Islamic Influences on Sociolegal Conditions of Pakistani Women

Abstract

The very concept 'women's rights' elicits disparate, conflicting images in con temporary Pakistan. What constitutes women's rights, who is to define what these rights are, and where responsibility lies for ensuring these rights is hotly dis cussed in Pakistan, though rarely actually debated. The various contending view points hardly recognize other perspectives as even existing, let alone legitimate enough to debate. Where these issues are being debated is within each larger view point either to convince sympathetic contestants of one's stance or, less often, to find common ground within a given perspective. The state, virtually by default so as to keep the varying camps at bay, has undertaken the difficult task to construct culturally appropriate definitions of women's rights as well as culturally acceptable mechanisms to implement them. Indeed, the effort to find and articulate culturally appropriate definitions of women's rights is not just an issue in Pakistan but is a contentious one worldwide. While we must be wary of essentializing Muslim women and hence, their human rights challenges, in Pakistan, as in much of the Muslim world, culture and religion are inextricably intertwined and both Islamic laws and codified traditions play pow erful roles in how Muslim states govern themselves and define their jurisdictions. A critical question in a social environment such as Pakistan's is that while what is ac ceptable within Islam especially pertaining to women and their rights may not be acceptable within prevailing cultural constructs, which arena will 'win out' as the defining social construct and be acceptable to all? The process of responding to this question, replete with its own contradictions, is still evolving. It would be easy to assign rudimentary labels to the three principal sentiments Islamist, secular/progressive and traditional and then discuss the vision each holds of women's rights in contemporary Pakistan. Easy, but grossly inaccurate. To initi ate the discourse on women's rights in Pakistan as seen from the vantage points of three distinct viewpoints would be to slip into the temptation to essentialize them into monolithic groupings. The enormous degree of diversity within each of these camps forces us to question the utility of using such kinds of categories at all. The way in which the state has interacted with the first two groups, in some cases ap