journal article
LitStream Collection
The Problem of the Rebellious Religious Women: Pakistan, Gender, and the Islamic Revival
2019 Social Politics
doi: 10.1093/sp/jxz001pmid: N/A
Abstract Academic audiences and local commentators alike are perplexed by women’s participation in Islamic movements in urban Pakistan. Why are privileged women joining Islamic movements which call on them to limit their freedom at a time of growing economic and social opportunity? I argue that part of the answer lies in the formulation of Pakistani gender roles, and the ways in which Islamic movements interact with gendered ideas of virtues to offer women new modes of imagining themselves and their role in Pakistani society. Introduction Islamic movements calling for the implementation of a “pure” Islam based primarily on the sacred texts, the Qur’an and Hadith, are becoming increasingly visible in urban Pakistani settings, where Islam had previously been an unexamined background element of everyday life. These movements’ growing presence in urban Pakistan is reflected in numerous advertisements for Qur’an classes posted around Islamabad, Karachi, and Lahore, and an intensifying battle over religious authority conducted in TV talk shows, newspapers, and everyday encounters. Islamic movements call on their members to make themselves physically and socially distinctive in ways that reflect their religious and cultural authenticity. Sartorially, members of these movements often dress in the shalwar kameeze which are native to South Asia, and women who belong to these movements adopt headscarves and face-veils. Socially, individuals belonging to these movements often withdraw from “mixed” gatherings in which men and women socialize, stop attending events which feature music or alcohol, and condemn previously unexceptional celebrations on the grounds that they are mushabihat, or an imitation of non-Muslim cultures. These include birthdays, religious events which they position as based on “folk” Islam such as the milad (celebration of the Prophet’s birth), and a number of the ceremonies surrounding weddings. It might be assumed that these restrictive exhortations would be unpopular among middle- and upper-class Pakistani women who lead privileged economic and social lives, but large numbers of Pakistani women are responding and changing their daily practices to conform to these movements’ visions (Zia 2009). This is a time of unprecedented opportunity for urban Pakistani women, who are entering prestigious colleges and the white-collar workforce at ever increasing rates. Although gender-segregated college education was the norm during the period immediately following the 1947 creation of Pakistan, the most popular private colleges over the past decade have been co-educational, and women are prominent parts of their student bodies. In 2014, the Pakistani Medical and Dental Council, the regulatory body governing government medical schools, instituted a quota requiring that medical schools maintain a 50/50 gender split in their student bodies because women were outnumbering men when spaces were assigned on the basis of merit (Saleem 2014). At this time of growing opportunity, when women are making significant inroads into the white-collar professional careers that were previously dominated by their brothers, affiliation with Islamic modes of sartorial and social expression are also growing. A number of observers have noted that women’s opportunities to acquire religious instruction have grown substantially over the past two decades (Shaheed 2010). While religious gatherings, or dars, aimed at women have been a feature of Pakistani life since the formation of the country, there has been a significant intensification in efforts by religious movements to cultivate female members. The Jama’at Islami, the most prominent Pakistani Islamic political party, has one of the oldest programs catering to women (Iqtidar 2011), and holds both neighborhood gatherings and intensive summer courses for young women. The Al-Huda Institute, more recent and equally if not more popular, conducts daily classes at its women’s campuses, as well as numerous classes in residential neighborhoods. The Tablighi Jama’at, a movement focused on populist teaching and preaching among its members, organizes weekly gatherings to expose female members to movement-sponsored theology. Islamic movements’ outreach efforts introduce women to their exegesis of the Islamic sacred texts, the Qur’an and Hadith, in order to convince them to work for movement-promoted goals. As women become drawn into these movements, they devote more time to movement activities and to religious practices they might have previously neglected. Women’s voluntary participation in Islamic movements has puzzled both Pakistani commentators and academic audiences, who ask what women gain from participating in these unquestionably patriarchal movements. Two major streams of thought exist; the first focuses on transactional interactions in which women gain hidden benefits from their participation (Avishai 2008; Bartkowski and Read 2003; Boddy 1989; Griffith 1997; Haniffa 2008), while the second sees women engaging in agentive attempts to fashion themselves as pious subjects despite the potential harm to themselves (Mahmood 2005). Both of these strains of literature demonstrate an assumption that women in Islamic movements “do not quite own any agenda within Islamist movements that are largely supervised by men” (Aslam 2010, 418). The ethical self-fashioning approach concedes that women in Islamic movements might be acting in way that harms their interests from a feminist perspective, while arguing that this is a valid choice and that it is women’s formation of themselves as pious subjects that must take center stage in analyzing their participation. This article extends both of those analytical frameworks to pose a third possibility: I argue that women’s subjectification within Islamic movements leads to new, previously unavailable ways of imagining themselves as agents, and transforms their engagement with the everyday Pakistani patriarchy. I began research on Islamic movements and Islam in Pakistan in 2009 and have conducted over four years of participant-observation research, bolstered by numerous informal interviews, more than thirty formal interviews, four life-history interviews, and a survey. I draw on this research to argue that participating in Islamic movements allows women to develop new forms of subjectivity and new ways of imagining their social and religious responsibilities. Analysis that expresses perplexity at women’s participation in Islamic movements does not take into account Pakistani patriarchy, and the ways in which Islamic movements allow women to acquire a more agentive way of navigating their everyday encounters. It is not the content of women’s interactions that changes, but rather their approach to them. By opening up new ways for Pakistani women to conceptualize their social roles, Islamic movements expand the options available to women in Pakistan on the most personal level, that of how they see themselves in relationship to society at large. The term “patriarchy” has been used to understand “the process, structure, and ideology of women’s subordination” (Lorber 1994, 3). I employ it in this paper to refer to the ideological structures which position women as subjects who exist primarily to serve the needs of others, as well as the processes by which women are socialized to see themselves as subordinate subjects. In employing the term “Pakistani Patriarchy,” I am referring to the social constructs which position Pakistani women as irreligious as well as selfish when they prioritize their own needs and desires above those of their families. Shaheed (1986) has pointed out that many of these inequalities are the result of the “infliction of Islamic religious principles on pre-existing behavioral codes in Pakistan.” Drawing on Butler, I see the constitution of the subject as reiterative practice through which subjects are formed within discourse (Butler 1993, 2–4). This is a process of identification and disidentification, a temporal process which takes place through the subjects’ repudiation and articulation of norms (Butler 1993, 12). Subjectivation operates through a subject’s agentive affiliation and disaffiliation with norms over time (Butler 1993, 13). This lens is particularly productive when examining women’s participation in Islamic movements, in which they take on and live by new norms while repudiating some of ideals of virtue they used to live by. Women’s adoption of new techniques of discipline in Islamic movements demonstrate their agency, as well as causing shifts in their subjectivities (Mahmood 2005). I argue that women’s participation in Islamic movements’ classes leads them to articulate new norms within these classes. Their discursive affiliation with these norms, and their repudiation of many of the prior norms related to gendered virtue, lead to changes in female members’ subjectivities. Gender Roles in Pakistan Caretaking has been seen as women’s work globally, and women in the United States are expected to provide caretaking for both children and elders for free, or for very minimal wages (Held 2007; Kittay 1999; Tronto 1993). The incompatibility of this work with participation in the labor force has led to declining fertility rates as women attempt to balance child-care and paid employment. The situation in Pakistan is intensified by the common patrilocal residence pattern in which women often move in with their in-laws and provide caretaking or domestic services at home for their children, husbands, and elders simultaneously. The common expectation that daughters-in-law take over the provision or management of domestic services, including cooking, cleaning, and laundry for the entire household, also contributes to the burdens associated with virtuous Pakistani femininity. Pakistan is home to a variety of regional cultural groups and languages and cannot be represented as having a unitary culture. Cultural attitudes related to women vary significantly based on social class, regional affiliation, and urban/rural divides. At the same time, state-sponsored ideals of Pakistani femininity have led to the emergence of a hegemonic discourse about the ideal Pakistani-Muslim woman (Ahmad 2012). Pakistanis across class-location and identity-position internalize this discourse, because it has been part of their background ideology growing up (Ahmad 2012). A number of common threads unite ideas related to women across a variety of class backgrounds and regions (Weiss 2014). Pakistani social life is centered around family and extended kinship networks across cultural and class locations. The ideal family is imagined as an extended patrilocal household, headed by a married couple who live with their sons, daughters-in-law, unmarried daughters, and grandchildren (Weiss 2014). Ideologies surrounding this ideal family present women as responsible for the well-being of the entire household, and call on them to sacrifice themselves in pursuit of the greater good. The Pakistani family relies heavily on the unpaid and under-acknowledged labor of women in order to sustain “traditional” responsibilities to its elders and children. In most Pakistani cultures, women receive less than men with regard to food, health, and education (Barolia, Clark, and Higginbottom 2017). Young women performing the bulk of the labor are theoretically subordinate to their hierarchically senior female in-laws (including older sisters-in-law, mothers-in-law, etc.). While there are minor variations in family dynamics, daughters-in-law are expected to run households according to the wishes of their elders and hierarchical superiors, including their husbands. Women are expected to maintain marriages by being docile and strategically managing relationships. Several informants, most of them older women, told me, in the exact same words, that divorce levels were rising because “girls these days have no patience” (larkiyon main aaj kaal bardasht khatam ho gaya hai). The divorces they described, in which “girls” had no “patience,” included those in which young women refused to live with their in-laws, cook for extended families, and in one case put up with physical abuse. All of these behaviors, including deference to in-laws, performing household labor, and caretaking for older relatives, are thought of as culturally and religiously mandated. Women who are going through tough times during the early years of their marriage are told that enduring is necessary for both their long-term happiness, and as a religious obligation. Norms related to women are absorbed over time through reiterative practice; young women become aware of these norms as girls, and are socialized into them over time. A number of unmarried college-age women I interviewed, when asked about what they expected out of marriage, repeated the phrase: “It is necessary to engage in compromise” (compromise to karni hoti hai) when expressing their awareness that marriage might require them to sacrifice their career aspirations, and said that a good woman should not disrupt household relations. Women construct themselves as virtuous by engaging in self-sacrifice and the prioritization of the needs of their family over time. In their social role as daughters, they help their mothers either by assisting with managing servants, or taking over domestic chores. After marriage, they become key figures in the running of a household, including providing care for elders, looking after their children, cooking, and ensuring the smooth running of day-to-day life. Women who work outside the home often express their guilt at not being able to provide these domestic services. My informant Maheen, a woman who employed a cook, a nanny, and a housekeeper, told me that her school-aged daughters and her in-laws said she was a bad mother because she was not available to sit down to lunch with her daughters. Less privileged career women told stories of waking up at 5 am to make lunch for their in-laws before going to work. Women across Pakistani social classes and cultures see their virtue as reflected in their subordination to their families’ needs. Their self-construction as “good” women requires them to engage in reiterative practices of self-sacrifice and the prioritization of others in their family. These constructions of virtuous woman as self-denying are reflected in a number of media. There is a preponderance of TV advertisements aimed at women, in which impossibly slender and youthful mothers put food on a table for their pre-teen offspring, husband, and in-laws while modestly deferring credit for the meal to the cooking oil they have used. The selfish career woman, the woman who neglects her in-laws, and the young woman who dates unsuitable men without consideration of her family’s honor are staple villains of Pakistani TV dramas. They are contrasted to the well-behaved women who give up their careers for their husbands, change their dress and behavior to conform to the norms of his family, and patiently win over resistant in-laws. By articulating norms of self-sacrifice, Pakistani women are able to construct images of themselves as virtuous. These images of virtuous women are wide-spread, and survive even in second-generation diaspora settings (Afsharab 1989). Disobediently Pious Women Islamic movements’ gatherings for women seem, at first glance, to reinforce the values associated with ideals of women’s virtue as reflected through self-sacrifice. These gatherings draw on the cultural format of dars, which are familiar to most Pakistanis as gatherings where women go to listen to sermons on religious virtue. Dars have a long history and were historically offered to the women of a neighborhood when a religious scholar was visiting. Religious teaching aimed at women in South Asia emphasized the need for women to obey their husbands and live harmoniously with their in-laws, and many dars develop these themes as well as emphasizing the need for women to engage in ritual religious practices such as prayer or fasting (Minault 1998). These values dovetail neatly with urban Pakistani desires for obedient, respectful, chaste, and docile daughters, and young women are often encouraged to attend movement gatherings by families who are deceived into thinking these gatherings a form of dars. I often encountered new attendees at these gatherings who did not know that they were sponsored by a particular religious movement, but had come because they knew the woman who was hosting the event. Young women often start out attending Islamic movement’s classes at the urging of their families, who want them to go in order to inculcate them with the desire to protect their chastity, be respectful to their elders, and submit to their expected role within the family hierarchy. While all of these are values Qur’anic meetings promote, they go beyond them to encourage women to veil, increase their observation of ritual religious practices including performing ritual prayer five times a day, and limit their contact with men who do not fit the juristic category of mehrum (mehrum men include brothers, fathers, husbands, grandfathers, and uncles). These changes often dismay the same parents who sent their daughters to these gatherings, and after attending these classes, daughters often refuse to conform to their parents’ desires regarding their dress and social behavior. This behavior runs sharply contrary to long-standing South Asian beliefs that virtuous women’s public presentation should be governed by the expectations of their parents, husbands, and in-laws. Minault (1998) has documented instances where in the early 1900s, entire families of women stopped veiling because their families decided to alter their political and cultural affiliations. Parents who sent their daughters to movement gatherings feel deceived when the theology their daughters encounter encourages them to disregard their parents’ desires when they conflict with their religious practice. Women often encounter increasing pressure to stop attending movement gatherings after they start to veil. Ahmad (2009) describes one such case, and I saw many during the course of my fieldwork. My informant Komal, who was in her late twenties when I started my research, was one of these young women. She had joined an Al-Huda class at a time of domestic and financial turmoil for her family, and her parents had sent her to the class in the hopes that it would keep her busy, lift her depression, and give her a greater sense of spirituality. Komal’s attendance did alter her attitude toward her family’s circumstances, and she was a lot more cheerful, but she also began to veil first her hair, and then her face. Komal attempted to hide her veiling practices from her family, but when they learned she was wearing a face-veil, it came as a shock to them. Her parents forbade her from attending classes, culminating in a two-week period in which they confined her to her room in order to make her give up her new modes of dress and behavior. Stories of disobediently religious women represent a microcosm of the problem of female piety in urban Pakistan. Islamic piety movements’ incorporation of women as members in urban Pakistan is the cause of a contentious discourse among middle- and upper-middle-class Pakistanis which plays out in newspapers, TV shows, and everyday encounters. Pakistanis use the term “middle-class” to identify any stratum of society that is elite and non-feudal (Talbot 1998, 46). All of my informants fit neatly into this local category, and also self-identify as middle- or upper-middle class. The urban upper- and middle-class includes members of the civil service and military, the media, legal community, judiciary, NGO workers, and professional Pakistanis who work in medicine, education, and business (Siddiqa 2011). The class position of women in Islamic movements conditions the impact their changing self-presentation has on their interactions with their families. Historically, adopting face-veils and headscarves has marked lower-class status in urban Pakistan. During the 1960s and 1970s, Pakistan’s national urban elites rejected “traditional” forms of dress and behavior in order to keep pace with a global modernity (Jamal 2009). As part of this effort, sartorial standards shifted; men wore western-style business suits, and women colorful shalwar kameeze with dupattas, gauzy shawls worn over the shoulders. Wearing headscarves and face-veils became a marker of “the culturally left behind” (Jamal 2009, 20). Similarly, refusing to attend birthday parties, dance at weddings, and socialize with men evokes an atmosphere more closely associated with conservative village life rather than urban Pakistani settings. Komal said that her family’s greatest objection to her veiling was that no one would want to marry her because she no longer looked like she belonged, and that she had become “too extreme.” Public discourse among the Pakistani urban middle- and upper-class expresses surprise that women are rejecting the growing advantages of urban life in order to embrace gender segregation, veiling, and an increased personal religiosity that has as one of its primary tenets women’s submission to their fathers and husbands. Central to this discourse is the argument that women’s participation in these movements is an overall social ill, one which damages women as well as society at large. Pakistani commentators also start from the assumption that Islamic movements are dangerous (Shapiro and Fair 2010) and that women in religious movements are harming both themselves and society. Many English language (and therefore urban middle- and upper-class focused) newspapers and websites carry articles analyzing the harms that religious movements preaching to women cause. These movements’ outreach to women is positioned as “promoting extremism among middle-income groups” (Rana 2015). The extremism theme has been increasingly represented in newspaper articles since the San Bernardino shooting in 2015 as the female shooter Tashfeen Malik had attended Al-Huda classes. Most newspaper articles, however, do not hint at the almost unthinkable possibility of violence from middle- and upper-class Pakistani women (Siddiqa 2015), and instead frame Al-Huda in particular as alienating women. The word “alienation” often occurs (e.g. Ahmed 2010; Rana 2015), and is significant for its implication that religious movements are causing women to draw away from shared cultural values. Popular media often describes support for Islamic groups as signaling a person’s “fanaticism” (Shapiro and Fair 2010, 89). Some analysts claim that the plan of Islamic movements which target women is to create a new generation of Islamists who have been radicalized by their mothers, and one such work calls this “intelligently vicious planning” (Zahid 2016). A number of feminist Pakistani scholars have examined the “problem” of women in religious movements. These articles have started from the position that middle- and upper-class women are not “as some might expect, casting off … purdah and veiling” but are instead holding on to them (Jamal 2009, 10). These articles have questioned women’s reasons for this participation and have offered a number of answers. Works in this vein position women who belong to Islamic movements in contrast to Pakistani feminists and analyze their politics in relation to the Pakistani feminist movement. This formulation is easy to understand, as it focuses on the confrontations between the women’s movement and Islamist women in matters related to women’s rights in Pakistan. Religious political parties have often deployed their female members to defend their proposed restrictions of women’s movement and activities (Zia 2009). These include promulgation and defense of the now defunct Hudood Ordinance, which criminalized rape victims, and recent attempts by the Council of Islamic Ideology to abolish a minimum age for marriage. One of the primary conclusions of feminist discourse is that women who participate in Islamic movements, particularly politically active ones like the Jama’at Islami, are promoting anti-women agendas while taking advantage of the opportunities these movements offer for activism and mobilization (Jamal 2010). Feminists highlight the political nature of women’s seemingly personal turns toward religion, and caution that even those movements which do not promote political interventions increase the polarization been “good” and “bad” Muslim women (Zia 2009) and convert “matters of rights and social norms into sins and evils” (Shaheed 2010, 862). They point to the dangers of recent scholarship which attempts to find “feminist, modernist and even secular tendencies” (Zia 2009, 44) in the activities of Islamic movements’ female members. A number of works in this vein object to academic discourse which sees women’s participation in Islamic movements as reflecting their agency even if it results in their subordination (Aslam 2010; Zia 2009), and argue that Muslim women should be encouraged to “own, define and appropriate their agency for achieving goals that are progressive, and centre [sic] around principles of human development and pacifism” (Aslam 2010, 417). These works reduce veiled women to “symbolic markers of appropriated political territory” (Shaheed 2010), and object to their religious subjectivation on the grounds that it is bad for Pakistani women as a whole to submit to a religious governance of their affairs. At the same time, Pakistani feminists are aware that they have been unable to expand the class connotations of feminism in order to make it accessible to middle- and lower-class women (Shaheed 2010, 856). During my four years of fieldwork in Pakistan, I encountered very few women, even among the educated middle- and upper-class, who claimed to be feminists. The history of colonialism in Pakistan means that feminism is perceived as a western project, and it is rejected on those grounds by many Pakistanis (Shaheed 2010). Even among the privileged women who claim feminism, most still subscribe to the belief that virtuous women participate in public life subject to the permission of their families and exist under the authority of their parents. I met Saadia while attending a conference on women’s empowerment at the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad. She worked for a local NGO, and was vocal about the many injustices women in Pakistan faced. Speaking to a group of foreign visitors, she said that one of these was “when a guy and a girl get married, its ok if he says he has ex-girlfriends, but a woman is not supposed to have been in a relationship.” In a later conversation, she was telling me about an acquaintance of hers, who had “run wild” because “her father was a kind and gentle man, and she just took shameless advantage of that.” In contrast to the relatively elite position occupied by self-professed feminists, urban middle- and upper-class women affiliating with Islamic movements reject the “postcolonial modernity of the elite classes in Pakistan,” speak Urdu rather than English, and do not self-identify as upper class (Jamal 2009, 24). These women’s discarding of the short hair and western dress and language of their peers is tied to their adoption of an Islamic self, but also indicates their unwillingness to claim their class-position (Jamal 2009). In short, Islamist-identifying urban Pakistani women offer less-advantaged women a viable alternative to the dictates of Pakistani femininity, which can be onerous regardless of class position or regional affiliation. My informants, regardless of their movement-affiliation, often held offshoot classes for poor women, including their domestic help. The more senior women were also often approached by lower- and lower-middle-class women for religious guidance regarding domestic matters, including negotiating conflicts with in-laws and husbands. Islamic Movements, Women, and Subjectivity Pakistan-based Islamic movements draw on the Islamic sacred texts, the Qur’an and Hadith, in order to preach that women should prioritize their individual spiritual growth over service to their husbands, in-laws, and children. At the same time, these movements re-impose patriarchy on women by presenting their service to their households as part of their active spiritual engagement with God. Women in these movements perform many of the domestic chores that they did prior to joining these movements, but now evaluate them through the lens of their education in the Qur’an and Hadith. Instead of performing all of the tasks they did prior to joining these movements, women will often now draw on their learning in these movements to ask themselves if a given chore is “really” required of them by God. Previous scholarship on Islamic movements has sometimes constructed this as a form of “resistance” or an appropriation of religious language for self-serving ends. I follow Mahmood (2005) in arguing that this construction does not give sufficient weight to women’s own statements about their reasons for participation in these movements, and presupposes a form of feminist consciousness that women themselves are unaware of. Moreover, my work documents many cases where women’s participation in these movements resulted in their adopting greater responsibilities at home, or engaging in incredibly costly conflicts with their families. During the course of my participant-observation research, I attended women’s gatherings sponsored by religious movements across a broad ideological spectrum. Three of the most prominent are Al-Huda, Tablighi Jama’at, and Jama’at Islami. All three of these movements have large memberships. Al-Huda’s unofficial classes for women can be found in nearly every urban neighborhood in Pakistan. Tablighi Jama’at and Jama’at Islami have similar levels of penetration into urban Pakistani society. I selected these movements for their general accessibility to middle- and upper-class women in Islamabad; the informal and widely dispersed nature of these movements’ gatherings render them attractive to women with limited access to transportation, and their timings (generally during the day when women’s husbands and children are at work or school) make attendance easy for housewives. All of these factors lead to these movements drawing women whose families are not necessarily affiliated with revivalism, and results in attendees whose attendance is enthusiastic, voluntary, and sometimes at odds with their families’ desires. I gained entry to these movements through social contacts established in other venues; many friends and family members had loose connections to these movements through extended kin and friend networks, and were able to furnish me with introductions. In each case, the leaders of the gatherings were willing to have me attend with the proviso that I keep an open mind and consider their arguments from a personal as well as an academic standpoint. Al-Huda was founded in 1994 by Dr Farhat Hashmi, who holds a PhD in Hadith Sciences from the University of Glasgow. Al-Huda is a purely education focused movement, and promotes the idea that women need to learn to translate and interpret the Qur’an and Hadith, so that their experience of religion is unmediated by religious authorities. Tablighi Jama’at and Jama’at Islami both date back to pre-partition India and were founded in the early 1900s. Unlike Al-Huda, Tablighi Jama’at and Jama’at Islami incorporate women into movements with larger male memberships. The primary activity of Tablighi Jama’at are missionary tours in which women can only participate when accompanied by a male relative. Women’s gatherings are aimed at encouraging them to play a supportive role in the movement. Jama’at Islami’s primary aims are to bring about religious reform through the political arena, and women’s education in the movement promotes its founder’s interpretation of the Qur’an, and the need for women to assert “Islamic” identities. These three movements demonstrate a wide spectrum of engagement with women. At the same time, their interventions into women’s lives produce similar effects on women’s social and religious activities. Each of these movements holds gatherings in houses in various neighborhoods across Islamabad, and in other large cities, in order to recruit and train women. These home-based gatherings are designed to be accessible to newcomers to the movement, while also maintaining a distinct movement-specific brand. It is these home-based gatherings targeted at neighborhood women which were the primary sites of my research. Unlike formal movement classes and outreach aimed at young women, where students are often sent by their parents, participants in neighborhood-level gatherings attend because of their own interest. As neighbors, women often talk before and after gatherings in order to share insights about the teaching in the dars. One common feature of the teaching in these movements is the idea that women are individual moral agents responsible before God for any sins they commit, or any virtuous action that they undertake. Movements encourage women to shepherd their families along the paths of righteousness. During my research, I observed sermons in all three movements exhorting women to get rid of televisions and music and educate their children in “Islamic” behavior. Sermons stressed that these changes were essential for women’s family’s spiritual well-being, and that they should be carried out even if parents, husbands, in-laws, and children resisted. The other common theme developed in these movements was that women’s obedience to their husbands came after their obedience to God, and that their obedience to their husbands was required as part of their submission to God. I attended my first Jama’at Islami sermon during the summer of 2009. Held in a posh house in the expensive F-6 sector of Islamabad, the dars featured Aaiza, a female speaker who started her sermon on the afterlife by saying “Your husband wants ikhlas1 from you. Before your husband, it is God’s right that you should demonstrate ikhlas toward him (God).” As a religious concept, ikhlas refers to the idea that actions undertaken for God’s pleasure should be undertaken for him alone and not to please others. The idea that there could be conflict between God’s desires and women’s husbands’ was one Aaiza often emphasized, particularly when speaking of the need to refrain from attending weddings that featured music, and other social events. In a later gathering, Aaiza said “God has given us only one master. When we are good to our parents or our husbands, we do this only for God.” The theme that pleasing God was more important than “worldly authorities” was repeated during a Jama’at Islami intensive summer gathering I attended later that summer. The teacher at this dars often counterpoised a woman’s duty to her husband with her duty to God by offering the example of a woman who wanted to please her husband and then emphasizing that it was even more important to please God. One of my most frequent research sites was an at-home Al-Huda gathering in the F-11 sector of Islamabad, which was taught by Rabia, a middle-aged woman who had been teaching the class for a year. Rabia often emphasized that her students needed to direct their actions toward God rather than men: “Change the way you think. Do everything for God. Even face cream, when applied thinking that the body is God’s amanat [lit. trust], is for God.” Rabia’s students often mentioned that they found the class important not for what they learned, but how they learned to think about their actions. In the words of Urooj, a mid-forties homemaker who lived with her husband, mother-in-law, and three children: “We have only now started to acquire taqwa [piety]. Now our lives are for one purpose. We used to do the same things before, but now we do them for the right purpose.” During interviews, more than half of Rabia’s twenty-women class mentioned to me that they did not think their daily practice had changed as much as the intentions they brought to it. Unlike Al-Huda and Jama’at Islami gatherings, Tabligh’s weekly dars were less focused on sacred texts, and more on the necessity of women participating in the movement’s mission by participating in and sending their husbands on missionary tours. These gatherings often mentioned the complementarity of religious men and women: “Every important word in religion has been done by women and by men.” These sermons often positioned women as the moral educators of men. Once, one of the male speakers told a story about a young bride who had refused to allow her husband to come home when he had tried to abandon a Tablighi gathering in order to spend time with her. The Tablighi gatherings emphasized that women were equal partners in the “work” of Tabligh, and that sometimes they needed to motivate their husbands and children into participating in movement tours. Women were also encouraged to abandon their domestic responsibilities to participate in movement-work. Sermons emphasized that women who had young children at home could leave them in the care of grandparents in order to go on tours with their husbands. I met a number of women traveling “on jama’at” who had left small children behind. These women were met with nearly universal approval from other Tablighi women for an action which would be almost unthinkable in most other Pakistani contexts. The constitution of female subjects in all three of these Islamic movements is a process in which women actively repudiate norms they had previously lived by while acquiring new ones. This is an agentive process which is initiated by women upon their contact with the teaching and preaching in revivalist movements, and while the sartorial changes women adopt are the most visible, it is the new subjectivities they develop within these movements that most significantly alter their engagement with urban Pakistani society. Women in Islamic movements across the ideological spectrum repudiate the idea that it is mere submission to the desires of their hierarchical seniors that makes them virtuous, and instead come to interrogate their practices from the perspective of a “pure” Islam. This ideal Islam is developed through their absorption of movement teachings, which center women’s actions along individualistic lines, leading women to re-frame the self-sacrifice they engage in for their families as being ultimately for their own spiritual benefit. Movements also encourage women to reject the authority of their husbands and in-laws when it seems to conflict with their understandings of faith. While these alterations in women’s subjectivities might seem subtle, they lead to significant consequences in terms of the way the female members of Islamic movements are perceived by their peers. The idea of the “pure” Islam women draw on to justify their changing religious practices is closely tied to the history of the global Islamic revival, the origin of which can be tied to the 1920s and 1930s, and the founding of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt (Lapidus 1997). These movements call for a rejection of traditional beliefs and practices as accretions to the Islam promoted by the Prophet Muhammad (Lapidus 1997). In Pakistan, Islamic movements draw on colonial history to develop a narrative that positions Islam in Pakistan as having been corrupted by co-residence with Hindu religious communities in India, and then later by the British colonization of India. These reformers argued that many popular religious practices, such as worship at the shrines of sufi saints and celebrations tied to these saints, were the result of an incorporation of Hindu religious practices into Islam (Osella and Osella 2008). Tabligh Jama’at and Jama’at Islami emerged in 1926 and 1941 respectively and were among the groups that contributed to the creation of these images. Indian religious reformers spoke of rejecting Hindu traditions to create a cleansed Islam and a return to the Islam practiced by the Prophet Muhammad and his companions (Metcalf 1992). One Jama’at Islami female dars leader encapsulated this approach to religion, which is common across contemporary Islamic movements in Pakistan: “The question is going around, what brand of Islam should we follow? We follow the brand of Islam made in Mecca and Medina, which is 1,400 years old! It is not contemporary, and it is eternal.” An essential part of Islamic renewal, in these eyes of these movements, is recreating Islam at the level of domestic space. Women are enlisted in these movements primarily to bring changes to their own and their families lives. When women in Islamic movements alter their domestic practices in ways that impact their families, or draw on sacred texts to delineate women’s rights or refuse household work, these demands strike at the heart of Pakistani patriarchy. Changing Behaviors and Conflict Urban Pakistanis who do not participate in religious movements see female members’ piety as actively impious because of their turn toward an individualistic way of interacting with the world. Members of these movements are taught to recalibrate their acts of service in order to align them with their idea of what pleases God rather than their families. They see the domestic disharmony which results from their changing attitudes to be a reflection of their piety, and they think it is their role to guide their families to the “correct” forms of religious practice. This puts their performance of piety at odds with the general idea of religious virtue which circulates in Pakistani cultures. In Pakistan, where women’s individuality is understood to be subordinate to nearly all family demands on them, women are called on to sacrifice a great deal in the name of family harmony. The de-stabilizing potential of women’s changing subjectivities in Islamic movements women manifests in the discomfort many urban Pakistanis show related to women’s participation in these movements. The general middle- and upper-class discomfort with women’s participation in Islamic movements is reflected in a number of discursive formulations calling into question the “true” piety of women in religious movements. Among these is a popular joke referring to Al-Huda (lit. guidance) as Al-Juda (lit. the separation) for the distance it creates between husbands and wives. I first encountered this joke when doing pre-dissertation fieldwork and heard it many times thereafter from both men and women. Another common statement which circulated among my Pakistani informants was the idea that women who veil do so not out of religious conviction, but in order to “do fashion” and appear different from others. I also often encountered the idea that women who participate in these movements are more likely to get divorced than “normal” Pakistani women. My informant Andaleeb was a U.S.-educated lawyer looking for a potential bride for her brother. She asked me if I knew of anyone suitable “He’s become religious, so we need a girl who wears a headscarf. Do you know anyone who is not too religious?” I asked how she defined too religious, and she said “She shouldn’t go to dars or refuse to attend parties. Do you know, some of these dars-going women say that it is not their religious responsibility to look after their in-laws?” Women’s changing ritual religious behavior is not the only cause of the controversy over their involvement with religious movements. The amount of prayer, fasting, Qur’anic recitation, and charity an individual observes are flexible, and alter significantly over the life-course. Older individuals, both men and women, often increase their performance of ritual religious behavior as they finish raising their families and earning a living. It is the “alienation” from society that women begin to demonstrate which causes consternation over their joining, both from general and feminist audiences. For feminists, it is Islamic-movement-affiliated women’s support for illiberal causes that is a matter for concern, while urban Pakistanis object to social disruptions caused by women turning to Islamic movements. Both sets of critics are united in their condemnation of women’s changing forms of dress, which signal them out as set apart from the rest of the urban elite and are read as signifying disapproval of women who dress differently (e.g. Abbas 2009). Perhaps not coincidentally, both changing social behaviors and altering forms of dress can destabilize the family, the preservation of which is culturally understood to be a woman’s highest goal. Women’s increasing observance of ritual prayer can sometimes interfere with their domestic work. Women in their twenties, thirties, and forties are responsible for performing or managing the bulk of household chores and are also the largest age group at religious gatherings. Rabia’s student Sonia described one such situation after a class stressing the importance of prayer: “Before, I used to start cooking at noon so that lunch could be on the table when my husband and children came home. I would skip the afternoon prayer because I was busy working. Now, I just put lunch on the table late. My mother-in-law doesn’t like it, but my prayer has to come first.” This kind of prioritization of self seems selfish to many Pakistanis, and Sonia, like many other Pakistani women, said that before attending Al-Huda classes she had thought it was more virtuous to sacrifice her prayer to get lunch on the table. As women participate in Islamic movements, their sense of priorities changes, and they come to reject traditional responsibilities in favor of their newly acquired religious sensitivities. Rabia often modeled this for her students. In one class, she mentioned that her husband’s relatives were visiting, and that she was happy that veiling meant that she could not do housework or tend to them. Her student Nargis justified this blatant breach of Pakistani hosting etiquette by referring to a tradition of the Prophet that limits guest rights, saying “You should tell your guests that after three days they have to fend for themselves.” Later that month, when Safia skipped a class because her husband’s brother was visiting with his family, Rabia exasperatedly asked “Why do you people do this? You can leave guests with an excuse for three hours.” Safia later explained that she did not feel comfortable leaving her in-laws in order to attend class, as they would complain to her husband. Female members across religious movements draw on the teaching in these movements to refuse to attend common social gatherings, including birthdays, wedding ceremonies with music and dancing, and any social event in which men and women are seated in the same room. A number of my Jama’at Islami informants told me that if they went to a wedding and found “un-Islamic” practices occurring there, they would leave right away. Sometimes, this refusal to participate in family events caused conflict with their less-committed husbands. A woman in Aaiza’s class asked her about whether or not it was ok for her to attend her nephew’s birthday, explaining that it was important for her husband that she attend. “No” said Aaiza, “I do not recommend that you attend. We should imitate the ways of others. Birthdays and anniversaries and saint’s days [urses], these are not part of our tradition.” Here, Aaiza was drawing on Pakistani revivalists’ common understanding that events inspired by non-Muslim cultures should be boycotted on the grounds of origin alone. All of my research subjects reported uncomfortable interactions with extended family, which were primarily centered around socialization. Asma, an older woman involved with Tablighi Jama’at, had a supportive family, but chose to hold a simple wedding for her son, and this upset all of her extended female relatives: “All of the women in our family said we had been waiting for his wedding, we were going to come, we were going to come … they became very angry.” Middle- and upper-middle class weddings in Pakistan are occasions for large extended family networks to gather, and generally involve three or more main celebrations. Asma’s son’s wedding, in contrast, involved a marriage ceremony held at a mosque, and a dinner for immediate family in her home. While women’s rejection of the common celebrations of their neighbors and extended family are driven by their readings of sacred texts and enthusiastic adoption of the recommendations of movement leaders, they have their origins in the reformist ideology that surrounded the creation of Pakistan in 1947. Male reformers associated with the Pakistan movement attempted to mold women to represent the emergent nation of Pakistan, framing “uneducated” women subject to “foreign” Hindu traditions as a threat to Indian Muslim civilization (Thaper 1993).2 These activists’ proposed reforms projected their authority into the zenana (women’s quarters), where women had previously been autonomous (Minault 1998, 6), and targeted women’s distinctive traditions marking out “birth, growth, illness, marriage, and death” (Metcalf 1992, 10). Women’s customs were singled out for both their defiance of specific principles of the sharia (Islamic law), and for their foreign origin (Metcalf 1992). While contemporary revivalist women’s rejections of these activities are agentive and signal their adoption of new forms of identity, this history complicates the restrictions on social events that my informants advocate. Of all the changes women make to their customary socialization and guest practices, it is their adoption of veiling that seems to cause the strongest negative reaction among their families. Most of my subjects reported high levels of conflict related to their veiling. These conflicts were highest for my Al-Huda subjects, who joined the movement without the support of their husbands, and lowest for my Tablighi informants, who usually joined the movement after their husbands were committed to the movement. Al-Huda informants from conservative families reported a pattern in which their adoption of greater displays of modesty, including wearing their dupattas over their heads3 or limiting their interactions with men garnered approval, but their donning of the headscarf or face-veil drew strong reactions from their families. Komal’s parents approved when she started to wear her dupatta over her head,4 but her transitioning to a head-scarf led to strong reactions, and her adoption of the face-veil was a factor in their confining her to her room for two weeks. Contentious encounters surrounding women’s veiling are not limited to unmarried women. Rabia described an interaction in which her in-laws confronted her and told her that her veiling and refusing to attend social events meant that her husband effectively did not have a wife “They said, either give him permission to marry [i.e. take a second wife], or leave him.” Her husband also tried to convince her not to veil, but eventually became reconciled, and no longer opposed her participation in the movement. Conclusion Three strains of overlapping discourse at different levels of analysis contribute to the construction of the “problem” of the Islamic-movement-affiliating women, consisting of local urban Pakistani discourse, Pakistani academic and feminist discourse, and international academic discourse. Each strain expresses a generalized anxiety over how to understand women’s participation in Islamic movements. The discourse over women’s participation in Islamic movements among middle- and upper-class Pakistanis expresses a general befuddlement as to the reasons women would participate in these movements. Pakistani intellectuals and feminists construct “Islamist” woman as a social problem preventing the implementation of a secular feminism in Pakistan. Meanwhile, international academics concede that the closest one can come to explaining women’s participation in these movements is to see them as either serving hidden self-interest, or as rejecting self-interest in order to cultivate pious selves. Each of these discourses demonstrates a common underlying assumption: women’s participation in Islamic movements harms their gendered interests. In propounding this assumption, these different levels of analysis elide the realities of Pakistani women’s everyday lives, and the patriarchy with which they grapple as subjects prior to their involvement in Islamic movements. The hidden assumption of these discourses has been that involvement in Islamic movements increases and reinforces the background patriarchy of Pakistani society. This assumption reflects the belief that Pakistani ideals related to the subordination of women are endorsed by Islamic movements, who will merely intensify demands on women and reinscribe patriarchy as mandated by a “pure” Islam. A close reading of women’s learning in Islamic movements demonstrates that this is not that case, and that women adopt new ideas regarding their domestic responsibilities while discarding old ones. These changing beliefs regarding religious virtue are created through the reiteration of new norms and the repudiation of old ones, and are bolstered by the knowledge of the Qur’an and Hadith women acquire in the classes of Islamic movements. Ahmed (2011) has drawn a distinction between a men’s Islam of books and theological rulings, and a women’s Islam based in tradition and compassion, and has argued that a greater knowledge of men’s Islam might be useful for women. I go beyond this idea in order to argue that adopting a “men’s Islam” through the classes of Islamic movements allows Pakistani women to think of themselves as individuals with personal priorities that can take precedence over the needs of others. Their reiteration of the norms related to their individual responsibility before God, and their repudiation of norms related to self-sacrifice lead over time to a vision of themselves as individual moral agents. Women in Islamic movements justify this turn to individualism by drawing on the widely accepted authority of the Qur’an and Hadith. Their adoption of face-veils and head-scarves is off-putting to many of their peers, but is widely accessible to lower- and lower-middle-class Pakistani women. Its accessibility makes identification with these movements and their values possible for non-elite Pakistani women, and this offers them options that secular feminism in Pakistan is unable to. By positioning women as individual moral agents responsible for their own spiritual growth and religious conduct, Islamic movements are creating new images of the virtuous Pakistani women. Where before, this woman had necessarily been subject to her family, Islamic movements reimagine the Muslim woman as subject primarily to God. Her domestic responsibilities are re-framed as moral obligations which are part of an individualistic personal relationship with her creator. This formulation positions women as individuals who are religiously required to prioritize self-growth over some domestic commitments, and challenges notions of women’s virtue as linked to submission to parents, husbands, and in-laws. Islamic movements’ calls to women, predicated as they are on the idea that women are individuals unaccountable to social collectives, provides female recruits with new ways of understanding their roles in Pakistani society. I argue that the rapid growth of Islamic movements among urban Pakistani women can be explained by their promotion of ideas of women as individual moral agents. These movements do place demands on women which they present as divinely mandated, but analysis which starts from this fact neglects to examine the background of widespread patriarchy within which Islamic movements operate. One significant factor in the rapid growth of Islamic movements in Pakistan is that, despite appearances, they offer women a reprieve from the background patriarchy of urban Pakistani society. Meryem F. Zaman is a sociocultural anthropologist whose research interests include gender, transnational social and religious movements, and South Asia. 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They provide for flexible displays of modesty, and Pakistani women will often shift their dupattas to cover their hair when they hear the call to prayer, head into a marketplace, or enter the presence of an elder. 4 Pakistani women often shift their dupattas to cover their hair in order to denote respect—for example, women will often put dupattas over their heads when they hear the call to prayer, or when entering the presence of an elder. © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected] This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)