ABSTRACT
Islamic proselytisation was a state-led initiative under General Zia-ul-Haq’s Islamic dictatorship (1977–1988) that exerted a major influence on Pakistan’s public sphere. In the post 9/11 era, and with the global expansion of the internet and of private media channels in the country, religious-oriented websites, magazines, radio and television programmes, quiz shows, and TV soap operas, as well as novels adapted for TV scripts, have contributed towards expanding the Muslim cultural sphere. This influence reverberates across social, political, and economic institutions and shapes debates about gender relations. This chapter offers a condensed summary on some diverse trends related to the performativity of women’s piety as observed in various media forms after 2001. In order to highlight how contested this terrain is, it contrasts the political discourses that are transcoded in other trends such as the rising expressions of sexuality and sexual autonomies by and within Pakistan’s feminist movements and which are received as anti-piety and anti-Islam, or counter-cultural. A variety of media sources are referenced to demonstrate the range of cultural spaces that are influential on these themes in Pakistan today.
