A worthier adversary

The writer is a sociologist based in Karachi, with a background in women’s studies and has authored and edited several books on women’s issues
In contrast to the woolly apologetic narrative that surrounds religious militancy in Pakistan, the militants themselves are enviably clear in their rhetoric and intent and remarkably efficient in the execution of their agenda. Loathe to be misunderstood as victims of imperialism, protégés of Ziaul Haq or indeed, products of the war on terror, the Tehreek-e-Taliban issues corrective press statements when their attacks on girls’ schools or students are rationalised as a revenge tactic against drone warfare or as a defensive jihad.
Instead, the Taliban clarify that theirs is a conscious and holy act to punish the secularising agendas of schoolgirls, dancing girls, lady health workers, barbers or music shop owners – indeed, the state of Pakistan. The Ahle Sunnat Wal Jamaat is unambiguous in its stated intent to eliminate all Shias in Pakistan and its tactics range from targeting dangerous schoolboys to demonic doctors.
The Khatme Nabuwat aims to erase all Ahmadis and then exhume them from their graves and kill them again and the minor local (male) players from the majoritarian sects have always preyed on Christian, Hindu and vulnerable Muslim communities. Clearly, such resolute faith-based crimes would not be possible without the patronage or, at least, shield of state protection. These range in the form of flawed laws and judicial procedures to actual holy collaboration by state agencies.
The nexus between state and militant groups has been explored in some historical detail in local analysis but a second-generation narrative now seeks to collapse all such linkages and indeed, the historical acts of such groups and their independent agency into a flattened, post 9/11 framework (for eg see Gender, National Security and Counter-Terrorism: Human Rights Perspectives, Routledge 2013). Such analysts consider ‘US imperialism’ and liberalism to be the singular motivating factor for faith-based militancy and crimes in the country.
This simplistic academic exercise allows the authors to carve out an identity for themselves, from floating diasporics embedded in the heart of the empire to ‘real radical leftists’ who rescue the oppressed Islamist/Muslim man from western Islamophobia and imperialist liberalism (Dialect Anthropol Oct 2012). Most such ‘radicals’ live and politic in cyber space on a variety of list servers arguing that location does not matter.
In such analysis, the motivation that compels thousands of young boys to follow some small-time mosque leader into Christian/Ahmadi/Hindu neighbourhoods on the pretext of blasphemy in order to murder and maim, is simply anti-imperialist moral injury exploited by some opportune Islamist leaders. Such politics are not considered to be systemic nor are they linked to the culture of impunity that enables them – in fact, such acts apparently have nothing to do with religious narratives under which Pakistanis are socialised. To identify and demand that such acts be accounted for is to malign ‘Muslim male politics’.
To draw linkages between the political endorsement of such hate-crimes by Islamist parties and protest the silence observed by conservative parties is to ‘demonise’ the Islamists who are considered to be misunderstood yet authentic and alternative vehicles to western secular universalism. Some narrators argue that there is no such thing as a ‘fundamentalist’, while others argue there is no case for the ‘Islamist’ and ultimately the entire discourse is a well-orchestrated conspiracy against Muslim male ‘politicians’ who are maligned by (non-Muslim) liberal-secular human and women right’s activists.
Perversely, some sections of the conservative Pakistani media do not discriminate on the basis of gender when they rally against human rights activists as betrayers of the nation and liberal fascists. However, many post 9/11 Pakistani diasporic virtual activists reserve their criticism almost exclusively for feminists or female human rights activists in their webs of cyber activism.
The reason is that Pakistani women’s rights activists are soft targets. Many men with left affiliations, who carry far more essentialist views of militants and Islamists, are rarely the subjects of such criticism. Nor is there a campaign against these ‘progressive’ men for not condemning US drone warfare, nor for being leaders of imperialist NGOs and neither are male journalists/activists vilified for their regular and sustained exposes on jihadist organisations.
There is no campaign against Islamic feminists either, who have transnational and well-funded global networks, for their criticism of Muslim men’s exploitation and misinterpretation of the Shariah. For their efforts and petitions against faith-based punishments, discrimination or manipulation of Islam against women, there is no accusation that they are anti-Islam or anti-Muslim men.
This self-acclaimed, re-located ‘new left’ premises its argument on a newly constructed post-feminism too – one that suggests that patriarchies in any form or manner have no connection with religion (in this case Islam) but are purely an invoked cultural and class-based articulation (as if the victims are not the working classes). This allows these post-9/11 activists to talk of the past – blame colonialism, blame the military dictator and discuss cases that they feel like selecting and then say “see, these illegitimate, false consciousness duped liberal feminists only take on cases of religious violence” while deliberately ignoring all other cases that they routinely pursue.
Accordingly, Islamophobia is something only observed by the ‘westernised’ liberal but the native policies and practices of Islamist groups who malign and kill other Muslims on the basis of the Others’ Islam does not qualify as Islamophobia. There is almost always silence on the MMA’s record (comprising of Muslim male and female politicians) in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and the consequences of their Islamisation of the politics, culture and society, top-down and bottom-up, which were in consonance with the militancy that followed.
There is also the defensive suggestion that control over women’s sexualities is not connected to religious discourse but simply a tool deployed by men in communities or due to cultural norms. However, control over women’s bodies was not just a Zia era, Hudood Ordinance thing – three decades on, the Islamists also actively obstructed the reform of the Zina Ordinance and the legislation of the Domestic Violence Bill since they are completely invested in the control of women’s bodies and sexuality as prescribed by their religious, not community or class identities.
Women can often bypass cultural norms and restrictions by directly appealing to secular rights and sometimes, yes, even by negotiating Islamic rights. However, the nexus between culture and religious laws or ethos would mean that their defiance then puts them at risk of violating divine prescriptions. It’s all very well to say that fatwas are not binding or that Islam does not require fatwas for divorce rights but the way that cultural and religious patriarchies collude does not change the reality that women even in the metropolis are resorting to buying unjust divorce fatwas due to such collusive practice.
Running campaigns against select liberals, feminists and human rights activists, and accusing them of being ‘imperialist collaborators’ – while ignoring others who may be on exactly the same conceptual page but happen to be personal friends or patrons – is an act of vicious self-realisation. It also reeks of academic dishonesty and is an insult to feminism and left politics alike. That’s why the right is an easier force to reckon with – they don’t hide their adversarial politics under false selectivity and they don’t depend on adversaries to legitimise their own identities.
Email: afiyazia@yahoo.com