Showing posts with label afiya s. zia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label afiya s. zia. Show all posts

2 Mar 2019

Faith and Feminism in Pakistan

(Folio Books, Lahore, 2018)


The new book by feminist scholar and activist Afiya S. Zia - Faith and Feminism in Pakistan (2018) - asks a very simple question (with a post-Freudian undertone): what do women in Pakistan (and other Muslim majority countries) desire most; religious agency or secular autonomy? 

That is to say, do they want identities shaped by and within a theocratic order that come with ready-made meaning and promise fulfilment; or do they want the godless freedom to create their own non-essential selves and individual values that may very well prove to have tragic consequences?

In Nietzschean terms, the choice is this: live piously - or live dangerously.

Dr. Zia has clearly chosen option B. Indeed, she lives more dangerously than almost anyone I know and I very much admire her for that.* I also think she's right to contend that female piety - be it Muslim, Christian, or Jewish in origin - presents no serious challenge to the patriarchal structures that produce it. 

However, where she and I differ is that she seems to believe that her own choice is one that all women can (and should) make for themselves and that as more and more women affirm secular autonomy this will lead to a radical transformation of society. I'm sceptical about this. For not only do I not subscribe to any kind of universal project of liberation, but I don't really undertstand why exceptional women - and Afiya is an exceptional woman - fail to understand their own exceptionality and wish to think collectively in terms of gender or class, for example.        

Having said that, what do I know about any of these things - particularly within a Pakistani context? Not much. Whereas Dr. Zia has spent many years thinking through these questions - and has done so not from the (relative) safety and security of professional exile in the West, but whilst continuing to live and work in Karachi.

Thus, whilst this book is full of sophisticated theory and analysis, it's also very much shaped by direct experience. For Afiya, the personal is the political; but the political is also personal and that lends her text an intense sincerity that puts to shame those who pride themselves on their ability to discuss everything with intellectual reserve and objective irony.   

The book is forthright in its assault upon those scholars in the West who not only turn a blind eye to the manner in which the reactionary forces of religious miltancy encroach upon and often violently usurp secular spaces, but seem to think there's something rather thrilling about this in terms of radical alterity and cultural diversity, etc. 
 
As Dr. Zia notes in her introduction, by advocating the "anthropological recovery of Muslim women's non-liberal agency" [3] those who now think it radical (or profitable) to promote religious identity politics betray years of hard work by feminists who have fought for secular rights and freedoms.

I think that's a brave thing to say: for she's arguing that it's not just Islamism that has set the women's movement back in Pakistan, but also the lack of active support from liberals outside the country who are afraid of exposing the "misogyny and hatecrimes enacted or inspired by faith-based politics" [3] lest they should be accused of Islamophobia. 

Push comes to shove, I suspect that Dr. Zia prefers the open enmity of the former to the spinelessness of the latter who find what she says a bit awkward at times. Her real anger, however, is reserved for those diasporic scholars of South Asian, Middle Eastern, or North African origin based in Western institutions, who regard themselves as postsecular and postfeminist and spend much of their time mocking secular women's rights activists in these regions as Western collaborators or native informants

This, as Afiya notes, is ironic to say the very least ...

And whilst these retro-Islamist scholars insist that they are "simply reviving and interrogating a different way of being by show-casing the interiorised subjectivities of [...] pietist Muslim women", the danger is that their project "runs the risk of rehabilitating [...] patriarchal and nationalist agendas" [8] that seek to purge all rights-based initiatives and movements of Western influences.   

In a series of powerful passages Dr. Zia concludes:

"Those critics who keep pretending that religion and local cultural codes are not the immediate sources that limit women's progress or freedoms and who argue that women may be comforted by introspective spirituality and should negotiate with the tools available only within their domestic and communal locations, are missing the points being raised by [...] secular feminists." [178]

"Neither is it adequate to argue that it is not religious politics but really something called 'liberal-secularism' that is the source of all political damage in Muslim societies. Instead, it has been in the political subversion of Islamic law and reversion to the universalist and 'secular spirit' of the Constitution that has allowed an expansion of material and legal rights for women in the last decade." [178]

"Those advocating an anti-Modernity, anti-enlightenment, nonliberal, supposedly alternative Muslim politics need to acknowledge [...] that in practical terms, feminism and human rights activism is being successfully silenced in Pakistan. If there is a contest between feminism and faith-based politcs, it is quite clear which is the front-runner." [181]

And clear, too, who are are ultimately the real losers: the women and girls of Pakistan ...


* Note: it's worth keeping in mind that there are female activists and politicians in Pakistan who live under constant threat and require around-the-clock protection.

Readers interested in a guest post on Torpedo the Ark written by Afiya Zia (in 2014), should click here


25 Jul 2018

Donkey Punch: On the Politics of Zoosadism


According to the author and journalist Fatima Bhutto, it makes little real difference who wins the election held today in Pakistan amidst predictable violence and claims of widespread vote-rigging. 

It is, she says, the nation's supreme tragedy "that such a young, hopeful, promising people are offered this glut of shoddy candidates", all eagerly playing their role in a political circus - including the ex-cricketer turned sinister clown, Imran Khan, peddling a morally flexible manifesto and relying upon the support of the powerful military establishment. 

Khan's mixture of militancy and misogyny is shocking and depressing enough. But most shocking and depressing of all is the following tale of animal cruelty reported by Ms Bhutto ...

On 17 July, Karachi-based supporters of Khan's political party - the PTI  - tied a donkey to a pole: 

"They punched its face till its jaw broke, ripped open its nostrils, and drove a car into its body, leaving the animal to collapse, having been beaten to within an inch of his life. Before they left, they wrote 'Nawaz' (the name of the former prime minister) into its flesh, seemingly inspired by their leader, Imran Khan, who has taunted [his opponents in the PML-N] as ghaddhay or donkeys. The donkey was rescued by the ACF Animal Rescue team, a private organisation, who noted that, even days later, it could not stand up on its own because of the ferocity of its torture. It soon succumbed to its injuries, an innocent creature beaten to death for entertainment."

As if that wasn't horrifying enough:

"A day later, another donkey in Karachi was mercilessly attacked, this time the skin on its face was ripped off, the flesh on its forehead torn apart till all that remained between its eyes was a pulpy, bloody hole."

What, really, is one supposed to make of such disgusting acts of cruelty?

Bhutto worries that it is yet one more sign of the horror to come in her homeland. And maybe she's right: for zoosadism is one of those behaviours often considered a precursor to psychopathic violence; i.e., research indicates that madmen who can cheerfully punch a donkey in the face, are far more likely to punch their fellow man in the back of the head.


See: Fatima Bhutto, 'Imran Khan is only a player in the circus run by Pakistan's military', The Guardian, (24 July, 2018): click here to read online. 

Thanks to Afiya Zia for bringing the above article to my attention. 


18 Jul 2016

The Case of Qandeel Baloch

How em looking?


The murder of 26-year-old model and social media celebrity Qandeel Baloch by a sibling attempting to restore and secure his family's honour, has succeeded only in elevating her status and bringing genuine shame onto himself, his religion and his nation.   

Whether by accident or design, Miss Baloch transformed herself from just another Kim Kardashian wannabe and pouting selfie-queen, into a political activist and pop-feminist icon within the deeply depressing Islamic dystopia that is Pakistan today.    

Her death, far from being senseless - as some liberal commentators like to claim - actually makes perfect sense within the misogynistic logic of a phallocratic regime. As Afiya Zia writes, it's simply a continuation of the "historic and routine act of eliminating female bodies that are defiant of the male-defined socio-sexual order".

She continues: "The more threatening that fitna-potent women in Muslim contexts are, the more chances that they will be physically eliminated to prevent rupture of the order." There was, thus, a grim inevitability that Miss Baloch's fate would be a tragic one. And hardly surprising that it would be at the hands of a close male relative. 

Obviously, something needs to change: we need to stop thinking of young girls as symbols of family honour, or pieces of family property; we need to dispel the fear and loathing that continues to surround female bodies; and, as Afiya Zia, suggests, we need "more women like Qandeel to scale up the discomfort of those privileged hypocrites and morality-mongers who fear sexual women more than murderous men".


Note: I am grateful to Pakistani feminist and critic Afiya S. Zia for sharing her recently written and as yet unpublished article, 'A Problem Called Qandeel', with me and consenting to my quoting from it.

 

6 Dec 2014

Is Revisting the Past Ever Worth the Effort? - A Guest Post by Afiya S. Zia




In the beginning, it may even be flattering: emails from boys you hardly knew in fifth grade who seek you out on the web from across decades and oceans. It's sweet to have them recall their little crushes. 

And what about those comrades with whom you lost touch and who - now that their children have left and spouses are about to follow - seek out the comfort of old feminist networks ...?

Then there's the return to unfinished intellectual projects that invariably leads one back to academia; this time in the vain attempt to prove that citizenship in the real world affords more valuable lessons than all the theory churned out by those who remained as permanent residents within ivory towers. There's an undeniable sense of righteous joy in exposing those who like to pretend that they never sold out to the corporate world; in showing how they too are complicit with capitalism because knowledge is an expensive business after all.

But is revisiting the past ever really a good idea, or even worth the effort?    

Overeager ex-boyfriends from school showing all sorts of interest in your professional development and the intimate details of your personal life, quickly start to become a bit creepy; nostalgic curiosity ends in cyber-stalking. 

And old comrades are now often just old and troubled by the spectre of loneliness. They used to ask what could be done to overthrow patriarchy; now they simply want to know where all the good men have gone and how they might find one for themselves.  

Meanwhile, the path to redemption via further academic accomplishment leads nowhere; one is little different from all those others who scramble up career ladders and chase success. We all conform and play the same game at last.

Having said that, there remains, of course, the shining hope of revisiting the past; i.e. that one just might reconnect with someone whom one should never have let go in the first place.

Also, crucially, it affords one the opportunity not to put things right, but, rather, to repeat mistakes - only this time without regret. For one looks back and travels back not in order to correct the past with the benefit of hindsight, but to make an affirmation of all that's been and of one's own life to date, complete with all its many errors and multiple stupidities.


Afiya S. Zia is a feminist scholar, activist, and provocateur based in Karachi. She is the author of Sex Crime in the Islamic Context (1994) and has also published numerous essays and articles. She is currently completing a new work entitled Faith and Feminism in Pakistan, whilst studying for a Ph.D. at the Women and Gender Studies Institute (University of Toronto). 

Ms Zia appears here as part of the Torpedo the Ark Gastautoren Programm and I am very grateful for her kind submission of a text written especially for this blog and, indeed, for the recent photo taken in Chelsea Market, NYC.