Imagining the “Muslim” Woman

Increasing numbers of urban middle- and upper-class Pakistani women are veiling and participating in piety movements, ¹ which have gained large followings in urban Pakistan and have set up faith-based institutions, schools, and private classes. ² Young college students are demonstrating growing religious sentiment and affiliation with ideas of Pakistan as an Islamic state, ³ and TV shows and newspapers are conducting a vibrant public discourse regarding gender and Islamic piety. While all of these factors mimic changes in other Muslim countries with resurgent Islamic movements, I argue that Pakistan’s postcolonial history impacts Pakistani revivalist movements’ utilization of well-known and widely accepted tropes of cultural corruption popularized by independence movements in pre-partition India, leading them to claim to be the bearers of an explicitly Pakistani culture as well as a “pure” Islam. A number of scholars have pointed to the growing tension between revivalist/“fundamentalist” women, and their non-revivalist counterparts in Pakistan. ⁴ These tensions center around questions of religious and cultural authenticity, ⁵ and can be seen operating in the public discourse surrounding the question of women and religion. Popular newspaper articles and TV shows challenge the legitimacy of revivalist modes of religious expression, asking whether revivalist reforms themselves are not “more cultural than religious or scriptural.” ⁶ These new debates around the well-worn issues of tradition and modernity offer telling insights into the constantly evolving roles and identities of women along the religious and cultural fault-lines of the modern Pakistani state.