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Transnational Feminism as
Critical Practice
A Reading of Feminist Discourses in Pakistan

Introduction

This essay is a speculation of some conceptual strategies that could

enhance our understanding of feminist politics and rhetorical practices in
the nation-state of Pakistan. I hope that this process will also aid efforts to
delineate the emergent configurations of the cultural political space of the
transnational as it has been altered by the events of 11 September 2001 and
the ensuing war on terrorism. In their struggles at a variety of family,
community, and state1 levels, self-defined feminist and human rights
groups in Pakistan have traditionally resorted to liberal notions of citizen-
ship, gender-neutral ideas about rights, and universalism of the public
sphere. Their reliance on these universalist concepts of rights and freedom
has intensified in the past two decades as a strategy against oppressive
regulation of political and social life in the name of Islamization. Given the
present international pressure on Pakistan to crack down on “extremists,”
we can expect an intensification in accusations of “anti-Islamic” and
“Westernized” against those who are pursuing a secularist agenda in
Pakistan. These processes, along with their mirror opposite, that is, the
hysteria that the spectre of Muslim terrorism raises in some Western
societies, are hardening the rhetorical divide of Islam versus West. At the
same time debates about the relationship between Islam and democracy
have intensified among Muslim scholars following September 2001. In

[Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism 2005, vol. 5, no. 2, pp. 57–82]

©2005 by Smith College. All rights reserved.
transnational feminism as critical practice 57
 challenging the obscurantism of Muslim leaders and appealing for
democratization in Muslim communities, many scholars, including
Muslim feminist scholars, present their arguments in a manner that often
reinscribes rather than disrupts the dichotomy between tradition and
modernity—Islam and the West.2 In this situation, I argue that feminist
critical theory faces urgent demands to reject the division of the world into
zones of traditionalism and modernity, particularly in questions related to
women, religion, and the postcolonial nation-state. We need intensely
nuanced accounts of the relationships among Islam, women, and moder-
nity in a manner that highlights the specificity of Muslim women’s
appropriation of modernity in different contexts of struggle.
It is important to situate Pakistani feminist discourses in the latest world
order in which Western democracy and culturally specific notions of
universal human rights and freedom have become the major discursive
weapons in a conflict of “Western civilization” versus “Islamic obscu-
rantism.” For we cannot simply assume that third world activists’ deploy-
ment of modernist and Enlightenment concepts somehow exonerates
these notions from their tendency to univeralise, essentialize, or construct
abstract subjects as argued by some feminists (e.g., Moghissi 2000).
Conversely, we cannot deny the appeal and strategic importance to
feminists in Muslim societies of the universal rights and equalitarian
impulses of modernity when compared with the parochial, culturally
relativist, and exclusionary agendas of ultra-right groups. I argue that
attention to the local, national, and global context of feminist activism in
Pakistan may help move the analysis of Pakistani—and other Muslim—
feminist discourses beyond notions of either an essentialist, global
feminism modeled on the first world or false consciousness about the
colonial origins of modern political concepts that needs the corrective
logic of contemporary Islamist activism.

Liberalism, Postcoloniality, and Catachresis

Noting the importance of the contemporary feminist insistence on

“difference” as opposed to a globalized notion of sisterhood, Deniz
Kandiyoti (1995) has pointed to the disjuncture that exists between
feminist theorizing and activism at the transnational level and the strate-
gies of feminists in many Muslim societies similar to Pakistan. She recalls

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that it was the activism of various groups of women, whom mainstream
Western feminist theory and practices traditionally marginalized, which
directed feminist attention toward power differences rooted in the struc-
tures of race, culture, class, histories of colonization and migration,
sexuality, and so on. While this challenge to universal feminism has
enabled more contextualized analyses of women’s lives and opened new
spaces for coalition building, it has unsettled traditional feminist demands
for gender equality that were based on developmentalist and moderniza-
tion discourses (Kandiyoti 1995).
In addition to women’s activism, Kandiyoti also points to a number of
global influences that have changed the context for international feminist
discussions (1995). She argues that widespread awareness of the failures of
developmentalist projects of postcolonial states coincided with theoretical
critiques of the premises on which ideas about development and social
transformation were based. Such critiques derived from poststructuralist
theories in social sciences that denounced both the narrow epistemologi-
cal foundations of Western humanist thought as well as the effects of such
assumptions on colonized societies. This critique of modernity also reso-
nated with feminist critiques of gender-biased and masculinist premises
of universalist discourses about rights and citizenship in the West. Both
poststructuralism and feminist criticism, therefore, focus on processes of
exclusion and inclusion in the construction of the universalist subject of
modernity. According to Kandiyoti, one of the by-products of this conjunc-
ture is a general distrust of the universal doctrine of human rights and its
condemnation as a tool of Western imperialism. In light of Kandiyoti’s
discussion, it is easy to understand the dilemma for Muslim feminists,
who—being positioned in a complicated network of cultural, colonial, and
imperialist histories and gender relations in their societies—must rely on
discourses of abstract citizenship and universal human rights as a means
of transcending culturalist power struggles being enacted at the local,
national, and transnational levels. Thus feminists in Muslim societies, as
Kandiyoti indicates, must develop strategies “to accommodate diversity
and difference without undermining the legal and ethical grounds on
which the right to difference itself can continue to be upheld” (1995, 20).
As she rightly emphasizes, this is more than an academic issue in societies
where political groups invoke religious authority to define the limits of
social behavior.

transnational feminism as critical practice 59

 I draw on Kandiyoti’s insights to highlight the differential relationship
of women in different contexts to the traditions of liberal democracy,
pluralism, and fundamental rights. Transnational feminism must steer
clear of both cultural relativism and universalism as it attempts to link
feminist critiques of universalism with feminist human rights activism in
Muslim societies such as Pakistan. I suggest that a critical feminist reading
of Pakistani women’s feminism can benefit from blending Kandiyoti’s
advice about the significance of historical context with Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak’s arguments about the importance of studying women’s differential
relationship to constitutionality in different contexts (Spivak 1993). Spivak
emphasizes the ambiguity that underlies the idea of the national agent,
“the people” in whose name the constitution is framed in all contexts. She
argues that we must insist on this “undecidability” (not subject to verifi-
cation) of national origins in order to avoid fetishizing national or ethnic
identity and keeping it open for interrogation. Spivak illuminates her
arguments about the contingency of national origins and the individual’s
relationship to Enlightenment ideas about freedom and rights through a
discussion of the historical contexts of the United States, Turkey, and
India. She establishes that the free individual in the United States can
claim a different relationship to Europe and colonization than the national
agent in postcolonial space such as Turkey and that this historical relation-
ship also shapes widely differing notions of secularism in the two contexts.
The importance of Spivak’s discussion for my purpose is her contention
that the idea of the nation in all contexts, although most clearly discern-
able in postcolonial contexts such as Turkey and India, is “catachrestic,”
which she defines as “wrested from its proper meaning”—the meaning
rooted in Enlightenment concepts. Spivak, therefore, insists that a
transnational study of culture, rather than being comparative, should
constantly invoke the “inexhaustible taxonomy of catachresis,” that is,
chart the differences in national origin (1993).
Drawing on this valuable insight I argue that feminists must resist the
tendency toward a comparative analysis and utilize the notion of
catachresis in reading women’s resistance struggles in Muslim societies
such as Pakistan. This can help move transnational feminist accounts, so
crucial in the contemporary era, away from a comparative framework
based on global sisterhood and ideas about universal oppression of
women. At the same time it can disrupt the tendency of cultural relativism
that leads to constructed oppositions and binary divides.

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 In the following sections I will first draw attention to some important
aspects of the contemporary discursive reconfiguring of nation-states in
the Muslim world and its implications for feminist struggles for secularist
politics, citizenship, and democratization in Muslim societies. Then, with
the proposition that feminism in Pakistan cannot be understood without
considering its agonistic engagement with Islamization, I will locate both
Islamization and feminism within the historical processes of nation-state
formation and globalization. Finally, I will engage with feminist rhetorical
practices in Pakistan and illustrate that bourgeois women’s emphasis on
universal human rights and the ideal of a transcendent citizen-subject
marks a potentially counterhegemonic move against the Islamization of
law and society that has derailed Pakistani politics since 1977. I will demon-
strate that a strategic displacement of our theoretical and analytical
presuppositions may sometimes be necessary in order to clear a space for
feminist practice that can be called transnational. I therefore attempt to
theoretically reposition these discourses through Spivak’s notion of
“catachresis” as a creative misuse of a term that opens a space for new
possibilities. I suggest Pakistani feminists’ catachrestic use of citizenship
and universalism marks a potentially transformative moment that Mrinalini
Sinha (1999) has, in another historical context, linked with the construc-
tion of new subject positions through women’s appropriation of modernity.

Pakistan Politics at a National/Global Crossroads

President General Pervez Musharraf ’s decision to join the forces of the

“international community” against the Taliban was represented as a choice
of survival over annihilation. Although Musharraf insisted that his decision
reflected the wishes of the silent majority, three years since his decision,
the people of Pakistan are experiencing a deep split arising from this local-
global moment. The government’s support for the U.S.-led war on
terrorism in Afghanistan and its ambivalence toward the invasion of Iraq
have led to a spirited revival in Pakistan of questions around national
identity and the demands that transnational political and economic
conditions place on it (Qadir and Akhtar 2001; Jahangir 2001; Latif 2002).
The most important manifestation of this crisis of national identity and its
most debilitating effects are evident in the national space of public
political action, where political parties make their claims to represent
“popular sentiment.” The two main political parties, the Pakistan People’s

transnational feminism as critical practice 61

 Party led by Benazir Bhutto and the Pakistan Muslim League of Mian
Nawaz Sharif, have faltered in their attempt to find a coherent position
between Pakistan’s claim to be a member of the world community (nar-
rowly interpreted as U.S. ally) and popular outrage at the U.S. imperialism
that is also equally and narrowly defined as support for Islamic militancy.
Controlled from exile by their leaders, the two parties’ normally ambivalent
approach to the Islam versus West question has left them without a clear
position due to their faith in the ability of the superpower to influence the
political dispensation in Pakistan.3 Thus the two main political parties that
could have provided credible opposition to Musharraf ’s leadership and the
government-sponsored Pakistan Muslim League have become spectators
as the main political battles are being fought between the politicoreligious
groups and the military. Traditional political parties have also suffered
from the vision of democracy that President Musharraf has tailored with
the aid of the National Reconstruction Bureau that he appointed. The
Musharraf government’s measures, while weakening the political strength
of the two main political parties against the government-backed Pakistan
Muslim League also had the, possibly unintended, effect of paving the way
for the unprecedented electoral success of the religious parties. In the
October 2002 elections the Muttahida Majlis Amal (MMA), a coalition of
six politicoreligious parties swept into power in the North West Frontier
and Baluchistan Provinces and later acquired impressive gains in the
Senate and National Assembly by-elections. For the first time, partly due to
their own organizing and partly due to the global situation, religious
parties, which used to score negligibly in national elections, now control
one-quarter of the seats in the National Assembly in Pakistan. The MMA
has used its strengthened political position to function sometimes as the
leading democratic opposition to Musharraf ’s government and at other
times as partner in legitimizing his authority and his controversial consti-
tutional changes.4 This has elicited comments from analysts in Pakistan
about the revival of a historical and destructive relationship between the
military and politicoreligious parties referred to as “the military-mullah
alliance,” in which Pakistan’s military regimes have harnessed the street
power of religious groups to bolster their government. This relationship
has historically proved particularly oppressive for religious minorities and
women.
Meanwhile, commentators and activists from a variety of political
positions in Pakistan repeatedly express concern that discursive relations

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between Euro-American states and third world states such as Pakistan have
changed from an emphasis on democratization to a focus on security. One
widely expressed concern relates to the hasty abandonment of U.S.-led
sanctions related to the return of democracy in Pakistan. Since 11 Septem-
ber 2001 the United States government has waived a series of military and
economic sanctions that were imposed on Pakistan after its nuclear tests in
1998 and the takeover by General Pervez Musharraf. While U.S. diplomats
and officials insist that this new policy would somehow help the process of
democratization in Pakistan, politicians and activists are concerned that
states such as Pakistan are now judged by a new set of “global” standards
that prioritize the government’s ability to implement measures that are
deemed necessary for the security of citizens of Western states.
While the space of national politics has become somewhat tenuous for
conventional feminist politics, another emergent concern from the
perspective of women and human rights groups in Pakistan is the percep-
tible diminishing of the global public sphere, whose existence is crucial for
consensus around universality, community, and equality across and within
nation-states. It is this international, transnational public sphere that
women’s and human rights activists in Pakistan have routinely referenced
in recent struggles with the state. This space has been seriously under-
mined by developments in international politics. Since democratization
struggles in Pakistan have traditionally relied on internationally agreed
norms and civil rights instruments, the delegitimation of these mecha-
nisms at the international level is bound to influence political—including
feminist—discourse in Pakistan in the coming phase and shape the nature
of transnational linkages. The meaning of globalization—as a specific type
of financial, political, and cultural restructuring that both reconfigures
state-citizen relationships and constructs new types of political subjects, as
emphasized by Spivak (1999), M. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Talpade
Mohanty (1997), and others—has assumed its worst scenario in combina-
tion with the flexibility of defenses, the widespread dispersal of military
forces, and a contradictory intertwining of global and local violence.

The Islamization-Feminism Relationship

I will not attempt to provide a history of Islamization in Pakistan but

instead refer to Islamization as a process that promotes drastic changes in
Pakistan’s legal, political, economic, and social structures in ways that

transnational feminism as critical practice 63

 seriously limit the rights of women and religious minorities. This process
was formally initiated as state policy in 1977 by a military ruler, General
Mohammed Zia ul Haq, along with support from existing politicoreligious
parties, mainly the Jamaat-I-Islami. I do not propose a causal relationship
between the present situation of women and Zia’s regime, nor do I suggest
that the past continues to determine our gendered experience of citizen-
ship. However, I reiterate that it is important to approach Islamization as
an attempt to construct a particular type of nation/society and to under-
stand the associated moves toward shaping gender relations that are seen
necessary to sustain such a society. I believe that a feminist deconstructive
reading of women’s secularist discourse must be stitched into the fabric of
postcoloniality and transnational political, economic, and cultural rela-
tionships to underline the following points.
First, we should understand the process of Islamization as a historically
situated policy that was implemented within specific sociopolitical
conditions in Pakistan, rather than approaching it with reference to
assumptions about Islamic revivalism or fundamentalism. This will help
avoid the misunderstanding that often dominates studies of Islamic
societies in which, as Fred Halliday and Hamza Alavi (1988) have noted,
Islam is frequently accorded a transcendence that obfuscates our under-
standing of the deployment of religion in specific historical contexts. By
historicizing Islamization as a political/cultural process, rather than a fixed
set of beliefs across all regions and times, we are able to see that religion
acquires various forms and is differently involved in the construction of
subjectivities at various times.
Second, although women’s resistance to Islamization in Pakistan
cannot be generalized to feminist activism against Islamism all over the
world, it resembles feminist accounts from other Muslim societies that
trace cultural resistance around gender to histories of colonial domination
and continuing dependency on the West (Kandiyoti 1994; Kandiyoti 1995).
Thus Kandiyoti suggests that anti-Western Islamism is also a reflection of
discontent with indigenous social class and cultural inequalities,
conflicting interests within the population, and religious and ethnic
diversities. In Pakistan, too, some feminist scholars suggest that rather
than being an inexplicable resurgence, “fundamentalism” is related to
cultural, political, and economic crises in our society (Toor 1997; Mehdi
1994). They argue that politicoreligious Islamic groups regularly use anti-
Western, specially anti-U.S., rhetoric to represent a non-Western Muslim

64 amina jamal
world, which excludes not only those territorially outside it but also others
within the “true” community. Central to these discourses is the image of
the Westernized woman as one who is wedded to Western ideas and inter-
ests through either false consciousness or because of selfish investments.
Third, the secular women’s struggle in Pakistan cannot be seen as a
struggle between Islam and modernity. Rather, it must be viewed as a
contest between two competing versions of modernity, between two
competing sections of the middle class. Both secular feminists—as they
proclaim themselves—and Islamists are attempting to play a developmen-
tal role in meditating different cultural projects and internal and external
groups, and thus they are participating in shaping the nation according to
their own ideals (Chatterjee 1986). As Mervat F. Hatem (1998) and
Kandiyoti (1994) reveal, Islamist discourse has embraced modern regimes
of power whose goal is to discipline or domesticate the relations of power
between men and women of the middle class within and outside the
nuclear family. They suggest that while anticolonial nationalist movements
were concerned with modernizing Islam, the concern of Islamists is to
Islamize the expression of modernity in present-day Muslim societies. In
Pakistan, Islamization has attempted to reappropriate aspects of the
public, political space that were at least formally designated as a space of
universal citizenship by the developmental state in its earlier modernizing
phase. Thus the struggle for feminists is to reverse this tide of cultural par-
ticularity in the public space while attempting to extend notions of citizen-
ship to the areas of family and community. Most critics of the Islamization
policy agree that, apart from the direct impact of laws, one of its most
lasting effects has been the noticeable change in the public environment
regarding questions of morality, with severe effects on women and
minorities (Mumtaz and Shaheed 1987; Weiss 1986; Richter 1986).
Fourth, we need to reposition secular women’s activism in the political
and social space of Pakistan by challenging representations that construct
it as a struggle of “elite women versus the masses” in which the latter are
seamlessly identified with “fundamentalist” men and women (Said Khan
1994). As Nighat Said Khan indicates, the conflict of women versus
“fundamentalist” (whether the latter are overtly part of the state, as under
Zia, or in opposition to the state) is not between the West and the rest (the
masses). Rather, it is a contest between two groups of elite, both of which
are equally removed from the day-to-day life of most of the people of
Pakistan (Said Khan 1994, 87).

transnational feminism as critical practice 65

 Finally, I must add that although the Islamist position in decolonized
space appears similar to the strategies of subordinated Muslim communi-
ties in Western liberal societies, there is an important contextual difference
that needs to be emphasized here in order to distinguish between “Islamic
resurgence” in Western multicultural and third world contexts. As Kandi-
yoti asserts, in the latter contexts important assumptions about freedom of
expression and association are absent in the dialogue between opposing
groups. When Islamist groups make their bid for state power, “it is the
choices and rights of all women that are affected, whether they subscribe
to an Islamist worldview or not” (Kandiyoti 1995, 29). Therefore, it is not a
choice of lifestyle or freedom of worship that is the issue “but the condi-
tions for the existence of a pluralist polity, which some movements freely
admit they have no interest in” (Kandiyoti 1995, 29).
We need to be mindful of this complex relationship between Islamiza-
tion and feminism in order to comprehend women’s rhetorical strategies
in Pakistan at the contemporary moment.

Secular Feminist Discourses in Pakistan:

A Transnational Feminist Reading

While diverse groups of women are engaged in struggle at a variety of

levels and spheres in Pakistan, references to the women’s movement in
literature, politics, and media specifically denote the activities of upper-
and middle-class—usually professional—women to gain state protection
in areas of marriage, inheritance, education, employment, and law. In the
past two-and-a-half decades these activities have coalesced around a loosely
formed network of women activists from a mixture of political positions,
all of whom appear to share a stated commitment to achieving women’s
rights within the frameworks of democratization, universal human rights,
and individual freedom. I want to focus on the historically specific activi-
ties of one such group of women who carved out a space for themselves as
the women’s movement in Pakistan and functioned as such during the
1980s and early 1990s. Although this group is much more dispersed now
than at its inception, I focus on it because it is the closest we have seen in
Pakistan of a critical assembly of women that can be described as a
feminist movement and one that came together with the specific purpose
of challenging Islamization. It is important to emphasize that although I
underline the strategies of the Women’s Action Forum (WAF), or Khawateen

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Mahaz-e-Amal, it is only one of many groups that was and continues to be
engaged in the struggles to which I refer in the following discussion.5
The WAF was formed in 1981 at a time of the worst political repression
by the government of General Zia ul Haq, who had introduced a series of
repressive legal and political measures in the name of Islamization. The
most well-known among these are the Hudood Ordinances, which are a set
of laws defining rape, adultery, theft, use of alcohol and drugs, and
prescribing punishments for these offenses. When a small group of upper-
and middle-class women organized public demonstrations and protests
against Hudood laws, they broke the silence that had enveloped Pakistani
politics and continued to pose the most important challenge to the
Islamization of law and society throughout Zia’s regime (Haq 1996;
Gardezi 1997; Mumtaz and Shaheed 1987; Weiss 1998). The founding of
the WAF is considered significant for feminism in Pakistan since it marks a
change in elite women’s understanding of their relationship with the state
(Mumtaz and Shaheed 1987; Haq 1996). Until 1977 women of the urban
educated upper and middle classes looked to the modernizing state to
implement women’s rights. However, elite women’s faith in the modern
state was shaken by Zia’s control of the state. Thus, after the introduction
of state-sponsored Islamization and the attendant moves to reassign
women’s place in social and political life, women’s struggle for rights and
freedom had to be waged against a confrontational rather than reformist
state. As many Pakistani scholars have pointed out, this changed the
nature and terms of the women’s movement in Pakistan (Mumtaz and
Shaheed 1987; Gardezi 1997). Formed by middle-class women as a reaction
to the Islamization policy of Zia and with the stated aim of protecting
women’s rights gained under the developmental phase of the postcolonial
state, the WAF struggled for a long time with the question of how to reframe
modernist issues related to women’s rights and equality into an effective
counter to the discourses of Islamization. Since women who resort to
modernist concepts are threatened by charges of antinationalism, the WAF,
like other secular women’s groups in Pakistan, has had to shape its
political and discursive interventions in a tension between an Islamic
framework and an avowedly secularist framework. After a decade-long
internal debate, some of which is reflected in papers that WAF activists
published, the organization decided in 1991 to declare itself secular,
meaning that it would advocate the separation of religion from the state
(Shaheed 1998). This act of self-naming, rather than being a settled issue,

transnational feminism as critical practice 67

 continues to draw mixed feelings from group members.6 While members
generally agree that the WAF has a “secular perspective,” differences exist
over what exactly this means (WAF Workshop 1991, 6). WAF members
generally define secularism in the following terms: “secular does not mean
antireligion. All religions are allowed to function but religion is a personal
matter and not a matter for the state” (WAF Workshop 1991, 6). While
secular identification opens the space for heterogeneous definitions of
Muslim women’s identity and rights and enables the inclusion of religious
minorities, it also carries a host of practical political concerns. For ex-
ample, members have raised the problem of defining the nature of the
secular state for which the WAF should strive and the question of
redefining the WAF’s stand in matters where the group has utilized the
framework of Islam to challenge particular laws (WAF Workshop 1991, 6).
An important concern relates to the image of the WAF in the country since
the group and its members have been attacked by politicoreligious groups
as antireligious or nonreligious. WAF members are divided over whether
the use of the word “secular” would alienate potential supporters or attract
more supporters. As the work of Said Khan illustrates, while most women
who describe themselves as feminists would also consider themselves to
be secular, there is enormous variation in the manner in which they define
their understanding of secularism or describe their politics in relation to
their Muslim identity (Said Kahn 1994).
The ambiguity that inheres in the secular versus religious relationship in
Pakistan needs to be situated in the differentials of class, gender, sexuality,
sectarian affiliation, and other matters that complicate national identity. As
the previous discussion of women’s positions in the WAF has shown,
Muslim women in Pakistan are enjoined to interpret the idea of the secular
state in a politically specific manner. For middle-class Muslim men and
women who identify themselves as progressive or secular, a major concern
is the conceding of public space to groups or individuals in the community
who are in a position to exert moral, social, and economic pressure on
other women and men. Thus the battle for the secular reflects a larger
battle over who has the right, in a democratic society, to represent the
identity or social category of Muslim in matters of political, economic, and
cultural issues. Can all members of society who consider themselves
Muslim or who are affiliated with Islam claim the right to represent this
social group, or is it the prerogative of a select group of men with claims to
particular knowledge? How will democratic representation be ensured in a

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social formation where the idealized relationship between individual and
state is mediated by family, community, tribe, and other affiliations? Seen
this way, a privatized notion of religion in which it is relegated to the
private sphere of family or community would not be secular since it would
bolster the rule of the powerful (mostly men) over women, religious
minorities, gays, and working-class people in these situations. “Secular”
for Muslim feminists is a politically charged concept that refers to a
contigent relationship between state and citizen. Thus it can mean a total
separation of politics and religion, as women in Pakistan are demanding in
their struggle for repeal of the Hudood Ordinances. Or it can entail state
intervention to protect vulnerable citizens as Muslim feminists in India
demanded during the famous Shah Bano case in 1996 when a Muslim
woman was deprived of financial support from her ex-husband because of
the culturalist interpretation of secularism. Therefore, while calling for
secularism, Muslim women appear to call into play the role of the state as
mediator between religion and politics, and the nature of this role could
vary in different contexts.
In Pakistan secular women’s groups have challenged Islamization in
two important ways. First, they reject the cultural particularism of the
Islamization project according to which differential legal and social status
is assigned to women and religious minorities. Thus the WAF and other
women’s groups emphasize universal human rights and international
conventions to argue that there should be no legal discrimination among
citizens on the basis of gender or religion. Part of this strategy is to re-
present the state’s Islamization program not as a social, political, and
economic reconstruction of society, as the governments of General Zia and
Mian Nawaz Sharif claimed,7 but as a project aimed at reducing the status
of women and minorities and depriving them of their rights. That is,
Islamization is seen as an anti-citizenship policy. Another aspect of the
strategy is to argue that it is, in fact, the responsibility of the state to
uphold the rights of citizens by disallowing (mis)interpretations of the
Quran and Hadith since this is against both Islamic justice and the consti-
tutional rights of citizens. This line of argument mobilizes both religious
and legal claims. Second, secular women activists draw on modern
theories of the state to insist that the Pakistani state override all other
claims to authority such as familial, tribal, or religious and act as a neutral
arbiter of interests within the nation when the rights of the individual
collide with the interests of the “community.” These arguments have been

transnational feminism as critical practice 69

 deployed by women and human rights groups not only to challenge
oppressive laws but also in situations of violence against women that
would conventionally be couched in the language of state protection. I will
examine these arguments further in the following sections.

gender, citizenship, and the law of evidence

In April 1982 the Council of Islamic Ideology (CII), appointed by General
Zia, presented to the government a new Law of Evidence to replace the
Evidence Act of 1872, supposedly to bring legislation into conformity with
Islam (Mumtaz and Shaheed 1987). The council’s draft prescribed that in
all cases two male witnesses, and in the absence of two male witnesses
one male and two females, would be required for proving a crime.8 In
specifically “female” matters such as menstruation or childbirth, “which
do not usually come under the direct knowledge of men,” the draft stated
that evidence of two or even one woman would be acceptable (Mumtaz and
Shaheed 1987). Also, the proposed law enabled a man accused of rape to
show, as part of his defense, that the victim was of “generally immoral
character.” Women’s groups vehemently protested the Law of Evidence,
which many saw as “potentially most damaging to women’s equity” of all
the Islamization measures (Weiss 1986, 101). In the two years from
October 1982 until October 1984, when the Law of Evidence was finally
passed, it remained the primary issue for women’s organizations. The high
point came in February 1983 when a women’s protest demonstration was
violently disrupted by police (Mumtaz and Shaheed 1987, 107). From then
on, organized women’s political activity became a serious public issue for
politicians, government, and other women (Weiss 1986).9 A measure of the
enormous significance of the protest was the unusually harsh response,
even for Pakistan, from pro-government ulemas (religious leaders) who
threatened to issue a decree of blasphemy against the women, pronounce
them unbelievers (kafira), and dissolve their marriages to Muslim men
(“Ulema’s Call to Women” 1983).
In their protests against the Law of Evidence women drew attention to
the discriminatory and un-Islamic effect of the law. They also invoked the
civil and secular role of the (idealized) nation-state in guaranteeing the
possibility of heterogeneous interpretations of religion and claimed their
rights as both citizens and Muslims to dislodge the monopoly of politico-
religious leaders to interpret the Quran. In a position paper published in
January 1982 in anticipation of discussions on the proposed Law of

70 amina jamal
Evidence, the WAF categorically rejected official claims that the legal
changes were meant to Islamize the existing law of evidence in Pakistan
(“WAF Position Paper on the Draft Law of Evidence,” in Mumtaz and
Shaheed 1987, App. 4A). Rather, the WAF termed it as an attempt to
diminish the legal status of women and religious minorities. The group
said that by equating the evidence of two women with one man the law
would reduce the status of a woman to half that of a man. Moreover, the
WAF said: “Not only is this law discriminatory it also finds no support
from any Quranic injunction.” To prove that Allah addresses men and
women equally in the Quran and accords equal rewards and punishments,
the paper cited an oft-quoted Quranic verse (Sura 5–33:35).10 It further
tried to establish the equality and personhood of women by referring to the
important testimonies by Prophet Muhammed’s wives Khatija, who was
the first to testify to the truth of the Prophet’s revelation, and Aisha, who
has been relied on to pass on authentic traditions of the Prophet. The
group argued:

Thus a single woman’s testimony not only changed the entire course of
history, but was also instrumental in convincing the Prophet of the truth
of his revelation. Nowhere in the Quran is a single woman disqualified
from bearing testimony. God calls forth all the believers, obviously both
men and women, to bear witness and depose the truth (Sur Al-Nisa Vrs
135). There is, therefore, no justification for interpreting other Aiyats
of the Quran in such a way as to relegate the evidence of women to
secondary position. (“WAF Position Paper on the Draft Law of Evidence,”
qtd. in Mumtaz and Shaheed 1987, App. 4A)

What becomes evident in this struggle is not only an attempt to legiti-

mate women’s demands for equality, but also to establish their
personhood by secularizing the religious. The WAF’s insistence on
appropriating religious texts is illustrated in the following instance, where
it tried to challenge traditional interpretations of the Quran:

The use of the word (amongst you—male gender) is relied upon for
disqualifying women from bearing testimony in certain cases, i.e.,
Hudood, and totally excluding the evidence of a single woman. The male
gender is used in many places in the Quran where the direction given
applies generally to all believers both men and women. The male gender
is used in a generic sense and not in any discriminatory way. Thus

transnational feminism as critical practice 71

 unwarranted and rigid interpretation in fact excludes women from
being believers and would have very serious consequences. (“WAF
Position Paper on the Draft Law of Evidence,” qtd. in Mumtaz and
Shaheed 1987, App. 4A)

In its arguments for women’s rights, the WAF also seized from Islamist
modernists and secular nationalists the right to diagnose social problems
associated with modernity and to propose its own solutions for the
establishment of a moral social order. The WAF, therefore, asserted its
own, gendered definition of “social chaos” and “immorality” that would
ensue from relegating women to a secondary status in society and that
could be averted through establishment of women as equal members of
society. It stated:

Since the message of Islam is peace and equality, any laws formulated
which do not conform to the spirit of Islam will weaken the moral fibre
of society and result in dissatisfaction and frustration amongst the
people. It is repugnant to the spirit of Islam to exclude one half of the
believing population from the equal status and position that is the right
granted to them by Islam.

Any move to introduce the law which institutionalizes a reduced status

of women would expose women to injustices and leave them entirely
unprotected from any offence committed against them. (“WAF Position
Paper on the Draft Law of Evidence,” qtd. in Mumtaz and Shaheed 1987,
App. 4A)

In the above statement we can see a productive use of “equality” to enable

more egalitarian readings of Islamic injunctions than are possible within
the literalist methods of interpreting scriptural texts, as many ulemas
employ in Pakistan. In spite of the women’s struggles, the Law of Evidence
was eventually passed, although in a watered-down version, in 1984.
However, the struggle against it continues.

unsettling “private” and “public”

One of the most contentious discursive moves of feminist groups in
Pakistan in relation to citizenship and democratic rights is their efforts to
establish the Muslim woman as sui juris, that is, women’s rights to legal
personhood, autonomy, and independent decision making. This indicates

72 amina jamal
an attempt to establish women as individuals in a society where prevalent
representations of “woman” are situated in constructs of “family,”
“community,” and “honor.” In discursive efforts to push women into the
private sphere of the family and home, proponents of Islamization
frequently use the terms “girl,” “daughter,” or “ward,” thereby denying
women’s legal status as adult individuals who have the capacity to give
consent or to enter into contracts. Through persistent protests against
court decisions, publicizing “family” actions to control individual women,
and protesting against discriminatory laws and social practices, groups
such as the WAF have successfully managed to keep the issue of women’s
legal status unsettled and controversial in Pakistan rather than being fixed
by the particular configurations of religion and law that Islamization has
produced.
This is evident in the continuing campaign against the practice of so-
called honor killing. Secular women’s groups in Pakistan routinely couch
their protests not in the language of violence against women, and therefore
of state protection for victims of male or family violence, but as an issue of
compromised citizenship arising from an ambiguous relationship between
state and civil society. An illustrative case is the campaign the WAF and
other groups organized around the most publicized case of honor kill-
ing—the cold-blooded murder of twenty-seven-year-old Samia Imran in
April 1999 in the office of her lawyers Asma Jahangir and Hina Jilani, at the
behest of her enraged family. The case caused a huge outcry throughout
the country, especially over the failure of police to make any arrests and the
hesitation of the state to provide security for human rights lawyers Asma
Jahangir and Hina Jilani, who were threatened by supporters of Samia’s
family (Press 1999).
Women’s and human rights groups described Samia’s murder not as the
issue of violence against women but as an “outrage in Pakistan’s human
rights history and a matter that had shaken ‘all concerned and conscien-
tious citizens’” (Press 1999). Apart from the issues of safety, there was
indignation that the incident was “an open challenge to the government
and institutions of law enforcement” (Press 1999). In a press statement a
group of human rights organizations stated that:
The deafening silence maintained by the government and State institu-
tions on this incident is also a matter of grave concern for all citizens.
No section of the government has condemned the murder or the

transnational feminism as critical practice 73

 campaign against women’s rights and human rights activists. We
demand of the government to abandon the policy of being a silent
observer in this matter and provide protection to human rights organi-
zations as well as the entire staff of AGHS.11 We demand of the govern-
ment to put aside all personal, factional and political interests and
frame tough laws to eliminate the abhorrent and totally un-Islamic
practice of “honor killings” including Karo Kari. (Press 1999)

Human rights activists, including feminists, based their arguments on

differentiating between state and religion, on the one hand, and tribal
tradition, on the other. In this representation the state was constructed as a
humanist neutral arbiter and tribe as “anti-women, undemocratic and
incompatible with universal human rights norms” (“Protesters” 1999).12
They said the government should not deny to women the rights that were
guaranteed by religion, as well as the constitution, and urged the state to
implement the various international conventions and agreements on
women’s rights that it had signed (“Protesters” 1999). The ensuing events
in the legislature and in the press illustrated well the contestations over
state, gender, and citizenship. These were played out in the discourses of
legislators wavering between the demands, on the one hand, of women
and human rights groups for state accountability and, on the other hand,
those of ethnic and religious groups determined to retain control over
authority derived from dominant assumptions of customs, tradition, and
honor. When a resolution was presented in the upper house, the Senate
became so contentious that it had to be redrafted repeatedly between 29
April and 3 August 1999. The resolution was defeated after a lengthy
debate that at times threatened to explode into physical violence among
senators. The death of the resolution was widely seen by women, human
rights groups, and supporters of secularism as underlining the weakening
state authority in Pakistan and the increasing privatization of the public
sphere of citizenship.13 In condemning violence against women within the
family, as well as those women who are endangered by their activism, such
as Asma Jahangir and Hina Jilani, women and human rights groups called
for strengthening state authority against informal authority invested in
family, community, and tribe. In this debate the substantiality of the state
is seen to be at stake as different groups vie to configure and strengthen
(or weaken) state authority in line with their own visions. Women’s groups
called for a stronger state to exert its modernizing influence in the private

74 amina jamal
arena; and, in so doing, they received little support from either politico-
religious parties or secular nationalists. Thus the historical experience of
Islamization, which necessitated bourgeois women’s reexamination of
their relationship with the state, has also led to a reappraisal of their
relation regarding secular nationalist modernity. As illustrated by the
Senate debates in the Samia case, Islamization as played out in the space
of public politics and parliament has revealed the cracks in the relationship
between women activists and self-styled modernist nationalists. The past
few years, therefore, mark a shift in middle-class professional women’s
subjectivities in relation to the project of nationalism (Jalal 1991; Mumtaz
and Shaheed 1987).14
By unsettling traditional demarcations of home and street, by challeng-
ing both modernist nationalist and Islamist constructions of private and
public, by going international, beyond nation-state limits in their struggle
for universal rights, middle-class women in Pakistan are in some ways
challenging the role assigned to them in Chatterjee’s definition of the
project of anticolonial nationalism (1993). To gauge their success or failure
we need to highlight, in addition to changes at the material level, what
Sinha refers to as women’s “rhetorical agency” in constructing new subject
positions through appropriation of modernity (1999, 208). Such agency
can be properly apprehended by paying closer attention to the ideological
and political dimension of women’s struggles in specific situations rather
than its legislative aspects (Sinha 1999). As Sinha shows in the case of
Indian women organizing in the Child Marriage Restraint Act (Sarda Act)
of 1929, discursive constructions and historical acts of discursively
constructed subjects cannot be separated; rather, they transform each
other. It is by underlining this transformative link that we can understand
the process of subject production as historically contingent. Sinha shows
that organized women constructed fresh subject positions for themselves
that contested the reformist claims of both colonial and nationalist
modernity. Following Sinha, one can argue that bourgeois women’s
activism against the nationalist project of Islamization in Pakistan marks a
politically transformative moment. Central to this moment is activist
women’s holding out, through their emphasis on universal human rights,
democracy, and global feminism, the ideal of a new citizen-subject that
could transcend not only the differences of gender, class, religion, and
ethnicity but also the nation-state and its insistence on cultural national-

transnational feminism as critical practice 75

 ism.15 Through this process also, elite and middle-class women were able
to create an opening that allowed them to reconfigure their relationship to
the project of nationalist modernity (Sinha 1999). Thus Pakistan elite
women have evinced a different set of what Sinha terms “rhetorical
choices” in constructing nascent forms of selfhood that are contingent on
the historical conjuncture of Islamization and globalization, as well as the
transnational human rights activism that has emerged in response to the
political, economic, and cultural dilemmas arising from this conjuncture.

Conclusion

The contemporary political ideological conjuncture calls for more nuanced

readings of the public space of nation-state, transnational politics, and
global capitalism within which feminist theory and practice have to situate
themselves. I have therefore argued that a transnational feminist account
of women and Islamization in Pakistan can only be provided through a
deconstructive reading of the agonistic relationship of Islamization and
feminism. My understanding of deconstruction has drawn on the work of
Gayatri Spivak, who suggests that a deconstructive stance must be
“unexcusing, unaccusing, attentive and situationally productive through
dismantling” (1993, 146). In an observation that is particularly pertinent to
my study, Spivak problematizes the proliferation in decolonized space of
political claims derived from the legacy of imperialism: nationhood,
constitutionality, citizenship, democracy, socialism, and even culturalism.
While these regulative political concepts have their roots in Enlightenment
Europe, women’s deconstructive reading of their use in specific contexts
of struggle can illuminate that feminists can make them serve the emanci-
patory needs of their own political context (Spivak 1993). Spivak accom-
plishes this by juxtaposing a text of French feminist Hélène Cixous against
that of Algerian feminist Marie-Aimee Helie-Lucas as a way to assess the
relevance of French feminist theory to the grassroots world of Algerian
feminist politics. Helie-Lucas holds special significance for the Pakistani
context since her work relates to the project of the network Women Living
Under Muslim Laws, which operates in Pakistan as Shirkat Gah, a promi-
nent women’s research and activist group and founding member of the
WAF. In Spivak’s reading the “internationalist” nature of Muslim women’s
struggles in Algeria becomes a defiant gesture that displaces signifiers

76 amina jamal
such as “nation” and “home” and destabilizes anticolonial nationalisms by
calling into question their ability to fulfill their liberatory claims for all
those who are theoretically included in the concept of the nation. She
argues that the face of postcolonial feminism must look “outward” in
order to challenge the repressiveness that underlies the postcolonial nation
and nation-state. Thus the “internationalism” of activists such as Helie-
Lucas of Women Living Under Muslim Laws both disrupts and exceeds the
internationalism that is rooted in nation-state or workers’ struggles
(Spivak 1993, 162). In so doing, it demonstrates the use of both strategic
essentialism and persistent critique (Spivak 1993, 162). Therefore, for
Spivak, Helie-Lucas, in calling for internationalism, is not just invoking
universal sisterhood or universal rights of the individual, but she is calling
into question “the essentialized notions of home as a basis of woman’s
identity in exogamous societies where home is in fact a radical exile fixed
by her male owner” (Spivak 1993, 162). It is an attempt to disrupt the
regime of power/knowledge that upholds ideas about “home,” “family,”
and “nation” and, through these, the repressive construction of “woman,”
“daughter,” and “wife.” As Spivak suggests, we should read this kind of
internationalism as being oppositional to the nationalist project that is
repressive of woman in the nation-space.
Consequently, I have tried to read elite women’s appropriation of
universalist and essentialized notions of woman and citizen as a
counterhegemonic move aimed at shaping the public/political space in
Pakistan in such a way that new subject positions could be located from
which to challenge patriarchal nationalism thinly veiled as either modern-
ism or Islamization. In so doing, I have attempted to offer a reading of
feminist discursive practices in Pakistan that suggests a fresh engagement
of women with both Islam and modernity. I propose that such a reading
takes us beyond the Islam versus modernity debate by enabling Muslim
women to pose another question: What discursive conditions of “Islamiza-
tion” make it necessary for women in Pakistan to privilege discourses of
universal (Western) modernity despite their problematic epistemological
and political connotations?

notes
A draft of this essay was presented for discussion at the Ford Faculty Seminar at
the Five Colleges Women’s Studies Research Center, Mt. Holyoke, in November
2003. I am grateful to the FCWSRC and Ford Foundation for according me the

transnational feminism as critical practice 77

 privilege of being the Ford Associate in Global Women’s Studies College at
FCWSRC during autumn 2003. I want to thank all the associates and other
colleagues who challenged me with their insights, comments, and suggestions
in this process.
1. I use the concept of state advisedly in this essay. Poststructuralist scholars draw
on Michel Foucault’s work to suggest that we understand the state not as an
edifice that stands above society but that its nature derives from the practices of
government rather than the other way round. Timothy Mitchell (1991) shows
that the state is the metaphysical effect of power arrangements. Mitchell
proposes that the state needs to be analyzed as a structural effect of power, that
is to say, not as an actual structure but as the metaphysical effect of practices
that make such structures appear to exist apart from and above individuals.
2. This is discernable in the works of self-identified Muslim women writing from
a variety of feminist positions ranging from scholarly expositions. See, for
example, Mernissi 1992; Moghissi 2000; and the extreme and bizarre outpour-
ing of Canadian self-styled “Muslim Refuse-nik” in Manji 2003.
3. For a useful analysis, see Herald Publications, February and March 2003.
4. In January 2004 the Musharraf government and MMA concluded lengthy
negotiations after which the MMA supported the passage of a highly controver-
sial 17th Amendment to the constitution that legitimizes Musharraf ’s power as
well as the unilateral constitutional changes his government introduced. For
the MMA’s attempts to lead populist politics and its appropriation of public
action against the U.S. war in Iraq, see Dawn, such as Staff Reporter, 6 January
2003, and Staff Reporter, 23 March 2003.
5. For detailed accounts and analysis of the WAF’s formation and history, see
Mumtaz and Shaheed 1987; Gardezi 1997; and Weiss 1998.
6. The concept of secular is highly contentious in Pakistan since many of the
ulemas (religious leaders) insist on translating it into Urdu as “ladeeniyat,”
meaning without, or antireligion. This makes it complicated because Pakistan
is an “Islamic” state, and all constitutions since the country’s founding have
stated that no law should be repugnant to the Quran and the Sunnah (practices
of the Prophet). Since the regime of General Mohammed Zia ul Haq, this
“repugnance clause” has been strengthened to state that all laws should be
brought into conformity with Islamic provisions. More recently, President
Musharraf ’s use of the word “secular” in reference to his vision of reconstruct-
ing Pakistan led to such an uproar among the politicoreligious parties that a
government spokesperson had to make a public denial that it had been used.
7. Mian Nawaz Sharif, who was a protégé of General Zia, was Prime Minister of
Pakistan from 1990 to 1993 and 1997 to 1999.
8. Exempt from this are cases covered by the Hudood Ordinances and any other
special law.
9. Anita M. Weiss notes that women’s protests in Lahore and Karachi in 1983
broke a “veil of silence which had fallen over Pakistan” since the execution of
Z. A. Bhutto in 1979 (1986).

78 amina jamal
10. Sura 5–33:35 as cited in the WAF position paper reads:
For Muslim men and women
For believing men and women
For devout men and women
For true men and women
For men and women who are patient and constant
For men and women who humble themselves
For men and women who give
In charity, for men and women
Who fast (and deny themselves)
For men and women who
Guard their chastity, and
For men and women who
Engage much in God’s praise
or them has God prepared
Forgiveness and great reward.
11. AGHS is the law office of Asma Jahangir and Hina Jilani. The letters represent
the intials of the four women lawyers who founded the organization.
12. I am grateful to AGHS for providing access to their clipping file on the Saima
case, and to Dawn (Kimachi) for their files on women’s issues and Islamization.
These clipping files are the sources for some of the news reports and news
articles cited without page numbers in this essay.
13. Since coming to power in 1999, General Pervez Musharraf has condemned
honor killing and declared it a crime; however, the practice continues unabated
due to lack of implementation. See “Musharraf for Debate on Hudood Ordi-
nance: Honour Killing a Crime,” Dawn, 11 February 2004, 1.
14. This is also reflected in Pakistani activists’ efforts in recent years to build ties
with progressive groups in India in the face of mounting militarism between
the two states.
15. Compare with earlier campaigns such as those around the Family Laws in the
1960s. The change I argue that occurred in women’s struggles during Zia’s
regime was not simply a political strategic change but also a subjective one.
While bourgeois women in the 1960s couched their demands in terms of a
tradition versus modernity debate, the present-day struggles avoid this
language in their unequivocal demands for universalism, pluralism, and gender
neutrality from the state.

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