Breaking Down Barriers: Pakistan Sees An Increase in Women’s Right Activism
Demanding an end to violence against women and gender minorities, thousands of women staged protests throughout Pakistan. The Taliban movement in Pakistan has increased the threats that the women who marched faced in the days that have passed. In order to make the case that the women had committed blasphemy—an accusation that has been regularly used as a weapon against minorities in Pakistan, where it has led to vigilantes killing the targets—proponents of women’s rights altered a video of the event.
Pakistani women held what they refer to as the Aurat (Women)’s March—an annual series of rallies that started in Karachi in 2018—to commemorate International Women’s Day this year. The demands of this year’s Aurat March, which took place in at least seven cities across the country, included protection from widespread violence, easy access to healthcare in a country where almost half of women suffer from malnutrition, and the fundamental economic justice of safe workplaces and equal opportunities for women. The COVID pandemic has made crises, such as gender-based violence, worse in Pakistan and other nations where women were already perceived as being particularly vulnerable.
However, the extremist reaction, which included violent protests in the streets, a Taliban statement denouncing the women for “actively spreading obscenity and vulgarity,” and a coordinated disinformation campaign on social media targeting the Aurat March organizers and supporters, highlights how unsafe, violent, and exclusionary Pakistan is for the majority of its 101 million women. Pakistan is among the world’s 12 worst performing nations according to the most recent Women, Peace and Security Index, which gauges women’s empowerment in their homes, communities, and societies. According to the most recent Pakistan Demographic and Health Survey, 28% of Pakistani women had “experienced physical violence” by the time they were 50 years old. Even so, it is unclear how widespread violence against women is in Pakistan because there are no reliable national statistics. The growing opposition to women’s activism highlights the necessity of both their movement and dispelling the prevalent patriarchal narrative about religion, which incorrectly characterizes feminism as hostile to Islam.
Even though Pakistani women endure agonizing suffering, moralists and realists in foreign policy should be concerned about this stark injustice in the world’s fifth most populous country for the obvious reason that more women are included and treated equally contribute to a more peaceful world. Research indicates that states with higher levels of gender equality act less violently when there are international disputes. The overwhelming body of research also demonstrates that including women in peace processes increases their sustainability. In Pakistan’s case, attaining gender equality is essential to the nation’s long-term development as a resilient democracy that can satisfy the needs of its citizens, effectively combat violent extremism, settle its disputes peacefully, and contribute to the stabilization of a region that continually poses a threat to international security.
Reaction, Not Prevention, in the Face of Violence
The women’s rights demonstrations last week were especially poignant because of the recent violence in Pakistan. When a mother ran out of petrol in September while driving her two small children on a highway, two men sexually assaulted her; one of Pakistan’s most influential police officers accused the mother of encouraging the crime by driving at night. Protests across the country erupted in a storm, drawing attention to gender-based violence, including a wave of attacks on transgender women.
The highway attack was the most recent in a string of crimes committed over decades to reignite a largely reactive national conversation about gender-based violence. In December, the government passed a new anti-rape ordinance that promised more severe penalties for offenders, such as chemical castration, and expedited trial times for rape cases in special courts. Similar calls have been made for policies like national hotlines, shelters, legal assistance, and psycho-social support for victims in response to the increase in violent attacks on women during COVID-19. Even with the potential importance of these steps, the country’s response to violence against women does not address its root causes in order to shift toward prevention.
Leading academics and women’s rights activists in Pakistan evaluated those reasons last month in a new USIP working group on gender issues in Pakistan. They stated that women are more susceptible to violence because of the structural cause of inequality that is the exclusion of women from Pakistan’s social, political, and economic institutions. Compared to men, women and girls have a 22 percent lower literacy rate. Despite making up 49% of Pakistan’s population, women only work for roughly 22% of the nation’s workforce and earn 18% of its wages. In the economy, women only make up 5% of senior leadership roles. In both rural and urban areas, women vote far less frequently, and they make up only 20% of the parliament. Women make up less than 2% of the police force and have a glaringly low representation in the nation’s higher courts.
The financial reliance of women on their fathers, brothers, or husbands is a major contributing factor to their susceptibility to violence. Women are traditionally expected to handle all home chores and are discouraged from working outside the home. Women are prevented from participating in the formal and informal economies by unwelcoming work environments and public areas. The small percentage of working-age women make up the informal economy, which is more susceptible to shocks from the outside world like the pandemic and pays pitifully little. Women are more vulnerable to violence and unable to flee because of men’s monopoly on household income and possessions and the idea that women should put up with violence in order to maintain the family.
According to the participants in USIP’s gender working group, these gender disparities are reinforced by the patriarchal attitudes prevalent in Pakistani society. These attitudes inevitably permeate state and political institutions. The police officer’s accusation of the woman who was sexually assaulted on the highway is indicative of the institutionalized misogyny present in both the political and governmental spheres. Therefore, despite the fact that laws prohibiting child marriage, workplace harassment, domestic abuse, “honor” killings, and acid attacks against women have been passed by both federal and provincial legislatures, they are still mostly unenforced.
The Way Ahead: Balancing Islam and Feminism
Therefore, a more significant shift in gender mindsets is necessary in Pakistan, and since 2018, men and women have been organizing the Aurat March to achieve this goal. The Aurat March has been limited to a few cities, despite its goal of uniting members of marginalized communities, including low socioeconomic groups and religious minorities. In rural areas, where gender inequality is more pronounced, it has not yet gained traction.
The movement is facing harsh criticism from Pakistan’s news media, religious scholars, established politicians, and the general public, which has been heightened by the backlash this month from the Taliban and other groups. The Aurat March was officially denounced by the provincial assembly of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa last year, and politicians have lodged complaints against it with the police and courts. The movement is criticized for being “un-Islamic” and for advancing a “western agenda.”
The critique directed towards the Aurat March originates from an oversimplified binary that regards Islam and feminism as incompatible concepts. Mainstream interpretations of Islam that employ a patriarchal cultural lens and routinely ignore feminist narratives found in Islamic traditions have solidified this false dichotomy. In Pakistan, the religious narrative has assimilated patriarchal cultural concepts to such an extent that individuals who criticize patriarchy face accusations of irreligion. Since religion is fundamental to the identity of the majority of Pakistanis, both individually and collectively, it is difficult to ignore such accusations. Therefore, until women’s rights movements like the Aurat March incorporate feminism, modernity, and Islam into their narrative and involve progressive religious scholars, they are likely to remain divisive, misinterpreted, and ineffectual. Failure to maintain a connection with religion will prevent the Aurat March from reaching a critical mass in Pakistan for gender justice.
This discrepancy affects broader advocacy and development initiatives in addition to social movements. Moreover, religion was not examined in USIP’s first roundtable discussion on gender inequality and violence as a factor in gender injustice or, more crucially, as a possible reform strategy.
For many generations, Muslim women have worked to reconcile Islam and women’s rights in Pakistan and around the world. Asma Barlas and Dr. Riffat Hassan have established a solid foundation for Islamic feminism in Pakistan by significantly contributing to the reinterpretation of Qur’anic texts from a non-patriarchal perspective. Furthermore, it is instructive to read about Ayesha Aziz, an activist for women’s rights, an Islamic scholar, and a teacher in Afghanistan. The promise that Islamic feminism holds for women’s empowerment in Pakistan is highlighted by Aziz’s achievements in establishing trusting relationships and finding common ground in religious values with Taliban officials while advocating for women’s rights.
Building on the research of academics such as Hassan and Barlas, feminist narratives about Islam should be made widely known as an immediate next step towards promoting gender justice in Pakistan. According to Pakistani-American scholar Fazlur Rahman, the longer-term challenge is to systematically address the growing divide between those who understand Islam but do not understand modernity and those who understand modernity but do not understand Islam. By providing both groups with a common ground of engagement, Islamic feminism can act as a springboard and advance the Islamic Republic of Pakistan toward greater gender equality and, eventually, universal peace.
