What do you make of this?
Hundreds of female supporters of Pakistan’s largest Islamic group protested today against government amendments to controversial rape laws.
Some 800 women, many wearing veils, attended the rally in a downtown district of the capital, Islamabad.
They were supporters Jamaat-e-Islami, a militant-linked Islamic charity.
These are strong women, with a strong voice. Not just puppets of the radical Jamaat-e-Islami wing from what I can tell. And yet they are protesting ammendments that could prevent a lot of suffering on behalf of women who are locked up for things such as ‘adultery’ - even if the sex act was forced.Shakira Hussein explores their mission in an article for New Matilda :
The JI women have no time for the likes of Jehangir. They claim that they are the true defenders of Pakistani women and that secular advocates of women’s rights are puppets of the West. They say that without the protection of the Hudood Ordinances, Pakistani women would suffer the plight of Western women — forced to dress and behave according to the lewd desires of men. Just as many in the West refuse to believe that a woman might choose to wear the hijab, JI women find it hard to believe that a woman would choose to wear jeans that display her bum cleavage.
In viewing Western or Westernised women primarily as victims, the JI women differ from their male counterparts, who view ‘immodest’ women in terms of the threat they pose to social order. While Islamist men tend to believe that it is immoral women who lead men (and other women) from the path of virtue, many Islamist women believe that ‘fallen’ women have been coerced or manipulated into sin. By outlawing immorality, they believe that it is possible to free women from being sexually exploited, or having their families broken up by their husbands’ extra-marital affairs.
The JI women are well aware that the Hudood Ordinances have caused immeasurable pain to many women who are entirely innocent of adultery. Through their welfare work in providing legal aid and emergency shelter to women in crisis, they have witnessed the damage at first hand. Such programs provide useful propaganda for JI, but there is also no doubting the women’s passionate belief in their work. They speak of their satisfaction in helping women who have been falsely accused, and they angrily denounce the common practice of a husband divorcing his wife and allowing her to remarry, only to go to the authorities with the claim that the first marriage was never dissolved and that his former wife is therefore guilty of adultery with her new husband.
And yet, they continue to support the Ordinances under which such women are jailed. They insist that the main problems lie in the implementation of the law, rather than the law itself. For instance, if marriages and divorces were properly recorded (most are not), it would be much more difficult for disgruntled former husbands to lay false charges. If the legal system were not so grindingly inefficient, women would not languish in jail for years only to be found not guilty (as most often happens) when they finally come to trial.
Is there a comparison here between christian anti-feminists and the Islamic women of JI? Or is it more complicated than that? It seems Western feminists and the Islamic women of JI hold similar views about one another. I guess we have to ask whether their agenda is to uphold the power of their patriarchal religion, or if they indeed are acting on behalf of women. Christian anti-feminists seem beholden to maintaining the patriarchal notion of women’s place as ‘God’ stipulates. However the JI women seem to be about ‘liberating’ women- Just in a completely different way to the ideas and actions of western feminists. Does anyone know more?
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