Pakistan Women Fear New Islamic Law May Blunt Struggle for Rights

From an office no bigger than a walk-in closet, sociologist Farida Shaheed monitors the struggle for women’s equality in this overwhelmingly Muslim country that has been somewhat inconsistent in its adherence to the laws of Islam.

One measure of the struggle’s ups and downs is the position of the mandatory veil, or chador, as worn by female newscasters on government television, Shaheed said the other day.

“Since the elected government came to power in 1985,” she said, “we’ve noticed that the chador has been slipping further and further back on her head, almost to the point where you couldn’t see it. There was a loosening of the rules. In the past week, though, it’s gone back down to the eyes.”

Elsewhere, there have been more substantial changes since President Zia ul-Haq appeared on television June 15 to announce a sweeping new fundamentalist law that gives Islamic scholars and religious leaders ultimate authority over virtually every institution in Pakistan.

TV Programs Checked

Islamic leaders--ulemas, they are called here--have been sitting for hours in front of video screens, editing programs and commercials to make sure that women do not appear for more than 25% of the air time, that no woman appears wearing makeup, that women appear in only those commercials that advertise products for women, and that no woman appears with her arms or head uncovered.

On the surface, such measures do not seem to go very deep, and women’s rights advocates and political analysts say it is not clear yet whether Zia, though he is a devout Muslim, intends to go much further now in enforcing fundamentalist Islamic law than he did in 1979, after making a similar announcement. Pakistan, they say, could never be another Iran.

“Zia simply doesn’t have the will that the Iranian situation displayed,” said sociologist Shaheed, who worked in Iran for two years as a U.N. volunteer just before the followers of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini overthrew Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi in 1979. “He (Zia) has done very well at simply using Islam as a political tool.”

Nevertheless, she said--as did several other women’s rights leaders interviewed here--that Zia’s new law, which declares that Islam will be “the supreme fountainhead for all aspects of life in our country,” has touched off new fear that after years of struggle for equality the 50 million women of Pakistan may be thrust back under the veil.

Sees Few Rights to Lose

On a recent Friday, as Zia was saying special prayers at the dedication rites for a spectacular new million-square-foot mosque in Islamabad, the capital city 160 miles away, Shaheed said: “At this point, we’re all still grappling with what’s going to happen to us. Aside from the new Pakistan television policies, Zia has spelled out nothing. I will say this, though: Women in Pakistan simply don’t have that many rights for us to have that much to lose.”

Already, Shaheed said, Pakistan’s Islamic laws bar women from giving evidence in court in cases involving rape and adultery. Women cannot be the sole signatory to any financial transaction. Rules affecting work are so extensive that, according to government figures, women make up less than 3% of the work force.

On the other hand, Pakistani men may take as many as four wives. They may divorce a woman simply by saying three times, “I divorce you.” And since 1979, Shaheed said, “a whole generation has grown up hearing from government television, the most powerful medium in the country, that women have no business anywhere but in purdah”--fully covered and confined to the house.

Still, since 1961 the women of Pakistan have been protected, to some extent, by constitutional provisions known as the Family Laws. These laws, which seek to temper the effects of Islam on women, require that a man’s three “I divorce you’s” be spread over a period of several months, providing for a cooling-off period that has saved many marriages. They also fix minimum dowry requirements and a minimum age for women to marry, putting an end to a tradition of 11- and 12-year-old brides.

Fears for Family Laws

“Now, all the family laws will be thrown out,” Shaheed said, “and there is talk of legalizing blood money.”

Tradition has it, she said, that “if you kill someone and the family of the victim agrees, you can get off by paying them 40 kilograms of silver, if the victim was a man, or half that amount if you killed a woman or a non-Muslim.”

Despite the uncertainty about implementation of the new law, Shaheed and about 30 other women’s rights advocates are already taking the offensive. Last weekend, 150 women demonstrated in Lahore against the new law, and six were detained, witnesses said. Other women’s protests are planned throughout July in other major cities.

“The point is, all those little advances we were making through the last few years are now all put in question,” Shaheed said.

Paradoxical Prominence

There are many signs of those advances, and together they form a mosaic of paradox in the status of women in Zia’s Pakistan.

At the center of the most prominent paradox is Benazir Bhutto, the daughter of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the man Zia overthrew and ordered executed in 1977. She commands a huge popular following and is regarded as Zia’s principal political foe. Conceivably, she could be the next prime minister.

And there are even more dramatic examples. According to a study that Shaheed is preparing for her Women’s Resource Center in Karachi, the heads of Pakistan’s two most powerful labor unions, the dockworkers and the steelworkers, are women--despite the fact that neither union has a single woman member.

Maleeha Lodhi is a quieter and in many ways more articulate symbol of the conflict. Young and Western-educated at the London School of Economics, she is chief editor of The Muslim, a powerful English-language daily in Islamabad. The Muslim is fervently Islamic in editorial philosophy, and it is required reading in government offices as well as in foreign embassies.

Tradition of Respect

“There is a paradox here, which is what makes a Benazir Bhutto possible and, to a much lesser extent, me possible,” Lodhi said. “There is a deep respect for women here, a respect that is gone in the West. If you know how to make that tradition of respect work for you, you can go a long way. When I am with the president, for example, I keep my head covered, but he always addresses me as ‘doctor.’ ”

And there is paradox in Zia’s own family. He does not drink or smoke, and he prays the required five times a day. But his wife is not in purdah, and his daughter is a physician.

Lodhi is among those who believe that Zia’s new law will have little practical effect on women in Pakistan.

“I don’t think women need be fearful that they’re going to get pushed back into the veil,” she said. “Women in Pakistan have gone too far to get pushed back now. I mean, it’s all well and good to protest the fact that women must appear on television with their heads covered, but the women are still there. That’s really something.”

Calls Zia Move Political

Zia’s announcement of the new law, she said, “was clearly 100% political.” She said he “is trying to pull the same rabbit out of the hat twice, and no one’s buying it, not even the fundamentalist political leaders and scholars.”

Within two days of Zia’s June speech, leaders of the most vocal of the fundamentalist political parties, the Jamaat-i-Ulema-i-Pakistan, which had been one of Zia’s staunchest supporters in the early 1980s, criticized the law as hypocritical and politically motivated.

They said it is a fraudulent attempt to use Islam to distract the people’s attention from Zia’s dissolution of Parliament two weeks earlier.

“There’s no doubt,” a diplomatic official here said, “that in Pakistan, which was founded as an Islamic country in 1947, Islam is like motherhood and apple pie. Zia has always used it as a political chit.”

Religious Leaders Wary

Editor Lodhi said: “The religious leaders are saying to Zia, ‘You tried co-opting us before, in 1979, but your Islamization was a sham. Now you want us to do it again, and we say, never. The ulemas and mulvis (Muslim priests) want a real share of the power, and Zia will never give it to them.”

Despite her optimism, though, even Lodhi said she is deeply concerned about the possible repeal of the family laws and the effect on women, the great majority of whom are severely oppressed.

“The point is,” she said, “the genie is now out of the bottle and anything can happen. From the political point of view, that can have far-reaching implications. There is nothing, for example, to stop someone from filing a petition in the Islamic courts that would bar a woman from being head of state. Where would that leave Benazir Bhutto?

“How can anyone say that this new Islamization is not, in principal, political in nature?”