Shahla
Haeri explores the life of professional
Muslim women in Pakistan.
A few years ago I met a woman professor at a
university faculty party in the eastern
United States. In the course of our
conversation, she learned that I had just
returned from Pakistan, where Benazir Bhutto
had been democratically elected prime
minister for the second time (1993). She
asked, rather incredulously, "How is that
possible? Isn't she a woman? Isn't Pakistan
a Muslim society?"
"Yes, she is a woman," I said. "And yes,
Pakistan is a Muslim society." It does not
automatically follow that because Pakistan
is a Muslim society, no woman can be elected
a prime minister or that no Muslim man will
ever vote for a Muslim woman.
What is culturally and historically specific
to Pakistan that made it possible for a
young Muslim woman to be elected prime
minister, not only once but twice? Is
women's leadership incompatible with Islam?
In the late 1980s, as a human rights
activist was interviewing me on the status
of "Muslim women", he used the term Muslim
women frequently, generally, and
indiscriminately. It seemed as if he did not
see me as an Iranian Muslim woman belonging
to a particular society with a particular
history and coming from a particular class,
educational, and professional background.
Which Muslim women was he talking about? He
seemed profoundly innocent of the actual
geographical, historical, cultural, and
ethnic boundaries within and among Muslim
societies.
Did he think Iranian women, diverse though
they are in class, education, and ethnic
identity, are really the same as Pakistani
women or, for that matter, Saudi Arabian,
Algerian, Afghani, or Malaysian women? How
could the realities of the everyday lives of
such a vast and diverse group of women,
within and across the Muslim world, be
viewed so uniformly and understood so
unproblematically?
I asked him whether he would use such an
essentialized - and meaningless at this
level of generality - term when speaking,
say, about Latin American women. Would he
feel just as knowing and comfortable in
referring to them as "Christian women"?
"No," he said.
"Why not?" I asked.
"Because, uh...," he said. "Well, there is
something peculiar about Islam!"
Is there something peculiar about Islam? Is
Islam the leveller of diversity and
difference that he perceived it to be? Islam
is, of course, a world religion that
transcends many cultural boundaries and
territorial borders. But can one begin to
understand different cultures merely by
looking at their shared religion? Islam is
declared constitutionally to be the state
religion of both Pakistan and Iran. Are
there no differences between Islam as
practised in Iran and Islam as practised in
Pakistan? Is there all religion and no
culture in Muslim societies? What is the
underlying power mechanism that gives an
apparently rational observer the right to
claim such categorical knowledge of the
"other'?
When Sajida Mokarram Shah, a woman whose
story is included here, lost her young
husband in a tragic car accident in 1983,
she and her four young children were
expected to move into her brother-in-law's
house and live under his supervision. The
well-established tradition of levirate or
widow inheritance among the Pathans/Pakhtun
in Peshawar dictated this move. Although
social custom has long endorsed levirate and
legitimized it in the name of religion,
Islam does condemn the custom and instructs
Muslims to avoid "inheriting" widows against
their will.
Educated and from an upper-middle-class
background, Sajida resisted family pressure
- from both her own family and her husband's
family - and adamantly refused to allow her
husband's brother to take control of her and
her children. By going against the custom
and asserting her autonomy, she threatened
both her affinal relations and her own kin
with the prospect of dishonour, although she
had the explicit support of religious
doctrine. Among the Pathans, whose identity
is "defined explicitly in terms of marriage
and control of women" and where women have
"so little autonomy or control over their
lives", her behaviour was perceived as
scandalous, indeed subversive. Her family,
most pointedly her father, shunned her.
One may ask how it was possible for Sajida
to defy cultural tradition in a society
where "nothing is stronger than custom".
Conversely, if religion is the all-powerful
source of the socio-moral order, how could
such clear Islamic injunction be rejected in
favour of social custom? Why is there so
much resistance to women's autonomy and
independence? Are contestory elements built
into religion that in fact can be empowering
to Muslim women?
I am always taken aback when, despite my
efforts to explain the "phenomenon" of
hopelessly passive, veiled Muslim women, a
majority of my students retain their
stereotypical images and beliefs of women in
the Muslim world. The sensitivity they - and
many scholars - show regarding the
differences of race, class, and ethnicity in
their own communities does not seem to
extend to their views of their Muslim
sisters. The cultural and historical
diversity of Muslim women's lives and the
specificity of their experiences and
activities escape them, even as I - an
unveiled, educated, professional woman -
stand before them.
Somehow they do not seem to hear or see me
as a reality different from their tenacious
image of "Muslim women" as passive,
victimized, and veiled, if at times
sympathetic. I have wondered how
analytically and politically useful this
mega category of obedient "Muslim woman" is,
how it was created historically, and how it
has been sustained popularly for so long, so
stubbornly. How is it that my students,
colleagues, and many others in the larger
society seem to ignore my presence and that
of many other women in my situation and so
resolutely hold on to images of women they
have never actually met? How did I become
invisible? I have puzzled over the
management and dissemination of knowledge in
the West and the apparent resistance to
learning about the differences and
similarities among and within Muslim
societies and Muslim women. To understand
this puzzle, I finally decided that the
anomaly of educated, professional Muslim
women needed to be addressed.
Popular perceptions become particularly
difficult to dislodge because some Muslim
states themselves - such as Saudi Arabia,
Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Algeria -
have produced enough news to encourage
images of brutalizing Islam and of
victimized Muslim women abroad. These states
enforce and propagate their own unitary
image of "the Muslim woman"....
Muslim states are, of course, not uniform in
their approach to addressing and redressing
the legal, political, and social
inequalities of their women citizens. These
states more often than not are contested
entities in the Muslim world, hardly
representing a democratic and majority point
of view. The harsh measures taken by the
Taliban in the name of Islam in Afghanistan
ironically seemed to alert the Iranian
Islamic Republic to its own puritanical
absolutism and to its untenable claim to the
"truth" of Islam. Ayatollah Khamenei, Iran's
spiritual leader since 1989, has condemned
the Taliban for their anti- and un-Islamic
behaviour, in particular their attitudes
toward women.
Many Muslim women undoubtedly have been
victimized (as is more or less true in most
societies) and veiled, a fact that should
not be trivialized. But the institution of
veiling, purdah (as it is known in South
Asia), though dominant in Muslim societies,
is neither the source of women's
victimization in the Muslim world nor
exclusively a Muslim institution. The custom
of sex segregation or purdah is a
well-established tradition in northern India
and is prevalent among both Muslims and
Hindus.
But the symbolism of the veil, the
motivations for wearing it, its styles and
gradations - from a loosely draped scarf to
a complete cover - vary tremendously within
and across Muslim societies. Some women wear
a veil to demonstrate religious conviction,
some to be distinguished as respectable,
others to remain anonymous or safe, and
still others to cover their poverty. Some
wear a veil out of respect for local custom,
and still others are forced to do so under
the threat of punishment. Veiling is also
primarily an urban phenomenon, and many
peasant and tribal women, though modestly
dressed, do not wear a veil.
That women are veiled does not necessarily
mean that they are miserable, victimized, or
inactive, though of course some may very
well be. This stereotype is called
objectively into question by the fact that
in the late twentieth century many Muslim
middle-class professional women chose to
veil themselves, particularly in Egypt and
Malaysia.
More challenging is the presence of veiled
Iranian women leaders in the Parliament, who
observe veiling more and more strictly the
closer they are to the foci of power.
Although Iranian women have been forced to
wear "Islamic veiling" in public since the
establishment of the Islamic Republic of
Iran in 1979 - and many resent having to do
so - they are participating more than ever
in their own society's political and social
life.
The active presence of Iranian women in the
public space is not, I must say, because of
gender-friendly policies of the Islamic
regime, but because of women's own
determination and sustained challenges to
the regime to respect its own rhetoric and
to fulfil its promises of gender parity.
Gender parity is still a distant dream for
Iranian Muslim women, but many of them have
turned the veiling requirement into a
licence to appear in public, to resume
professional careers, and to demand changes
in personal laws and in political and
professional institutions.
Even in such situations, however, a
professional woman's choice to veil is
perceived as a further confirmation of
passivity of women and oppression of
religion or as an anomaly and a paradox,
rather than as an empowering act.
* * * * *
The dearth of literature, media reports, and
visual portrayals of the social and
political activities of professional women
from the Muslim world is a puzzle until we
consider these frames of reference. Why has
this category of Muslim women who are
accessible and visible in their own society
- and often contested because of it -
remained invisible in the West? How is it
that their discourse has been heard so
rarely outside of their own societies? Why
have middle class urban professional Muslim
women failed to capture the imagination of
anthropologists, the media, and the public,
as their veiled sisters seem to have done so
completely?
The evolving global power structure has
confronted Muslim states with the daunting
tasks of economic reconstruction and
democracy, sovereignty and citizenship,
religious revivalism and xenophobia, human
rights and gender equity. Against this
background, social analysis is challenged to
breathe fresh perspectives into the research
epistemologies of the Muslim world....
In the past one hundred years or so, the
Western literature and public media have
represented Islam primarily as a historical,
monolithic, omnipotent, and, in that sense,
"exceptional" - that is, different from
other world religions. Embedded in such
representation are the assumption of
victimization of Muslim women and a gradual
amnesia regarding the history of the
diversity of women's experiences in the
Muslim world prior to the Enlightenment. In
particular, women's agency is denied, and
religion is perceived to be the major if not
the only cause of the oppression and
victimization of Muslim women.
In this work, I try to decenter the dominant
methodological and epistemological
tendencies that portray the Muslim world as
village or tribe and Islam as the hegemonic
socio-moral order in the Muslim world. I
suggest we approach religion as only
partially hegemonic and in tight embrace
with culture, particularly with the deeply
entrenched moral code of honour, izzat, in
Pakistan. Further, I suggest we should pay
equal attention to the life and experiences
of people like ourselves and conduct
research among equals in the face of global
socio-historical currents that have demanded
greater similarities and uniformity in the
midst of claims to national sovereignty,
ethnic diversity, and plurality. From this
perspective, anthropologists are challenged
to renegotiate critically the nuances of
similarities between the "self" and the
"other", rather than primarily to focus on
the differences.
To understand the often paradoxical and
ambivalent responses to social change in the
Muslim world, I contend that we ought to
document, demonstrate, and analyze the
impact women have had on their societies,
just as we have done regarding the impact of
women in the Western world - for example, in
work on the suffragette movement. If one
were to compare the literature on Muslim
women with the writing on women in the
United States, it becomes clear that the
women who are the subject of the latter
study are for the most part middle class and
educated.
* * * * *
I do not intend to be an apologist for
misogynous practices that continue to
oppress women in the Muslim world, but I
also find it problematic to single out Islam
as the champion of world oppression of
women. Here lies a dilemma I have had to
contend with, one that I think is the source
of both my personal vulnerability and my
professional strength. As a "translator" of
Pakistani and Iranian cultures and as a
Muslim feminist anthropologist, I find
myself in the unenviable position of
fighting on two or more fronts
simultaneously: being critical of social
injustice and violence against women "back
home", while trying to cut through layers of
entrenched misunderstandings,
misconceptions, and stereotypes abroad.
As professional women become active players
in Pakistan and in much of the Muslim world,
the contestations over who has the
legitimacy to define, interpret, and control
the sacred text and cultural traditions have
intensified. Although relatively small in
numbers and diverse in their professional
pursuits, these women are involved in
politics, are knowledgeable about their
society, and are aware of the contested
discourse of religious legitimacy and
political alliances nationally and of the
rapidly changing configurations of gender
power, and knowledge internationally.
Shahla Haeri has
written extensively on religion, law and
gender dynamics in the Muslim world. She is
the Director of the Women's Studies
Programme and Assistant Professor of
Cultural Anthropology at Boston University.
She has also authored Law of Desire:
Temporary Marriage, Mut'a, in Iran.
This book reflects on the changing
circumstances of educated professional
Pakistani women who have taken in their
stride the structural constraints within
society. It also examines the western
misconceptions regarding Islam. |
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