Pakistan: The Real Losers of the War on Terror

Afiya S. Zia

Much of the vocabulary woven around the War on Terror has demonstrated a privileging of the security question and terrorism and counter-terrorism strategies, with just cursory discussions around the broader issues of human rights and the specific impact of Islamic militancy on women. This paper discusses some contemporary cases where women have been valorised as bearers of Islam and national culture. It argues that Islamists of all political bearing compete to use the ‘spectacle’ of the Islamist Woman in order to promote their own political ends. The reconstruction and role of the ‘agentive Islamist woman’ across the sites of religious nationalisms, Islamic extremism and popular culture demonstrate a canvassing of Islam as the symbol of their modernity, anti-modernity and post-modernity, respectively. Each seeks the political deliverables of Islam, depending on its utility, to support their corresponding ideological agenda and material ends. This renders Islamist women’s agency as an exclusively male political tool rather than a driver of women’s particularised rights.

Biography:

Afiya S. Zia is a feminist researcher and activist based in Karachi, Pakistan. She is author of ‘Sex Crime in the Islamic Context’, 1994; ‘Watching Them Watching Us’, 2000, ASR, Pakistan, and has edited a series of books on women’s issues. In recent years, she has authored several essays carried in the Feminist Review, Journal of International Women’s Studies, Economic and Political Weekly, Global Social Policy, OpenDemocracy, the University of Cambridge Occasional Paper Series and has authored a recent paper, ‘Motivated by Dictatorship, Muted by Democracy’, Zed books forthcoming.

In 2008, she was a fellow at the Gender and Religions Department at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, UK, where her research work was on ‘Challenges to Secular Feminism in Pakistan’. She is an active member of Women’s Action Forum in Pakistan and an advisory board member of the Centre for Secular Space (UK).

Organiser: Bloomsbury Gender Network hosted by the SOAS Centre for Gender Studies

Contact email: rs94@soas.ac.uk