Over the past few days, Muslim feminists who believe in a "proletarian Islamic legal order" have been morally outraged at Pakistan’s Council of Islamic Ideology (CII). Every time our state ulema offer a regressive proposal, there is renewed shock and horror. This is despite the record of the CII under Sherani and other members of the ulema (including a woman representative of the Jamaat-e-Islami), which has been consistently and blatantly anti-women in its recommendations.

The pressure to strike down the Muslim Family Laws has been relentless since it was passed in 1961. In 2014, the CII excavated back into history and recommended lifting the ‘anti-Islamic’ 1929 colonial ban on child marriages.

Did Muslim reformists think that Pakistan had lurched into some post-Islamic future where religious competition and theocracy had evaporated away? Their current indignation is over the CII’s recent advice to legalise marital violence against women albeit, lightly.

The more adventurist revivalists have always insisted that no secular laws such as, the child-marriage ban, would work in the Islamic context. They have argued for the emancipatory spirit of Islamic laws and an alignment of the "right interpretations". They reject western and colonial laws and propose to work within Islamic fiqh and debates. However, they had warned the same about the reform of the zina laws, which, in fact, has been exemplary of the exact opposite logic and a lesson in how to regain secular neutrality of state and society.

Meanwhile, the Sindh and Punjab provincial assemblies have passed amended versions of the Child Marriage Restraint Acts (2014, 2015). In Sindh, where child marriages are said to be the highest, there was practically no resistance to the passing of the law. The PTI’s choice to defer the KP bill to the CII instead of the Commission on the Status of Women proves that it was set up to be rejected. This is indicative of that party’s commitment to women’s rights. If Sindh and Punjab passed child-marriage restraint laws against the opposing recommendation of the CII at that time, does this mean these provinces are more secular or westernised?

Some moderate Muslim analysts have accused the CII of being obsessively anti-western. Many Muslim reformists are predominantly supporters and beneficiaries of western education, technology, academia, citizenships and welfare. Their keenness to wed enlightenment with Islamic ethos is equally obvious. But it is absurd to simply box the Islamists as anti-western or anti-modernity (which they are certainly not), and as if there is no kernel of historical resonance in their contemporary flawed interpretations. Aren’t all interpretations just that -- arbitrary, imperfect, constructed?

Ultimately, the Islamists and the Muslim reformists are just spitting images of each other who cut their politics and perspectives around the putative placemat called The West.

Both have a love-hate relationship with all things western. Their narrative is intended to speak to western audiences and they crave western media attention even as they whine and complain about its anti-Islam propaganda and imperialist designs. Both groups are ‘fixers’ and rescuers of Islam -- ironically and contradictorily -- from each other and from the West, simultaneously. No wonder they’re so busy and getting nowhere.

The problem is that the commentary by both these sets of interlopers is meaningless. Their rhetoric may be influential but in unserviceable ways.

Sindh is not a province known to be sociologically influenced by religious clergy; so, evidently, there are other drivers that steer the high level of pragmatic child-marriage.

It is the political economy of marriage arrangements that is directly linked to early marriage, violence against women and discrimination in resource distribution. The religious debate is irrelevant -- even if the CII recommendation is rejected, the problem of child marriages will not be rescued by moderate Islamic interpretation. Only a rational, secular analysis that is not self-indulgently and superficially engaged in Islamic reform or authenticity can enable us to understand these factors.

Sindh police have taken preventive steps in cases and arrested perpetrators over the last year. Does this mean child marriages will be eliminated any time soon? No. Reports vary widely with some citing 37 per cent of married Pakistani women who are under the age of 18. But the non-responsive birth registration programme and refusal to carry out a census makes estimation of change impossible. Still, the reasons for decrease or continuation of early marriages are compellingly independent of the factor of religious debate. The level of education has a direct correlation on multiple social behaviours including, marriage and maternal and child mortality.

Furthermore, Sindh has passed the Domestic Violence Act. What would be the legal encounter between this law and the CII recommended light beating if it were to be accepted? The point being that it is not scholarly debate within the Islamic discourse that will realign our social or legal futures. In fact, it is the competition between the democratic legislative processes and irreconcilable Islamist debates that will determine progress for equality and rights in Pakistan. Mostly, women will simply keep risking their lives as they make their own desperate way out of their injustices. Religious reformists and their apologia simply delays and distracts from this eventuality.

Faith is a convenient resource to justify patriarchal practices which benefit men over women and the hegemony of the religious majority. To say Islam is not patriarchal is an absurd knee-jerk defence by the apologists because historical evidence does not bear witness to emancipatory politics of equality in the early half of the second millennium.

The battle of interpretations between the CII and reformists is self-serving and ultimately self-defeating. The attempt to dovetail a legal or social regime from the 14^th century with modernity is so divorced from material realities of Pakistan that it merely serves as a pantomime for those who deal with such cases.

Those who work on specific cases need to be trusted far more than self-acclaimed scholars, be they Arabic or English speaking experts. The CII should be dissolved but not to be replaced by some self-defined moderate substitute. Social and legal progress for women and minorities needs a concrete understanding of structural issues and democratic pragmatic policies. Instead, Muslim reformists help the Islamist lobbies by collapsing the debate into abstract accusations, all for the last divine word.