PukhtunWomen

Forgive me if you have heard this before, but I just received this nugget of information a week ago. Now you must be familiar with the lack of discipline when it comes to postal services in any part of the world and that I choose to live in the Southern Hemisphere gives postal services and news magazines in Pakistan virtual carte blanche’ for taking a month to get me anything (if someone is reading I am still waiting for the annual issue for Herald and Newsline). Well to get back on track, I just found out from the letters to the editor section (in February’s issue of the Newsline), that a group of female students appearing for a Bachelors of Education final were allegedly asked by their panel of examiners to point out north and south on a map and that sadly, the students could not point them out!! But surprise, surprise they were still given a pass degree. I can understand the shock and horror this news might have caused, deploring education standards, lenient examiners, apathy towards what kind of teachers we are producing to train future generations. But somehow I cannot really blame that group of hapless teachers in training. Really would anyone blame any Pakistani in recent times if he or she fails to point out the right direction of anything today? Forgive me if I turn to Urdu but really in this never ending cycle of qibla durst karna (the best translation I can come up with is knowing where our religious and political Mecca lies) who knows what is East and what lies West, who is right or left (wing)? Good Islam, bad Islam, jihad against the Russians, no actually peaceful political Islam, Afghanistan is our friend, no Afghanistan needs to be minded, India yes, India no; the past ten years have been one crazy roller coaster and no one knows what goes up and what is the ground now. So if someone tells me that a student cannot point North and South on a map, I will say I perfectly understand! Can you imagine that the last bastion of non-conformity, of challenging ‘the religion of the court’, which is what Sufism was in the past, now sports endorsement by the (Pakistani) state—in fact it has a virtual decree from the court. GHQ says Pakistanis, we are all Sufis now and you better like it. I can virtually turn over that garment (which now is becoming more and more like a straight jacket) and read on the collar—Official Suppliers to the President of Pakistan.

I am sure the process to mess up our religious and political leanings started a long time ago but at this stage I am just recounting the process since I gained political consciousness—as in what has made my generation and my fellow Pashtuns so ‘directionless’ and ‘clueless’ for want of better words. Since the 1980s we have had a particular political experiment of forcibly imposing an Islamic identity in regions hosting Pashtun populations in order to support the war effort across the border, which of course led to a monolithic and one-dimensional Islam being enforced. If you are to steer our boat back to its moorings, to explain it very graphically, it is essential to recover all the readings of political Islam and social action amongst Pashtun communities. This so we can chart the roadmap to how our community can reposition itself. Amartya Sen has attempted to recover the history of debate and religious pluralism amongst South Asian communities to address the difficult problems of inter-communal harmony in the region (for more on this read ‘The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian Culture, History and Identity’, Penguin Books, New Delhi, 2005). His research into the sponsorship, advocacy, and support of inter-communal dialogues in the recent past proves that ‘tolerance towards diversity of opinion was not alien to the South Asian region’. It is thus essential that we contribute and respond to concerns regarding the paucity of records narrating similar debates amongst Pashtun communities, for these debates and exchanges have happened in the past, it is just that for reasons that have suited the powers that are, these dialogues were obliterated.

And this task is important if we are to rework popular perceptions and imaginations of the Pashtun community, or as Benedict Anderson writes elsewhere for other communities it is important to question the styles in which communities are imagined. And for this it is important to commission projects that narrate and acknowledge a past that to date has remained disenfranchised and unrecognized. Surely, Islam has been expressed in relatively flexible forms in the past, and there can be multiple readings of Pashtun and Muslim social and religious identities. It is crucial to recover such expressions in the past, to develop a forum that could sponsor and support such dialogues in the present now.

What should Messrs. Musharraf be doing now and veryearnestly, and no its not arranging Women’s/Farmers/Students/Businesspersons conventions or rather I would say assembling a hostage guest list (guests to be assembled three hours before arrival of the Chief Guest, no handbags, pens, mobile phones, notebooks to be allowed in the auditorium, clap when asked to, maintain a three feet distance from the podium style of jamboree) in the Convention Centre and then ask them to bring up their children properly and vote for his team come election time. His team needs to conduct a series of consultations with religious, government and community organizations with the aim to study amongst other important steps, how can we develop sensible educational material about Islam, about our local cultures, about such Pakistani citizens that we have ignored or white washed from our textbooks, and what has been the history, the role and contribution of the true heroes of our country. What policy suggestions can we come up with, what policy and program initiatives can we foster, which voices, social movements, and inter communal harmony projects can we sponsor that will encourage a healthy and interactive religious diversity and which will utilize our ethnic and religious backgrounds as an asset and resource for Pakistan's social, political and economic well-being in a globalising world?

I can narrate numerous such voices in the past, and in the spirit of Women’s Day I am sure you can forgive me for being extremely partisan towards my female Pashtun ancestors and taking their story up. It is not only in the recent present that Pashtun women have started coming up with models of Islam and Pashtunwali that were accommodative of their concerns, there have been educational, literary and social reform movements amongst Pashtun women in the past as well. There is an excellent research dissertation being conducted by Bushra Rahman in University of Peshawar who has explored the work of Pashtun women poets. She has explored how their initial subjects of ‘mysticism’ shifted to anti British and nationalist imagery and eventually a critique by some like Bushra Begum and Alif Jana Khattak of the controls over their mobility and sexuality under Pakhtoonwali. One can also explore women writings in the progressive journal Pakhtun introduced by Ghaffar Khan. Women’s initial anonymous letters to the editor or advice columns with acronyms did progress to journal articles carrying their names, now that we are back to a culture of nameless women is a tragedy. Noor Jehan Begum, Maha Sultana, Najma, Majeed Begum, and Ameena Khatoon through writing in the journal deliberated upon the gendered expectations of Pashtun women under rigid understanding of Pakhtoonwali. Ghaffar Khan on his part took the decision to support women’s social reform and invited them to become full paid-up members of the Khitmatgar political action for instance. Women were encouraged to be involved in the nationalist movement and the resultant political activism brought about an easing of purdah and segregation rules, and inclusion of concerns like women’s access to education and inheritance rights in the political discourse.

So dust off that dirt from your bookshelf, air our stories and then tell me whether your future teachers still have a problem with that old compass!!