Moral Regulation in a Postcolonial Nation-State

This paper looks at two instances of ‘moral panic’ in the recent history of Pakistan. As women are the repositories of national culture, their moral and sexual regulation is arguably coextensive with state formation. However, in countries like Pakistan, this process cannot be understood as based on some pre-given ‘Muslimness’; rather, Islamization itself is contested terrain and not the only source of meaning, with local tribal traditions and complex class alignments equally at play. This is demonstrated in the first case that I discuss: General Zia ul-Haq's military regime's enactment of a series of laws in the1980s – the Zina Ordinance and the Laws of Evidence – aimed at controlling women's sexual, social and political status. A direct consequence of these policies and their implementation was the launch of a counter-attack against the regime by urban middle-class women who formed an umbrella organization of feminist groups and individuals, deploying innovative forms of cultural protest in a situation where direct public action was severely restricted. The second example, popularly known as the ‘Saima love-marriage case’, which occurred during the democratic years of the 1990s, also reveals how contending social classes and cultural forces mediated their struggles for hegemony through the bodies of women (and men). At issue throughout the discussion is the need to reorient common-sense approaches to the victim figure of Islamic fundamentalism, especially at a time when Islam has globally become the sign of illiberalism and the justification of new imperial agendas.