Discourses of race, gender and sexuality have always served an important ideological function within imperialist projects. The current phase of American imperialism, characterized by the Global War on Terror is no exception, as evidenced by the cynical deployment of 'women's rights' by the Bush regime to legitimate the bombing of Afghanistan. Given the contemporary geo-political context, the current imperialist project requires the deployment of increasingly explicit forms of Islamophobia, and 'queer rights' have become the latest front in this purported battle between Civilization—liberal modernity as embodied by 'the West'—and Barbarism—as connoted by Islam. Within this neo-Orientalist discourse 'the Muslim' enemy is today configured as both misogynyst and homophobic, with an essentialized Islam comfortably posited as the roots of his illiberalism. This illiberalism is then presented as both the mark and the evidence of Islam's radical alterity from Western civilization, an alterity that cannot be tolerated and must, in fact, be destroyed. Like colonial and imperial projects in the past that relied on 'civilizing missions' (cl)aiming to 'save brown women from brown men' (for a counter argument see Spivak 1999), the new imperial project thus uses the imperative to 'rescue' Muslim queers (as well as women, of course) as an ideological cover for racist wars abroad and xenophobia at home.

The main thrust of this essay is to show how misleading the contemporary mainstream Western discourse on 'Islam' and gender/sexuality is, and the degree to which it is premised on an essentialized and monolithic 'Islam' emptied of history, diversity, complexity, and dissent. I begin by highlighting some of the constitutive elements of this discourse and the central role played by certain key neo-conservative Muslim intellectuals in ventriloquising a racist Islamophobia. I then juxtapose this discourse and its claims with a close reading of two cases involving women and sexual minorities from Pakistan in order to show how a framework which begins with the prior assumption that something called 'Islam' determines the status of women and sexual minorities in 'the Muslim world' is simply not intellectually useful and is in fact politically dangerous.

Everybody Loves a Good Native (Informant)

Of course, this new ideology of Empire requires its organic intellectuals or 'native informants' and, as always, collaborators are readily available. Enter Irshad Manji, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and Salman Rushdie, along with a slew of lesser-known 'experts'—writers, artists, etc. Rushdie was one of the earliest supporters of the Global War on Terror, claiming in a Washington Post op-ed that what lay behind the September attacks was not international politics, but a mindset that abhorred Western freedoms, in particular the freedom for women to wear miniskirts (and, presumably, the freedom for men to enjoy women wearing miniskirts[1]).[2] Since then, he continues to be one of the strongest voices within the clash of civilizations framework, undeterred by the fall in popular support for the war in Iraq.

Irshad Manji shot to instant stardom in 2003 with the publication of her book The Trouble with Islam.[3] A "narrow polemic," filled with inconsistencies, selective citations and brash generalizations, nevertheless—or rather, therefore—continues to be popular.[4] Manji also carefully cultivated a persona to go along with the book—that of a young, smart, and brash queer Muslim woman. The cover of the book features a head shot of Manji in partial profile looking plaintively up (presumably towards God/Allah); the title of the book is superimposed on a band which cuts across the cover at a point where it strategically covers Manji's mouth. The symbolism is anything but subtle, but then subtlety is not a hallmark of this new Orientalism.

This posturing has paid off—The New York Times declared her "Osama bin Laden's worst nightmare."[5] Manji is the recipient of the first-ever 'Chutzpah' award bestowed on her by Oprah. And what is it that Manji has the 'chutzpah' to do? Why, to confront "her fellow Muslims on their blatant anti-Semitism, for the misleading clarion call against American imperialism, for silence in the face of terrorism, for the abuse of Muslim women in conservative Islamic communities."[6] The list is revealing; it is in essence a reflection of the various aspects of neocon discourse: Zionism (characterized by unqualified support of Israel, the coding of Palestinians as 'terrorists,' and the vilification of Edward Said as someone who stifled reasoned debate on the Israel-Palestine issue[7]), as well as unqualified support for U.S. imperialism based on the humanitarian imperative to 'save' Muslim women from the violence of their religion and their men. The urge to cite Gayatri Spivak has never been greater.

Manji's endorsement by such icons as Salman Rushdie and Thomas Friedman underline her status as an organic intellectual of empire. In no less than The New York Times, Manji proclaims that "[w]hile every religion has its fundamentalists ... only in Islam is literalism in the mainstream, a recipe for generating hatreds that can spawn suicide bombers."[8] One of her most valuable contributions to neoconservative politics is her critique of liberal multiculturalism that, according to her, prevents liberals from exercising their moral imperative to civilize the barbarians. Belying the claim made in the subtitle of her book ("A Muslim's Call for Reform in Her Faith"), which appears to intimate that her audience are 'her fellow-Muslims,' she asks 'Westerners' (i.e., White non-Muslims): "Will you succumb to the intimidation of being called 'racists,' or will you finally challenge us Muslims to take responsibility for our role in what ails Islam?"[9] This implies, of course, that the Muslims are a monolithic community, devoid of any internal complexity and in fact incapable of effecting change from within; in order to make this claim, she (like Hirsi Ali) needs to gloss over the ubiquitous dissent in 'Muslim' countries across time and space, and render invisible the thousands of (Muslim) activists fighting for progressive values in these places.

Western academia has rewarded Manji handsomely for her 'courageous' stand against her essentially illiberal religion and community.[10] She was invited to head the "Moral Courage Project" at New York University which "aims to develop leaders who will challenge political correctness, intellectual conformity and self-censorship." This, despite the fact that critics have pointed out the deep and consistent inaccuracies—conceptual, historical, cultural, geographic—that characterize Manji's discourse.

Like Manji, Hirsi Ali's (and Rushdie's) authority lies in her status as insiders—authentic Muslims and, crucially, brave and courageous 'victims' of Islam who dare to raise their voices against its horrors and against those who would defend these horrors in the name of multiculturalism or other liberal 'canards.'[11] They are also unabashed in their veneration of the West, which they credit with giving them the agency that 'Islam' refused them. This status—not just as an authentic native informant, but as an authentic victim of 'their' religion/culture/civilization—allows them to get away with shoddy scholarship and also, importantly, with saying things that liberal 'politically correct' discourse will not allow Whites/non-Muslims/Westerners to say. In effect, their ideological function is to ventriloquise racist Islamophobia. Here, for example, is Hirsi Ali:

By our Western standards Muhammad is a perverse man. A tyrant. He is against freedom of expression. If you don't do as he says, you will end up in hell. That reminds me of those megalomaniac rulers in the Middle East: Bin Laden, Khomeini, and Saddam. Are you surprised to find a Saddam Hussein? Muhammad is his example; Muhammad is an example to all Muslim men. Why do you think so many Islamic men use violence? You are shocked to hear me say these things, but like the majority of the native Dutch population, you overlook something: you forget where I am from. I used to be a Muslim; I know what I am talking about.[12]

For Hirsi Ali, Islam is the common denominator behind a range of misogynist cultural practices—from FGM to honor killings to the 'cult of virginity.' That these practices often predate Islam and are common to Animists and Christians of the sub-Saharan region as well as Ethiopian Jews does not faze Hirsi Ali. Of course, no sociological evidence is provided to back up these claims because such evidence would disrupt the discursive construction of an essentialized Islam; in any case, the complicit audience asks for none, being satisfied with the claims made by authentic 'insiders.'[13]

Hirsi Ali's politics need not be read off her writings alone. Until recently, Hirsi Ali was a member of the Dutch Parliament, representing the right-wing VVD party.[14] The VVD had wooed her away from the social-democratic Labor Party with whom Hirsi Ali began her political career; Hirsi Ali argued that the VVD provided her with "greater ability to advocate for the rights of Muslim women."[15] What the VVD did provide her was a national platform for her xenophobic and anti-immigrant politics, all nicely packaged in the liberal rhetoric of saving Muslim women (from their men).

While a particular liberal vision of women's rights features most prominently in Manji and Hirsi Ali's discourse, they have both also been instrumental in the discursive construction of Islam as essentially homophobic. Manji's status as a queer Muslim woman does much of this ideological work for her, while Hirsi Ali's next collaboration with gay Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh—after the experimental and incendiary Submission, on women and Islam—was slated to be on Islam and homosexuality.[16]

A Gay Jihad, or, the Trouble with 'Islam'

So pervasive is the idea that there is something unique about the relationship between Islam and sexuality that it underpins the discourse of otherwise well-meaning projects. A good example is "A Jihad for Love," the documentary film made by Pervez Sharma (a New Yorker of Indian origin). It might appear unfair to mention Pervez Sharma in the same breath as Hirse Ali, Manji, and Rushdie, but his film is part of the mainstream discourse on Islam and homosexuality. In fact, it is illustrative precisely because it is pitched as a sensitive response to racist Islamophobia.

Released in 2008, the film focuses on the experiences of a few main protagonists—an imam from South Africa, a group of Egyptian men, four lesbians—two from Turkey, one from Egypt, and one a Moroccan settled in France—and a few brief clips featuring India and Pakistan. The website—and the film—underscore the 'Islamic-ness' of the subject-matter by opening with the visual and audio of the shahada, or 'testimony' required of all Muslims, which translates as, "There is no God but God and Muhammad is his prophet." And it is hard to miss the incredible claim made on the website that the film "[allows] its remarkable subjects [note: not us, the viewers, but the subjects] to move beyond the narrow concept of Jihad as holy war." Thus, the real protagonists of this project are not "its remarkable subjects" as they are referred to on the website, but the film—and thereby the filmmaker!

Sharma claims that his intent was actually to challenge the idea of a monolithic Islam. He is careful to say that Islam is not unique out of the Abrhamanic faiths in its attitude towards homosexuality.[17] Despite these good intentions, his film unfortunately reinforces the idea that gay Muslims face particularly or uniquely negative circumstances, and contributes to the confusion around Islam and homosexuality. For example, in an interview with the New York Blade he explains that there are "only six Islamic states that implement sharia (Islamic) law," which is where "it starts becoming a problem."[18] Meanwhile the movie itself does not profile any Muslim queers from these six countries. Unless the viewer already has this (and other) information, she is likely to leave the film feeling that all Muslim countries are Islamic in the sense of being ruled by sharia, and that that is the root of the problem for Muslim queers. Sharma confuses the matter further by including Muslims from countries that are not even Muslim—his main protagonist is a South African imam and the film features a Muslim man in India, a country in which Muslims are not only in the minority, but an increasingly beleaguered one. Moreover, the fact that the experience of harassment related by the gay Indian Muslim man was not unique and would be shared by Indian Hindu or Christian or Jain queers of the same socioeconomic background, is something that Sharma—as an Indian Hindu who only recently converted to Islam—should know and share. Instead, he chooses not to do so, leaving us with the (reinforced) impression that the problem is Islam.[19]

In fact, the narrative and logic of the film would have changed dramatically if Sharma had featured the experience of non-Muslim queers from the same 'Muslim' countries as those that his Muslim protagonists came from. Instead, he focuses on Muslims alone, and in fact veers from a focus on state repression (as in the case of the Egyptians) to social and familial homophobia. He makes no distinction between persecution under Islamic laws (the film in fact features no such case) and persecution under secular laws, as in Egypt—where, unsurprisingly, it is the colonial law against sodomy under which the men are arrested, something which, again, the film makes no mention of. In effect, the only connecting thread between the different protagonists is their Muslimness. Thus, although Sharma claims that his motive was not to present Islam as (uniquely) homophobic, the film in fact ends up doing just that.

Needless to say, the endorsements from critics featured on the website deploy words that are familiar to any student of the neo-Orientalist discourse on Islam—words such as "brave," "brutally honest," "courageous," "fascinating;" National Public Radio even exclaims that it "lifts the veil of secrecy." Critics note that this film is produced by Sandi DuBowski, who made "Trembling Before G-d," and tend to place it within a genre of films on faith/religion and homosexuality, but in the absence of a comparative frame within the film itself, the viewer cannot be counted on to make the same connection.[20]

What Are We Talking About When We Talk about 'Islam'?

As Edward Said argued in Covering Islam, one of the main problems with the mainstream Western discourse is that it constructs a flattened and monolithic idea of Islam which it then uses to explain the behavior of all Muslims regardless of their varied cultural, social and political contexts.

"Islam" as it is used today seems to mean one simple thing but in fact is part fiction, part ideological label, part minimal designation of a religion called Islam. In no really significant way is there a direct correspondence between the "Islam" in common Western usage and the enormously varied life that goes on within the world of Islam, with its more than 800,000,000 people, its millions of square miles of territory principally in Africa and Asia, its dozens of societies, states, histories, geographies, cultures.[21]

Said goes on to question the notion that this thing called "Islam" can explain complex behaviors, at the individual as well as the collective level:

Is there such a thing as Islamic behavior? What connects Islam at the level of everyday life to Islam at the level of doctrine in the various Islamic societies? How really useful is "Islam" as a concept for understanding Morocco and Saudi Arabia and Syria and Indonesia?[22]

Unfortunately, in the thirty years since Said penned his original critique of Orientalism, things have only gotten worse as far as the mainstream Western understanding of, and discourse on, Islam is concerned. Perhaps this is not surprising, given that Western—specifically U.S.—political investment in parts of the world that are predominantly Muslim has also intensified during precisely this period. This neo-colonial project requires an ideological framework to legitimate it just as the earlier colonial project did. And, as before, this ideological discourse features a civilizing mission structured around the need to save native (i.e. Muslim) women and queers from 'their' inferior and threatening culture-religion (Islam).

As the above quotes from Said indicate, there are serious problems with trying to use 'Islam' to explain too much of the personal and social life of Muslims. In fact, any attempt to deploy the category in a meaningful or systematic way immediately reveals its fuzziness. When we use the term 'Islam,' do we mean the textual sources of Islamic tradition, namely the Quran and Sunnah? Do we mean the shariah, the system of Islamic jurisprudence, which is itself not a unitary thing? Do we mean the ways in which various political groups—and often the State—in Muslim societies deploy Islam? Or do we mean Islam as it is popularly understood and practiced, which changes every fifty miles or so?

These issues are not specific to Islam, obviously. Sociologically speaking, culture and religion are difficult, if not impossible, to separate in any context—even in the 'secular' West. However, and ironically, Islam does pose a unique problem because of its decentralized nature. Even Islamic law—the 'shariah' that is so often invoked in the mainstream discourse as if it were one monolithic body of religious law—is interpreted differently by different Muslim communities depending on which fiqh—or school of jurisprudence—they tend to favor. Interestingly, Muslims can switch back-and-forth between different schools of jurisprudence depending on which orientation they prefer at any given time. This is a far cry from the idea of a unitary 'Islamic law' popularized by the mainstream Western press.

Scholars have argued that instead of invoking Islam to explain behavior in 'the Muslim World' we should look at historical as well as contemporary social conditions, relations, and conflicts. In order to understand what this sort of analysis might look like, and what sorts of insights it might yield, let us turn to a specific Muslim country—Pakistan. Pakistan provides us with a crucial lens through which to examine the issues we are trying to grapple with here. It is a Muslim-majority country which officially designates itself an 'Islamic Republic' and it has often been the subject of media attention in the West—not only for its role in the nine-year-old war in neighboring Afghanistan, but also because of the declining status of its women.

The (changing) role of religion in Pakistan—as in India and Bangladesh—cannot be understood outside of the region's colonial and post-colonial history. The British politicized religion during the course of their rule in the subcontinent, and religious discourse and identity became a crucial part of the anti-colonial struggle. During the Cold War, the United States found it expedient to use religious ideology to counter 'God-less' communism across the globe and followed a conscious strategy of funding and otherwise supporting the most virulent forms of political Islam across the Muslim world, and Pakistan was no exception. Although the well-read American may today make the connection to the proxy war with the Soviet Union in the late 1970s and 1980s when the U.S. and the Pakistani army created the mujahideen and consciously bolstered their ideology of jihad, this relationship actually went much further back, to the 1950s and 60s when the U.S. began to support the neo-fascist Jama'at-i-Islami of Abu Ala Maududi, which was geared towards producing Cold War propaganda about Godless communism. The JI, not surprisingly, grew significantly as an organization in this period, going from being marginal in national politics to being a serious political player under the martial law regime of General Ayub Khan (another American-supported dictator) in the 1960s. It is worth noting that despite all this, the JI proved to be no match for the tide of socialism that was sweeping Pakistan at this time.[23]

It was not until the 1980s and the arrival of another American-backed dictator—General Zia ul Haq—that the Jama'at-i Islami's fortunes turned once again. In order to legitimize his claim to power, Zia did more to destroy the secular basis of the state than anyone before him. He installed members of the JI in key parts of the state, created the Shariat Courts (which, it must be noted, were appellate courts and did not replace the existing judicial system), destroyed secular student politics in universities and shifted the terms of political debate in Pakistan.

The main focus of Zia's program of Islamization and the moral renewal of Pakistani society was the control of women, specifically the need to return them to the 'chardivari' or the home. This was a class project—Zia's base was the urban petty-bourgeoisie which had been feeling culturally and economically threatened by the recent entry of large numbers of women into the public sphere.

And yet, despite all this 'Islamization', something called 'Islam' cannot explain the actual ways and means by which women's bodies and sexuality are managed and/or controlled in contemporary Pakistan. I want to illustrate this through the example of two important cases from Pakistan. A close look at these will help us understand just how impossible it is to think of 'Islam' as being the source of Muslim women's problems, and how complex the reality actually is. What I seek to demonstrate through these cases is that Islam is invoked very selectively, even in so-called 'Islamic societies,' and even when the issue is the control of women's sexuality. In fact, sometimes the rights granted to women under Islamic law become inconvenient for the purposes of patriarchal control, in which case 'Islam' is all-too-easily tossed aside in favor of 'custom' and 'tradition.' This is an aspect of what I call 'patriarchal opportunism,' whereby patriarchal structures from families to nation-states strategically select elements from an ideological 'toolbox' in their attempt to gain support for the sexual regulation of women.

'Runaway Marriages' and the Saima Waheed Case:

In February 1996—almost ten years after the mysterious death of General Zia and Pakistan's return to democracy—22-year-old Saima Waheed married against the wishes of her parents, leading to a contentious legal battle which gripped the country and generated a 'moral panic' around the issue of women's status within 'Islam' and Pakistani society.[24]

Legally, the issue seemed fairly straightforward. A precedent-setting case had already established, without ambiguity, that an adult Muslim woman in Pakistan had the religious and legal right to contract marriage on her own behalf, without the intercession of a wali or legal guardian. Moreover, such 'runaway marriages' are hardly news even—or perhaps especially—in socially conservative societies such as Pakistan, characterized as they are by gender segregation and the institution of arranged marriage, and social strictures regarding marriage across caste/class/ethnic divides; in fact, they are often the only means for young men and women to assert some modicum of control over their lives.[25]

Saima was the college-educated daughter of an economically and politically influential family, the Ropris. Arshad Ahmad, the man she chose to marry, was a teacher at a government college in a small town. To give a sense of the class divide here, Ahmad supplemented his income of Rs 5000 a month (less than $60) by giving private lessons, while Saima's pocket money alone—which she received as a director of her father's company—was double that.

Saima informed her parents of her desire to marry Arshad, and his parents, following prescribed social norms, formally proposed marriage to her family. However, when it became clear that her family was not only rejecting the proposal but intended to marry her elsewhere, Saima took decisive action. She and Arshad married in the office of a friend of his (a lawyer) with all the required legal and religious protocol. Saima returned home immediately afterwards, and some days later broke the news to her family, expecting that they would capitulate in the face of a fait accompli and agree to a formal public ceremony. Instead, she was beaten, drugged, and deprived of food for several days. She finally managed to escape and elicit the services of Asma Jahangir, a prominent women's and human rights lawyer, a veteran of the Zia period and the bête noir of religious conservatives (Saima's father and uncle were prominent leaders of a highly conservative Sunni sect). Thus the decision by a daughter of the Ropri family to publicly violate the norms of this new, upwardly mobile orthodoxy was no laughing matter—the fact that she elicited the support of Asma Jahangir and chose to live in the women's shelter run by her law firm was to add insult to injury. They responded by subjecting Ahmad's family to physical harassment, and by filing an FIR (First Information Report) with the police, challenging the legality of her marriage to Ahmad.

These, then, are the factors which turned an ordinary story of a runaway marriage into a battle for the consolidation of class and patriarchal power played on a national stage. In the legal discourse around the case, Saima's exercise of a right granted to her both by secular and religious law was understood and projected as quintessentially transgressive, and hence shameful both at the familial and national level. This act of moral depravity on her part was connected to the "loss of cultural purity caused by the combined influences of neo-imperial designs and the treachery of their local collaborators,"[26] the latter, of course, an open reference to feminist activists in general, and her lawyer, Asma Jahangir, in particular.[27]

The discourse around the case abounds in the established and familiar postcolonial binaries of East/West, tradition/modernity, public/private, sacred/profane. These need to be understood, first and foremost, in the context of Pakistan's colonial history and its contemporary postcolonial condition—a people struggling to forge an identity in a society undergoing rapid social and economic change, and secondly, vis-à-vis the power strategies of the socially ascendant Islamist classes engaged in a struggle for hegemony within Pakistan—forging alliances with the older elite while at the same time seeking to displace them. Class struggle is itself always already a gendered process, both discursively and materially—a fact not often noted in most Marxist or feminist writing. The attempt of a rising class or class faction to replace another one is also simultaneously about the clash between different and competing patriarchies or patriarchal arrangements. Taking account of this class context also highlights the status of women within kin-networks, where they function as commodities to be exchanged—and the role of marriage in consolidating class power. Hence the rhetoric of marriage as something too important to be left to the men and women concerned.

The intersection of class and patriarchy is evident also in the anxiety around Asma Jahangir, the lawyer. This anxiety reflected the fear of emasculation by the 'uppity' and depraved woman and is also-already a class anxiety—in their struggle for hegemony, the upwardly mobile class represented by the Ropris projected Jahangir as a representative of the 'Westernized' and 'morally bankrupt' bourgeois class.

Ultimately, the Saima case was not simply about 'secular liberals' versus 'religious conservatives,' or even 'fundamentalists.' Even socially progressive individuals who supported her actions on principle were heard expressing insecurity about the precedent it set for their own daughters, underlining the fact that the control of female sexuality is not the purview of religion alone. The Saima case is thus a fascinating lens into the field of struggle between different patriarchies, highlighting as it does the very way in which they sometimes contradict, and sometimes reinforce one another. In fact, if anything, this case illustrates the premium placed on controlling female sexuality across class lines.

Saima's case was argued, and ultimately judged, not within the terms of existing Muslim family laws in the Pakistan Penal Code or the Shariat—both of which were unambiguous in their understanding of the rights of adult Muslim women with regard to marriage—but on the undesirability of filial disobedience, to the extent that the judgments of both Justice Chaudhry and Justice Ramday, while diametrically opposed, expressed the desirability that parental authority be juridically enforceable. Although both judgments talk of this obedience in general terms it is clear, given the context of the case, that the anxiety they express is not just a generalized one regarding parental control over children, but a very specific anxiety over female (sexual) agency.

This case highlights the fact that despite ubiquitous references to 'Islam,' the 'Shariat,' and even Pakistan as the 'Islamic Republic,' it is in fact patriarchy—or rather patriarchies—that were at issue here. When it came to the issue of the legality of the marriage, Saima's case was fairly straightforward and easily resolved by recourse to legal precedence alone. In fact, the Lahore High Court did validate her marriage on legal grounds, albeit through a split verdict. The judgments of the three judges provide an extremely interesting lens into the complexities of patriarchy within Pakistani society.[28] Among other things, they demonstrate that 'Islam'—whether as a basis for individual/national identity, as a religious and cultural system, or as a set of injunctions encoded in theological and juridical textual sources—is always/already an internally contested discourse rather than a monolithic and internally coherent thing.

Saima's case is also a fascinating glimpse into the habitus of her particular class, and its complex and contradictory relationship to an increasingly global capitalist modernity. Despite the conservative nature of her family, Saima was hardly a stereotypically oppressed or even a 'traditional' young woman by Pakistani standards. She was active in intercollegiate (and therefore non-segregated) events, which is where she first met Arshad. Her father was not only aware of her attendance at such events—despite the gender segregation that was the norm within the family—but by all accounts took intense pride in her achievements. She owned a car and a mobile phone, both symbols of mobility and autonomy as well as wealth and social status. Daughters of the Ropri family were also not denied access to other accoutrements of wealth such as swimming and riding, both activities associated with the Westernized upper classes. Their dress code was also unconventional—they wore jeans and t-shirts at home and, even when outside, continued to wear them under the hijab. Thus the 'fundamentalist' (if there is such a monolithic figure) does not unequivocally despise the West or 'modernity,' understood as commodities—cultural and otherwise.

But all these accoutrements were given to Saima to enhance her father's social status, in particular by making her a more desirable commodity on the marriage market, which her father could expect to deploy to his strategic advantage, given that marriages in Pakistan (as elsewhere) are still very much about cementing relations between men. The minute she challenged his authority, these markers of privilege were summarily taken away, as was her mobility. Saima, on the other hand, understood her education as a means of asserting her independence.[29] The fact that her father explicitly exposed his daughters to the very accoutrements associated with 'Westernized modernity' and the 'depraved' upper classes as a means to secure social status shows the complex and contradictory relationship between desire, class, and patriarchal interests especially as mediated through/by the processes of economic and cultural globalization. Saima's own articulation of her position can thus perhaps be seen as a neat if ironic illustration of the notion of 'unintended consequences.'

Any attempt to unpack cases such as Saima's requires an understanding of the ways in which 'the law' itself is constructed and operationalized—in particular how, in postcolonial states, the law is itself a contested and contradictory institution. In the case of Pakistan, for example, we have to understand the colonial antecedents of the (secular) Pakistan Penal Code which is officially the 'law of the land,' the postcolonial context of the appellate Shariat courts and the various 'Islamic laws' introduced by Zia, and the many customary codes which continue to operate in some of the tribal regions of Pakistan. And lest we assume that the regulation of women or sexuality in Pakistan can be traced to the 'Islamization' of the law under Zia, we need to remember the delightful colonial legacy called the "Family Laws" that are part of the penal codes of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Developed by the colonial state as part of its attempt at compromise and conciliation with the natives, the various "Family Laws" essentially made the control of women (code for 'family') the exclusive purview of 'their' community. The British had already decided that the most organic basis for community in India was religion, and so we had the "Muslim Family Laws," the "Hindu Family Laws," and "The Christian Family Laws," etc. And let us not forget the "grave and sudden provocation" provision of the colonial code (derived from British law) under which men could kill their wives on the mere suspicion of adultery. We should also note another infamous colonial law known as "Section 377" (of the Penal Code) which the countries of the subcontinent share with many other British ex-colonies, such as Barbados and Trinidad, which has allowed the police to harass gay men in public spaces, but which, interestingly, has never been deployed in Pakistan.

The Neoliberal Nexus

Mitra Rastegar's cogent critique of Azar Nafisi (author of Reading Lolita in Tehran) notes[30] that "it is typical of much human rights discourse in the Third World to focus on ... practices of regulating women's bodies, especially those identified with Islamic law, while ignoring socioeconomic concern."[31] In the 'Third World,' these socioeconomic concerns are tied ineluctably to neoliberalism as instituted by the World Bank and IMF. Ironically, nothing illustrates the connection between neoliberal globalization and the regulation of sexuality better than the issue of the Zina Ordinance in Pakistan.

The Zina Ordinance was part of the Hudood Ordinances, promulgated by Zia ul-Haq as the cornerstone of his Islamization program in the 1980s. Zina means illicit sex in Arabic, and the Ordinance essentially turned 'illicit sex'—adultery as well as premarital sex—into a crime against the State. While removing the category of marital rape entirely, it put the burden of proof for rape on the victim. Thus, if a woman charged a man other than her husband with rape, but could not produce the "four adult male Muslim witnesses of good moral character" that the law now required, she had nevertheless admitted to having sex with a man other than her husband and could be convicted under the Zina Ordinance. Many Islamic jurists and scholars pointed out at the time that the intent behind the juridical requirement of four male adult witnesses of good moral character was to prevent spurious accusations of zina against men and women, and to use this to essentially entrap and punish women (and women alone) for sexual transgressions was against the spirit of Islam and Islamic law. However, the law stood—and still stands—a testimony to the increasing street power of Islamists.

The number of women in Pakistani jails skyrocketed after the promulgation of this Ordinance. Two cases in particular—one of a legally married couple accused of adultery by the woman's ex-husband who claimed he had never divorced her, and the other of a young blind servant, Safia Bibi, who had been raped and impregnated by her employer, galvanized a public outcry against the sheer injustice of this law. The most important group was the newly formed Women's Action Forum, but other secular pro-democracy groups, as well as some Muslim clerics, publicly supported the defendants. Then, as now, all cases of zina passed by the appellate shariat courts were struck down by the Supreme Court of Pakistan. Thus even Zia's regime—which is the closest that Pakistan came to the institutionalization of a theocracy—was not a period in which the shariah trumped secular law.

In her critical ethnographic work with women jailed under the zina law in Pakistan, Shahnaz Khan shows that far from being an expression of religious piety at the familial or state level, the zina law is wielded as a potent weapon of control and extortion by families of 'disobedient' women.[32] The women are almost entirely from the lower classes, and so the impact of this law is classed as well as, of course, gendered. Men, who may also be charged with zina rarely end up in jail, being better able to negotiate a financial settlement with their accusers.

One of Khan's most surprising findings was that incarceration is actually seen by these poor women as a form of 'protective custody' and thereby an escape from their families. The role of the State, Khan finds, is complicated in these cases—sometimes it sides with family, and sometimes with the woman, and Khan can unearth no discernible pattern to the variation. Complicating matters even further, Khan finds that the women themselves invoke the moral authority of Islam—and specifically what they understand as the rights it grants them—against their families. Islam also becomes a source of solace for them during this difficult period.

These facts disrupt the manner in which the mainstream media in the West constructs the role of Islam in the lives of Muslim women, and highlight the pitfalls of not distinguishing between the different forms and contexts within which 'Islam' is invoked, and by whom. Among other things, a distinction must always be made between what I call 'Islamization from below,' within which we can slot the rise of (voluntary) public piety among Muslims such as the adoption of particular styles of facial hair by men and of various forms of hijab by women, and 'Islamization from above,' which refers to the ways in which structures of power—from families to states—deploy 'Islam' in order to control women (and men). State policies imposing particular dress codes and enforcing gender segregation in public would be examples of the latter. However, the adoption of the veil by female university students in Cairo in the late 1970s as a protest against the State would be an example of the former. There is, of necessity, a relationship between the two levels of Islamization, but it is complicated and certainly does not lend itself to easy generalizations. Moreover, ignoring this distinction and collapsing all forms of 'Islamization' results in a serious misunderstanding of the social processes at work.

Khan's research on incarcerated women leads her to conclude that poverty is an important causal factor in the imprisonment of women under the charge of zina in Pakistan. She follows other Pakistani scholars in linking this poverty to the structural adjustment policies imposed on Pakistan by the World Bank and IMF from the 1980s on. The importance of this observation cannot be understated because feminist scholarship on structural adjustment across the world has shown a strong link between the deprivations created by these policies and a rise in violence against women. Khan's research thus allows us to connect something that appears to be a result of 'Islamic law' (the incarceration of women under zina laws in Pakistan) to similar developments in other places, which are in turn the result of larger global political and economic processes. Needless to say, issues such as class and international political economy are never part of the explanatory framework when it comes to discussions around Muslim women in the West since they do not fit into a framework in which everything to do with Muslims is explained by 'Islam.'

This brings us to an important point which has seldom been taken into account in regards to women's status under purportedly Islamic regimes (or within purportedly 'Islamic' societies): the degree to which the World Bank's push for devolution of political power to the local level (touted in World Bank jargon as 'governance' and delivered on by General Pervez Musharraf) weakened the writ of the State vis-à-vis the local 'community,' strengthening customary legal practices such as jirgas (tribal/local community councils). Even though the role of the state vis-à-vis women, from the time of Zia on, had hardly been unproblematic, its role as in loco parentis did offer the possibility of protection. Devolving power to local elites and leaders was the equivalent of throwing them, and other vulnerable members of rural society, to the wolves. As the Pakistani anthropologist Nafisa Shah has pointed out in her cogent critique of the fetishization of the 'community' in ethnographic literature, the 'community' is seldom, if ever, the benign force it is made out to be, especially vis-à-vis women.[33] The devolution plan in Pakistan has resulted in an increase in the power of local patriarchal elites. Devolution may be a great concept in the abstract, but when grafted on to a society such as Pakistan's, which is characterized by deep inequalities at the local level, where powerful landed interests still hold sway, and women are still treated as communal property, it effectively removes any possibility that the most vulnerable might occasionally be able to turn to the state for protection. Even more so than before, when they had to at least answer to a senior bureaucrat, the local police have effectively become the thugs for the powerful interests in their area.

In a society defined by a history of disenfranchisement of the people by dictatorial regimes (with support of the U.S.), and under siege from joint pressures of a corrupt ruling class, a heavy debt burden, predatory and conspicuous consumption, and ongoing (neo-)colonial intervention, cultural identity becomes a contentious issue and—as is invariably the case regardless of the kind of state/society under question—women's bodies become sites for these cultural politics and the class struggles they embody. The regulation of women and their sexuality becomes the key hegemonic move through which consent across social classes can be secured.[34]

Globalization—defined as the increasing interconnectedness of different parts of the world at economic, political, and cultural levels—has resulted in an intensification in the dynamics of social change across the developing or postcolonial world. Such rapid and intense social change produces anxieties in the societies and communities experiencing this change, anxieties which feminist scholars have shown to result in greater regulation of women. This was just as true of Europe during the period of capitalist modernization in the 18th and 19th centuries, and of colonized and decolonizing societies in the mid-20th century.

Issues related to women and gender in contemporary Muslim societies must be understood within the same framework. What passes for the victimization of women by 'Islam' is all-too-often part and parcel of a more global phenomenon—an increase in the moral and sexual regulation of women by communities and kin-networks as a response to political, social and cultural anxieties; such anxieties have intensified under economic and cultural globalization. The regulation of women and their sexuality is, after all, a common feature of all patriarchal societies, traditional or modern, and certainly not simply Muslim ones.[35] It is the discourse of Islamic exceptionalism—in essence the form of Orientalism operative today, which is defined by an exclusive focus on Islam—which prevents us from seeing the 'family resemblances' between honor killings in the Pakistani or Jordanian Muslim communities and honor killings in Hindu and Sikh communities in India, between the violent protests against the celebration of Valentine's Day in Pakistan and India (led by the goon squads of the Muslim and Hindu religious right respectively), and between the attempts at the regulation of women by 'Islamists' and the Christian Right in the U.S. alike.

The Case of Raj/Shahzina and Shamail[36]

Let us now turn to the recent case in Pakistan involving a transgender couple, or the 'she-couple' as they were dubbed by the Pakistani media. In September 2006, Shahzina Tariq and Shamail Raj, cousins and long-time sweethearts, were married in Faisalabad, a medium-sized city in Pakistan's Punjab. Shamail was born female but, in his own words, had always felt that he was a man in a woman's body. This realization was intensified when, at puberty, he began to develop breasts and a beard. He ultimately decided that he needed surgical intervention in order to live as a man and with the support of doctors and a psychiatrist in Faislabad, he first had a mastectomy and then later, in 2006, a hysterectomy. Shahzina and Shamail's decision to marry at this time was in part determined by the realization that Shahzina's father—Tariq Hussain—was determined to marry her off to a man to whom he was considerably in debt.

The marriage not only did not end the harassment, it increased it. Hussain and the rest of his family charged Shamail with abduction (a standard tactic by families in such cases of 'love marriages'), and several cases of fraud. After a favorable decision from a lower court in Faislabad failed to cease the harassment, the couple made their way to Lahore and sought the help of an advocate of the Lahore High Court. However, Shahzina's father's testimony at the first hearing in which he charged that Shamail was a woman, turned the tables on them. The judge ordered a physical examination by a medical team, which reported that although Shamail was "a well built muscular person with mustache and beard and ... a hoarse voice,", he was nevertheless physically a woman; the team, however, proposed more tests. This turn of affairs changed them from complainants into defendants, because if Shamail were declared 'a girl' their earlier sworn statements would amount to perjury since the basis of the couple's writ application was that they were legally married.

Consequently, the judge issued a notice requiring them to show cause as to why they should not be charged with perjury under Section 193 of the Pakistan Penal Code. Frightened at this turn of affairs, the two went into hiding. Given that they had missed two hearings of their case, the judge issued non-bailable arrest warrants for them, which resulted in their eventual incarceration. At the trial, they were again asked to show cause as to why they shouldn't be charged with Section 193 and Section 377 ('unnatural offences'). Section 377 covers only penetrative sexual acts, and the law in Pakistan (both Islamic and secular) is silent on the issue of lesbian relationships, and so the court eventually dropped this particular charge. They were, however, both charged with perjury but given lesser sentences of three years each. The entire process—from their filing a petition against Shahzina's father in the LHC, to their sentencing—took all of 25 days. What is crucial to note about this case is the relative absence of arguments couched within the rubric of 'Islam'—Shamail was charged with perjury under the Pakistan Penal Code, and not under 'Islamic law.'

As it can be imagined, their case turned into a public debate over homosexuality (specifically lesbianism), and (trans)gender. This was especially interesting because Shamail was a rare figure—a female-to-male transgendered individual, whereas it is male-to-female transgender/transexuality that is the most visible and therefore familiar in Pakistan.

A prominent feminist activist (Nighat Said Khan) heard of the case and got involved soon after the couple arrived in Lahore, and was instrumental in getting them a new lawyer for their appeal to the Supreme Court. Although by the time the case came to be heard, it was expected that the Supreme Court would rule in their favor, the judgment itself was a pleasant shock in the way in which it drew on the presence of the figure of Hermaphrodite in Ancient Greece to Islam, the court dismissed the charge of perjury against Shahzina and Shamail, and granted them bail. In their petition the couple had pleaded that they could live together under their own free will and volition even without entering into marriage. By its action, the Supreme Court effectively upheld the right of transgender/transsexual people to live dignified lives free of harassment.

Ironically, while the mainstream media was busy discussing this case, and while the public discourse regarding it was (overall) surprisingly positive, the liberal secular intelligentsia and feminist and human rights organizations maintained a studied silence on the issue. There were no public statements from either the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, for example, nor from Asma Jahangir or her sister Hina Jilani, who (as we've seen) are usually in the frontlines of civil rights cases in Pakistan, especially those involving women. The justification, as expressed privately to Khan, was the concern that the issue was so volatile and scandalous that taking a public position on it would compromise their ability to do other civil rights work. The Women's Action Forum was generally sympathetic but even its public statement was a while in coming.

Since this precedent-setting case, there have been several positive judgments—in one, the court ruled that an adult woman could live with another adult woman (this had been challenged by the parents of one of the women), and another which upheld sex-change as legal. And since 2009, the newly reinstated Chief Justice of Pakistan has taken suo moto notice of the problems that transgender people face. In the first landmark decision passed in April 2009, the Supreme Court of Pakistan ruled that transgender people could put E (for eunuch) as their gender designation on the National Identity Card and other government documents. The issue was discussed with a great deal of sympathy by the media—which was surprising in itself given the commercial media's penchant for salacious and scandalous gossip-as-news. What became clear through the course of this case was how well-organized and politically savvy the hijra community in Pakistan actually is.[37]

A framework in which Pakistan is an essentially 'Islamic' society, and Islam as essentially homophobic, cannot explain this case, just as it cannot explain why one of the most popular television shows in recent Pakistani history was a celebrity talk show hosted by Begum Nawazish Ali, one of the several drag personas of Ali Saleem. Saleem first shot to national fame through his inspired impersonations of Benazir Bhutto on a satirical television show focused on politics. The guest list for the Begum Nawazish Ali show ranged from film and fashion personalities to major political figures.[38]

What these cases from Pakistan illustrate is that Islam is not the overarching motor within purportedly Muslim societies that mainstream discourse would have us believe. When they prove inconvenient, even codified Islamic laws are summarily sidelined, ignored or glossed over. Thus, what a discourse premised on Islam as a totalizing force misses (or cannot account for) is the opportunistic way in which Islam is deployed and—crucially—how it is discarded when it becomes inconvenient. So, for example, honor killings are justified not through a recourse to Islam, but to 'tradition' and 'custom' as it was done in the Pakistani Senate in 1999. What this framework also missed is that, in fact, sometimes the rights given to women under Islamic law render them more vulnerable to customary practices. There is, for example, the custom of haq bakhshwana in rural Punjab wherein the daughter of a propertied family is 'married' to the Quran—or, in some cases, to a tree—so as to prevent her share of the family property transferring to her husband's family. This custom arises only because, under Islamic law, women have rights in family property. In this case, the issue of property as it pertains to women is explicit. In fact, I like to refer to it as the problematic of 'women and/as property': that the status of Pakistani women lies at the nexus of the fact that they are both the property of their kin (symbolically and sometimes literally) while having rights to property themselves. What this means is that, at the very least, we need to switch to a framework that understands religion, like culture, as an ideological toolbox alongside other ideological toolboxes.

In Conclusion

In this paper I have tried to show the ideological underpinnings and political implications of the contemporary obsession with Islam and sexuality in the West. This means we must always entertain a healthy dose of skepticism towards projects that present the 'Muslim world' as some sort of organic entity. In a quintessentially Foucauldian sense, their ideological purpose is to create this very 'Muslim world' of which they propose to speak. In doing so, they perpetuate the idea that Muslim societies and communities are self-contained and never-changing entities bound together by a monolithic and totalitarian 'Islam,' which share nothing historically, culturally, socially, or politically with other societies and communities.

This myth of Muslim exceptionalism does not stand up to any historical or comparative study that looks at 'Muslim countries' alongside others. In fact, even the study of a single 'Muslim' country—even one which calls itself the Islamic Republic of Pakistan—explodes the myth of a monolithic and totalitarian 'Islam' that defines every aspect of its followers' lives.

What the examples from Pakistan also illustrate is that understanding the role of Islam even in a single country requires, among other things, parsing the complex and contradictory role it plays at various levels, from national ideology, to social norms and state structure. And at each of these levels there are a further set of questions that need to be asked: how is 'Islam' being deployed, by whom, and for what purpose? Is it being used as an ideological tool, does it serve as a spiritual haven, or is it invoked as an identitarian response to the ravages of a globalized world?

It is impossible to come away with anything but a superficial—and often simply incorrect—understanding of the role Islam plays with regard to women and gays without historical and sociological context. Such a framework immediately disrupts (or should) the idea that something stable and immutable called 'Islam' exists anywhere. For example, the fact that Muslims in Pakistan, as elsewhere, invoke Islam in everyday discourse doesn't tell us anything about what they mean when they invoke it—surely the 'Islam' invoked by the women imprisoned under the zina law and interviewed by Khan is not the same Islam that features in the discourse of the Jama'at-i Islami. Thus, 'Islam,' when deployed by state and private actors, be they organizations or individuals, needs to be one of the things the researcher must unpack; it certainly cannot be unproblematically deployed as the explanatory variable. Among other things, the 'Islam connection,' when it is there, is varied, complex, and sometimes contradictory, and certainly not what we are led to expect from mainstream discourse on Islam.

All this means that there is no shortcut and no way around historically and socially contextual analysis that is simultaneously also implicitly or explicitly comparative—and that too not simply across 'Muslim societies.' There is need for analysis that begins with the empirical reality and then moves out towards generalization, but a generalization that is not predetermined by a priori categories such as 'Muslim nations' and 'Muslims societies.' It also means acknowledging that, far from 'unveiling' the insidious workings of an actually-existing 'thing' called 'Islam,' the current Western discourse actually actively constructs it, and does so in order to legitimize certain political projects. In other words, this discourse is deeply ideological.

Endnotes

1. In her superb book The Politics of the Veil, Joan Scott points to the way in which the imperative of the heterosexual male gaze underlies the French anxiety over the veil. Scott quotes a French psychoanalyst's (a woman) explanation that, "the real problem posed by the veil is that is covers over ... a sexual dimension". As Scott points out, "It was precisely the covering over of women's sexuality that so troubled her: the veil was a denial, she said, of women as 'objects of desire' ... the veil interfered with what she took to be a natural psychological process: the visual appreciation of women's bodies by men brought women's femininity into being ... feminine identity depended on male desire; male desire depended on visual stimulation." See Joan Scott, The Politics of the Veil (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007): 157-8. [Return to text]

2. Salman Rushdie, "Fighting the Forces of Invisibility," The Washington Post, 2 October 2001. [Return to text]

3. Irshad Manji, The Trouble with Islam (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2004). [Return to text]

4. Leila Lalami, "The Missionary Position," The Nation, 1 June 2006. [Return to text]

5. Clifford Krauss, "An Unlikely Promoter of an Islamic Reformation," The New York Times, 4 October 2003. [Return to text]

6. "She's Got Chutzpah," O, The Oprah Magazine, May 2004. [Return to text]

7. Due to constraints of space, it is not possible to do justice to the place of Zionist intellectuals and the state of Israel and the role of queer activism in the West within this latest imperialist project and its accompanying ideological discourse of Islamophobia. Briefly, queer Zionist intellectuals/activists (such as Andrew Sullivan), and the state of Israel, pitch the latter as an island of queer-positivity (read: liberalism) in a sea of Arab/Muslim/Palestinian homophobia. This position is not going unchallenged, however—anti-Zionist and anti-imperialist queer groups and individuals in Israel/Palestine and the West have launched a concerted counter-attack. For a quick introduction to the issues, see: Jasbir Puar, "Israel's Gay Propaganda War," The Guardian, 1 July 2010. [Return to text]

8. Krauss. [Return to text]

9. See Irshad Manji's blog. [Return to text]

10. The role of the Western—and, in particular, U.S.—academy in the current imperialist project deserves separate in-depth attention. [Return to text]

11. They are regularly mentioned in the same breath within the mainstream media. See, for example: Marianne Williamson, "Women in Islam," Oprah Radio, 24 April 2007. [Return to text]

12. Emphasis mine. Ayan Hirsi Ali, Infidel (New York: Free Press, 2007): 303. [Return to text]

13. Lalami. [Return to text]

14. By an ironic twist of fate she was stripped of her Dutch citizenship after it emerged that she had lied on her asylum application. [Return to text]

15. Lalami. [Return to text]

16. The project was cut short by van Gogh's murder at the hands of a radical Islamist. By all accounts, van Gogh reveled in baiting Muslims, and saw them as antithetical to Dutch values; in Hirsi Ali he found the perfect partner. [Return to text]

17. Anthony Brooks and Parvez Sharma, "Interview," National Public Radio, 2 October 2007. [Return to text]

18. Trenton Straube, "Struggles of Gay Muslims," New York Blade, 17 May 2008. [Return to text]

19. The portion on Pakistan is even more bizarre, focusing on a sufi shrine but featuring no queers. [Return to text]

20. In fact, when I made the connection in an informal discussion with Dubowski at the screening of the film in Boston, his response was to reject this comparison because whereas the Hasidic Jews (the ones featured in Trembling Before G-d) are members of a conservative Jewish sect, in the case of Islam, the problem was the mainstream. [Return to text]

21. Edward Said, Covering Islam: How the Media and Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World (New York: Pantheon, 1981): x. [Return to text]

22. Said, xv. [Return to text]

23. In fact, Islamist parties have never managed to turn their rhetoric into electoral victory in Pakistan, except through the rigged election of 2002, held by another American-supported dictator, General Pervez Musharraf. [Return to text]

24. This part of my essay is immeasurably indebted to Neelam Hussain's wonderful and complex analysis of the Saima case. See: Neelam Hussain, "The Narrative Appropriation of Saima: Coercion and Consent in Muslim Pakistan," in Engendering the Nation-State, Volume I, Neelam Hussain, Samiya Mumtaz, and Rubina Saigol, eds. (Lahore: Simorgh Publications, 1997). [Return to text]

25. Such "runaway marriages" are also common in India, for example. [Return to text]

26. Hussain, 202. [Return to text]

27. This strategy of dismissing or attacking feminists on the basis of the claim of 'Westernization' is not unique to Pakistan or even Muslim countries. Uma Narayan, for example, describes the deployment of the same strategy in India. See: Uma Narayan, Dislocating Cultures: Identities, Traditions and Third World Feminisms (New York: Routledge, 1997). [Return to text]

28. For a detailed exposition of these judgments, see Hussain (1997) and Saadia Toor, "Moral Regulation in a Postcolonial Nation-State: Gender and the Politics of Islamization in Pakistan," Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 9:2 (2007): 255-275. [Return to text]

29. Hussain, 221. [Return to text]

30. Inderpal Grewal, "On the New Global Feminism and the Family of Nations: Dilemmas of Transnational Feminist Practice," in Talking Visions: Multicultural Feminism in a Transnational Age, Ella Shohat, ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998). [Return to text]

31. Mitra Rastegar, "Reading Nafisi in the West: Authenticity, Orientalism and 'Liberating' Iranian Women," Women Studies Quarterly 34: 1-2 (2006): 116. [Return to text]

32. Shahnaz Khan, Zina, Transnational Feminism, and the Moral Regulation of Pakistani Women (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2006). [Return to text]

33. Nafisa Shah, "Role of the Community in Honour Killings in Sindh," in Engendering the Nation-State, Volume 1, Neelam Hussain, Samiya Mumtaz and Rubina Saigol, eds. (Lahore: Simorgh Publications, 1997). [Return to text]

34. 'Islamization' and the attempt to institute Islamic law included half-hearted attempts in other spheres such as 'interest-free banking', but these were never institutionalized or implemented with the same enthusiasm and consensus as the laws pertaining to women. [Return to text]

35. See, for example: Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid. eds. Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History (Delhi: Kali for Women, 1989); George Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe (New York: Howard Fertig, 1997); Andrew Parker, et al, eds., Nationalisms and Sexualities (New York: Routledge, 1992); Angana P. Chatterji and Lubna Nazir Chaudhry, guest editors, "Gendered Violence in South Asia: Nation and Community in the Postcolonial Present," Cultural Dynamics 16: 2-3 (2004): 122-373. [Return to text]

36. This section draws on several conversations with Nighat Said Khan during and after the period in which the case was unfolding. I served as an informal liaison between Khan and the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission. [Return to text]

37. In 2005, a hijra had made national headlines by winning his local union council seat, and members of the hijra community are increasingly visible on serious talk shows. [Return to text]

38. In pointing this out I am not claiming that members of gender and sexual minorities now have full and complete rights and that they do not continue to face severe problems in Pakistan. [Return to text]