Tag: agency

When there is insecurity…

Islamisation of the law and society in Pakistan, under the rule of General Zia ul Haq, initially created new opportunities for women to negotiate change. Opponents of the General’s Islamisation of his rule and civil society actors were harassed, imprisoned or chose to leave the country. Civil space was empty in the face of the insecurity unleashed by the processes of Islamisation.

Enter women activists. For a significant period of time the insecurity created by the rapidly changing political, social and religious conditions gave women open doors to pursue change. Women demonstrated publicly, confronted the General’s rule, and challenged religious leaders. They were vociferous in their demands for equality for women under the law and in the constitution.

Scholarship in the Western academia has laregely focussed on how insecurity threatens men and their masculinity, arguing that this leads to exaggerated displays of masculinity. Those who do not display this sort of masculinity are then mistreated as part of this hyper-masculine behaviour.

But, is this always true? In the case of Pakistan insecurity saw space for women open up in new ways, opportunities created and grasped, and gender norms renegotiated. Women’s activism in Pakistan has continued as public advocacy with the government, society and religious authorities. Patriarchal norms were reinforced through the religious framing of the laws, but at the same time women reimagined the challenge to those norms. ‘… [R]esearch on masculinity in various parts of the world suggests that during times of social, political, and economic instability, women may be treated more equally or gain opportunities they did not have during more stable times.’ (Kucinskas and van der Dos, Gender Ideals in Turbulent Times: An Examination of Insecurity, Islam, and Muslim Men’s Gender Attitudes during the Arab Spring, Comparative Sociology 16, 2017.)

There is significant evidence that demonstrates how when men feel threatened they can resort to hyper-masculine behaviour which often involves violence against women. The increased rates of violence experienced by women during Covid bear witness to this. UN Women presented data that described violence against women as the unseen pandemic during that time. (https://www.unwomen.org/en/news/in-focus/in-focus-gender-equality-in-covid-19-response/violence-against-women-during-covid-19) France was just one country where there was a reported 32% increase in reports of domestic violence.

I am not wanting to deny this reality, that insecurity often sees increased violence against women. There is, however, another side to the story.

Research into several MENA region countries concluded that men who live with economic and political insecurity are often more open to gender egalitarianism, suggesting that this is because these men are dependent on women when under such pressure. Their research went on to indicate there is a strong relationship between political Islam and patriarchal gender attitudes. (Kucinskas and van der Dos, Gender Ideals in Turbulent Times: An Examination of Insecurity, Islam, and Muslim Men’s Gender Attitudes during the Arab Spring, Comparative Sociology 16, 2017.)

What happens when there is insecurity? Much greater attention must be given to context in examining and extrapolating outcomes. Complex dynamics at play between politics, religion, social organisation and patriarchy means the results vary significantly.

It’s not quite so simple

Problematising the challenges for gender equality is fraught because too much research takes a unidimensional approach to the issues. Some state ‘the problem is religion’, with both Christianity and Islam labelled as patriarchal constructs that hinder women’s development and equality. Of course if you belong to one of those religions you may argue otherwise. There are women within both of these faith traditions who argue cogently for the emancipatory nature of their faith. So yes, the problem is complex.

Too often simplistic articulation of the problem denies the agentic nature of women’s engagement with and through their faith tradition. Everything about women and how they negotiate their everyday is subsumed under a rubric of their passive socialisation within religion to oppose gender equality.

However, the question that is not answered is how do men and women live their faith differently? What are the negotiations they engage in everyday that enable them to navigate the complexities of the religious and social dynamics that mediate their lives? How do they bargain with their faith, its institutions and traditions, its beliefs and practices, to challenge the barriers they face?

Working in a women’s college in South Asia, I was struck by the different ways women’s education enabled them to negotiate with socially and religiously embedded structures. As an outsider looking in I could only see structures that appeared antithetical to gender equality. As I spent time living in the community, and in some small way began to see how women lived intentionally and purposefully rewriting the rules of those structures, their agency became evident.

I had heard outsiders describe education for these women as simply a ticket to a better marriage, dismissing the education they engaged in as largely meaningless. What I began to see, however, was the ability education gave these women to negotiate who they married, what they brought to the marriage and how the marriage was navigated. Yes, education enabled them to negotiate in their marriage and that was a meaningful was of challenging old norms that would otherwise dominate their lives.

It is too easy for us to disregard the acts of agency of other women because they are not as we imagine their world should be. The path of change can only be defined by those who must pioneer it. Simplistic articulations of problems can blind us to the change that is happening in women’s everyday negotiations and navigations.

Reimaging the future through formative experiences

‘Dreaming of an alternative reality is not merely a matter of inspiration. To even conceive of different realities, women must first question the given parameters of their current lives by, among other things, unravelling the composite strands of the current identity being imposed on them as an integral whole.[1]’

Moments of crisis can be a spark to turn dreams into action. When we explore the history of women’s activism in Pakistan, it was the crisis that engulfed women with the Islamisation of laws that sparked the collective response that saw the formation of the Women’s 

Action Forum (WAF). Crises that impact women can take individual journeys and bring them together in a collective struggle. The WAF became a platform to unite the individual voices of women and organisations for collective action. Women’s individual stories became part of a bigger story of women acting together to negotiate change in gender relations. 

Looking back on women’s activism Mukhtar Mai in Pakistan, Banaz Mahmod in the UK/Khurdish Iraq, Malala Yousafzia in Pakistan, Djamila Bouhired and Louisette Ighilahriz in Algeria, Tarana Burke and the #MeToo Movement, Rosa Parks in America, and the many, many other women from around the world, each of these women questioned the boundaries of their lives and dreamed of a different future.

In Kishwar Naheed’s poem, We Sinful Women, there is this profound movement from subjectivity to resistance. It captures the constraints and opportunities that attend the life of women in the pursuit of change 

It is we sinful women
who are not awed by the grandeur of those who wear gowns who don’t sell our lives
who don’t bow our heads
who don’t fold our hands together.

It is we sinful women
while those who sell the harvest of our bodies become exalted
become distinguished
become the just princes of the material world. 

It is we sinful women
who come out raising the banner of truth
against barricades of lies on the highways
who find stories of persecution piled on each threshold
who find the tongues which could not speak have been severed. 

It is we sinful women.
Now, even if the night gives chase
these eyes shall not be put out.
For the walls which have been razed
don’t insist now on raising again.[2]

Women foreground agency in resistance when formative experiences become the grist of change. 

[1] Shaheed, F. (2004). Constructing Identities: Culture, Women, Agency and the Muslim World (Vol. July). Lahore: Shirkat Gah. p. 11

[2] Naheed, K. (2004). The Distance of a Shout. Karachi: Oxford University Press. Translated by Rukhsana Ahmad.