Negotiating Gender, Religion, and State Power: Feminist Literary Responses to Islamization in Pakistan under General Zia-ul-Haq

Abstract

The Islamization era of General Zia-ul-Haq (1977-1988) was a turning point in Pakistan's political life in which the government used religious rhetoric as a tool to reinforce its authoritarianism. Gendered subordination took the form of religion in legislation like the Hudood Ordinances, the Law of Evidence, making women's bodies and personhood a central battleground in the regime's overall ambition to govern on behalf of Islam. This article looks at the ways in which women writers of the time challenged this official mode of thinking, in works characterized by acts of body, language and interiority. In rejecting a marginal protest reading of this literature as a marginal protest, the article suggests that it was a substantive counter-discourse which took on the state's discursive terrain and challenged the unification of religious and political power from the inside. This literary piece addresses issues of gender, religion and state power not as mutually exclusive or opposing binary codes, but as a terrain of negotiation that is continually opened in collective resistance movements like the Women's Action Forum. The article, in sum, advances the historiography of postcolonial feminist literature, a critical perspective that will help to make sense of women's writing as a form of political challenge to authoritarian religious authority, an approach with many implications for feminist history in the Muslim world and others in which religious authority is authoritarian.