Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction
- 1 In a Desperate State: The Social Sciences and the Overdeveloped State in Pakistan, 1950 to 1983
- 2 The Overdeveloped Alavian Legacy
- 3 Institutions Matter: The State, the Military and Social Class
- 4 Class Is Dead but Faith Never Dies: Women, Islam and Pakistan
- 5 The Amnesia of Genesis
- 6 The Political Economy of Uneven State-Spatiality in Pakistan: The Interplay of Space, Class and Institutions
- 7 An Evolving Class Structure? Pakistan's Ruling Classes and the Implications for Pakistan's Political Economy
- 8 The Segmented ‘Rural Elite’: Agrarian Transformation and Rural Politics in Pakistani Punjab
- 9 Ascending the Power Structure: Bazaar Traders in Urban Punjab
- 10 Democracy and Patronage in Pakistan
- 11 From Overdeveloped State to Praetorian Pakistan: Tracing the Media's Transformations
- About the Contributors
- Index
4 - Class Is Dead but Faith Never Dies: Women, Islam and Pakistan
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 April 2019
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction
- 1 In a Desperate State: The Social Sciences and the Overdeveloped State in Pakistan, 1950 to 1983
- 2 The Overdeveloped Alavian Legacy
- 3 Institutions Matter: The State, the Military and Social Class
- 4 Class Is Dead but Faith Never Dies: Women, Islam and Pakistan
- 5 The Amnesia of Genesis
- 6 The Political Economy of Uneven State-Spatiality in Pakistan: The Interplay of Space, Class and Institutions
- 7 An Evolving Class Structure? Pakistan's Ruling Classes and the Implications for Pakistan's Political Economy
- 8 The Segmented ‘Rural Elite’: Agrarian Transformation and Rural Politics in Pakistani Punjab
- 9 Ascending the Power Structure: Bazaar Traders in Urban Punjab
- 10 Democracy and Patronage in Pakistan
- 11 From Overdeveloped State to Praetorian Pakistan: Tracing the Media's Transformations
- About the Contributors
- Index
Summary
INTRODUCTION
In his ‘Rethinking Pakistan's Political Economy’, S. Akbar Zaidi (2014:50) argues that ‘“class” has become a category that has lost relevance for the social sciences’ in Pakistan and that ‘the country has been forced into an analytical Islamic framework as if no other sense of existence or identity existed’. This chapter confirms Zaidi's observation by referencing it against Alavi's (1988) thesis on women, class and Islam. The comparison reveals how Alavi's earlier class analysis has since been replaced by the privileging of Islam as a category of analysis in a body of post 9/11 scholarship. It also demonstrates how defensive apologia, offered by those who claim a left identity, has prevented the emergence of a new and gendered reading of Pakistan's political economy, since it has been busy saving Islam and the Muslim man from feminist critique and global imperialism.
The first three decades of the newly independent state of Pakistan were marked by successful pressure from women's groups and activists for the feminisation of its policies and institutions. The 1977 military coup by General Zia ul Haq was followed by a regime under which the earlier ambitious modernisation period was replaced by an aggressive conservatism enforced by a social and legal Islamisation campaign. This was met with resistance from a small but vocal Pakistani women's movement during the 1980s. According to Hamza Alavi,
the decade [was] truly [the] decade of the women of Pakistan. A powerful women's movement made a dramatic impact on Pakistan's political scene, all the more so in the light of the total failure of political parties to inject any life in the movement for restoration of democracy in Pakistan to bring an end to its oppressive military regime. (1988:1328)
This acknowledgement of the agency of women's resistance to a masculinist state and of the importance of their contributions towards Pakistan's democratisation is a departure from Alavi's (1972) original un-gendered thesis of the overdeveloped Pakistani state in which women are an invisible category. But the criticism regarding Alavi's gender blindness warrants deeper investigation. Women's rights movements in Pakistan have held contradictory relations with military regimes. These relations have been hostile and confrontational at times and at others, yielded advantageous or beneficial policies for women.
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- Information
- New Perspectives on Pakistan's Political EconomyState, Class and Social Change, pp. 93 - 109Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2019