Gender, Sexuality, and Islam under the Shadow of Empire

The Neoliberal Nexus

Mitra Rastegar’s cogent critique of Azar Nafisi (author of Reading Lolita in Tehran) notes ¹ 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.” ² 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. ³ 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. ⁴) 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. ⁵

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. ⁶ 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.

1. 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).[↑]
2. Mitra Rastegar, “Reading Nafisi in the West: Authenticity, Orientalism and ‘Liberating’ Iranian Women,” Women Studies Quarterly 34: 1-2 (2006): 116.[↑]
3. Shahnaz Khan, Zina, Transnational Feminism, and the Moral Regulation of Pakistani Women (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2006).[↑]
4. 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[↑]
5. ‘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.[↑]
6. 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.[↑]