This article is part of Dissent Today’s special series on Pakistan’s general elections. Follow the series here.
The recent sentencing of former Prime Minister Imran Khan and his wife, Bushra Bibi, for contracting their marriage during the latter’s post-divorce Iddat period, has triggered political outrage. Khan is reported to have claimed that ‘this marks the first instance in history where a case related to iddat has been initiated’. Populists are not just skilled mythmakers – they’re often seduced by their own myths at the cost of political reasoning.
Of course, this is not the first case of state intervention in ‘private’ matters of marriage and sexual relations; British colonial and postcolonial Islamic judicial reasonings have consistently colluded and strengthened patriarchal strangleholds over Pakistani women’s consent, choice and agency (especially, sexual and marital).
From 1979, General Zia ul Haq instituted gender apartheid in the 80s and 90s when Islam was invoked to enable men’s legal, social control over marital rights and sexual dominance over women.
The Zina Ordinance (Adultery, Fornication) decimated the concept of sexual consent, enabled men to cast wrongful accusations of adultery on their wives with flimsy or no evidence and, even the admission of sexual violation of a woman, if unproven or if pregnancy resulted from the rape, could be taken as self-indicting evidence of committing the crime of adultery or illicit fornication.
Forty years of advocacy against the Zina laws resulted in constant allegations against protesting feminists and women’s rights activists as “foreign agents”, “westoxified elite women”, “enlightenment dupes”, “orientalist anti-Islamic demons” and “compromised NGO/civil society liberals”. Complicit in this patriarchal view was Imran Khan who abstained, along with the Islamists boycott, from voting to reform the Zina Ordinance. It was due to the votes of the opposition party of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) that the Musharraf government managed to pass the Women’s Protection Bill of 2006.
Confessing political complicity
Historical amnesia is a dangerous disease suffered by many millennial PTI supporters and this only widens the democracy deficit. The projection that state persecution of the PTI’s leadership is uniquely vicious, or that the party is constitutionally committed, anti-establishment and anti-elite, is text-book mythos over logos. In fact, it has been the politics of populist piety and not democracy, that was perfectly coupled under the governance of Imran Khan and his wife, Bushra, who he characterized repeatedly as ‘spiritual and domestic’.
Quite disconnected from his personal journey of pietist redemption, in 2018, ably assisted by the Jamaat e Islami, Imran Khan enthusiastically weaponized the piety clause 63 A of the constitution to disqualify PM Nawaz Sharif. He repeated such a ‘gaming of the constitution’ by barring 25 legislators from voting for a Chief Minister candidate from the opposition party in the Punjab Assembly in 2022. Intra-party elections in the PTI have been controversial since the time of Justice Wajih and split the party even before it was dharna-lifted into power by the establishment in 2018.
It has been the politics of populist piety and not democracy, that was perfectly coupled under the governance of Imran Khan and his wife, Bushra, who he characterized repeatedly as ‘spiritual and domestic’.
The most damning evidence of Khan’s pro-establishment credentials has been his regime’s exoneration of the indicted demagogue, (late) General Musharraf who defiled the constitution and sold the country in the war on terror and who this honest civilian premier had a chance to hold accountable through judicial process.
In 2018, Khan also rewarded another chief with a constitutionally dicey extension. Apparently, ‘anti-establishment’ depends on how anti the establishment is against you on any given day.
Dual standards
The political culture between 2018-2022 was dominated by fake news, innuendo, gendered attacks and piety performances. Under Khan’s governance, the red herring of financial corruption was provided by video and audio exposes of sexual indiscretions of opposition politicians. Sex and money were shaken into a political cocktail. YouTube tabloids offered peepholes into the personal affairs of opposition politicians yet, there were no PTI objections over privacy or propriety back then.
The public scrutiny of all politicians has heightened due to the use of social media – the elasticity of the public-private boundary has been stretched by this generation of social media political activists themselves. It’s baffling that, despite their proud manipulation of social media for political ends, the current PTI rhetoric pretends that Khan and Bushra are the exclusive and innocent victims of the weaponization of sexual politics.
For over a decade, Benazir Bhutto remained the target of vicious sexism – often within her own cabinet – and carried the ignominies targeted at her spouse, too. Lack of photoshop or AI technology did not prevent the spread of political porn even at that time.
Despite their proud manipulation of social media for political ends, the current PTI rhetoric pretends that Khan and Bushra are the exclusive and innocent victims of the weaponization of sexual politics.
Women remain the markers and symbols and physical targets of moral panics around the tryst of Muslim women’s sexuality. The focus on abstract morality and women’s fitna potential are a deliberate method to bury material and political equal rights of women. Inspired by such fears, male judicial sympathy for men’s fragile fears of being cuckolded and their cynical use of the law and religion remain firmly intact.
The gendered cost of faith-based politics
While piety may be about the self and inward, the politics of piety or religion are, by definition, public and instrumental. Khan preached morality that galvanized a generation that adulates him for his past picadillo performances, as much as his pious promises of turning Pakistan into a Riyasat e Medina.
As in all matters, the standard for lapse of self-righteous Muslim men in Pakistan is much lower than that for women, and the legal and moral impunity extended to them is much higher. Male leaders, military and civilian, have enjoyed lives of blatant indiscretions but former PM, Imran Khan, is arguably the most successful beneficiary of moral flex, separation of the personal from political, and the privilege to preach to the nation about vice, corruptive effects of film and arts, women’s rights as cultural alienation, on nepotism, clientelism and improprieties in office and, in his use of the religion card in politics.
However, none of this would be possible without Bushra Bibi – Khan’s redemption as the pious subject was very much enabled by the spiritual patronage of Bushra. When it suited this male-defined Islamic republic, Khan’s hypermasculinity remained immune to iddat requirements, improprietous haste, shrine prostrating and sexist thinking. His rumoured sexual transgressions and alleged spousal oneirocentric revelations about official appointments were defended in a way that no woman leader could expect or survive. His populism has politically mobilized more women than other parties or non-governmental movement in recent times, without offering any specific gender-based rewards, policies, or rights.
While Khan remains moral Teflon, the recent turn in narrative directed at the former first lady, Bushra Imran, reveals the tenuous placement of piety performance if she doesn’t maintain the male-defined Madonna gold standard. Since piety is exclusively about virtue, the risk of worldly or material compromises is high but moral lapses – even illogical ones like the incompletion of the iddat period for a woman in her 50s – elicits a very high price.
Piety politics, like all politics, is of course, performative and competitive and not some inward, discreet self-defining underground journey, as romanticized in recent scholarship. The pious are deeply invested in social norms such as purdah and observing sexual modesty and iddat rituals.
Dishing out moral condemnation boomerangs at the first opportunity precisely because there is no consistency.
Panic over immorality becomes personal when virtue is tied to religious belief rather than (secular) political ethical standards. It’s not consistent to have a leader use religious references, perform piety, cite divine purposes and conjoin religion with politics but refute the realm of punitive religious laws as ‘personal’ or ‘private’. That would qualify as secular laws and state.
No lesson learned
Today, the unrepentant Imran Khan and his injured followers show no signs of reconciliation or democratic collectivism. They ride the crest of moral indignation laced with the kind of piety that only qualifies them as first and exclusive civilian victims and mock and accuse anyone who remains sceptical, as collaborator and state sell-out. Refusing to acknowledge that Khan was the willing disciple and henchman for the Establishment, they sneer at human rights activists for not directing all their energies for PTI’s “real” democrats. The anti-democratic nature of exceptionalizing a party and its leader is not sinking in. Ironically, they insist that PTI associated women are entitled to the same feminist attention and activism that they discredited, demeaned and delegitimized for four years but offer no such support or collectivism in return – only snideness, moral exclusion and judgement.
Imran Khan’s followers insist that PTI-associated women are entitled to the same feminist attention and activism that they discredited and delegitimized for four years, but offer no such support or collectivism in return – only snideness and moral exclusion.
However, the youth bulge in Pakistan in the new millennium was never some lumpen blindly following a pious pied piper – it is gendered, globalized and even queer. Overlapping Khan’s election, a new wave of feminist intent arose comprising those who reject such imposed piety, virtuousity, modesty, propriety and insist instead, on pride, visibility and sexual autonomy.
This means that Pakistani women’s aspirations for equality and fundamental rights have increasingly narrowed to just two strategic options; the first is repentance, conformity and domestication (the kind that Khan glorifies as typified by his wife) which offer the consolation prize of secondary status and heavenly reward; the other is gendered, sexual and political defiance – which invites the risks of social and actual death and inspires persistent moral panic.
The contemporary generation witnessed how social media celebrity Qandeel Baloch pioneered the departure from the earlier practice of the pious disguise required of women celebrities who played out their on-screen scripted Madonna/Whore roles in their actual lives. Qandeel subverted the male notions of honor and shame and paid the price with her life. On the other hand, those women celebrities and artists who have taken the path of repentance have profited from the politics of piety. Veena Malik, Maria B, Mishi Khan and others become foot soldiers of the state and patriarchy by peddling a conservative gendered order. Then they wonder how the state weaponizes the war on women?
Which path?
After decades of state suppression, conservative backlash, and liberal hopes hinged to the promise of piety, the sexual politics of a new generation has rudely unsettled Pakistan’s gendered moral order. Moorat and Aurat March have become the vehicles for protest and celebration of sexual identities. Haya Marches and pious women’s movements celebrate abstinence, modesty and gender apartheid. Which one is the natural alliance in the Iddat case today? Why are PTI hardliners calling on feminists’ and not on pious women’s organisations to extend support to their leader? Do they now concede and support that ‘mera jisam meri marzi’ is the right of a woman to consent or refuse matters relating to her choices in ‘private’ matters and that the state and male guardian have no jurisdiction over these?
Further, if the objection is the targeted humiliation of Imran Khan and Bushra Imran, then does this imply that the lower class of men and women do not deserve our daily outrage at their routine humiliation at the hands of state and community gate-keepers of morality who police the sexual autonomies of women with exceptional zeal?
In a classic staging of the common practice of divorce blackmail and revenge, Bushra’s ex-husband, Khawar Maneka perjured himself by first insisting his pious ex-wife was pure and spiritual and later characterized her as the unfaithful, disobedient nashuz. Such deployment enables law to serve as a tool of controlling women’s choice and denying their free will in matters of marriage.
The lesson is clear – the hybrid middle-path approach of interpreting Islamic laws in a progressive light will not stabilize the personal or social rights of Pakistanis and women and civilians will pay the gendered cost of this, repeatedly.
It’s time for the outraged to extend their conscientious objection for ALL women, genders and exploited classes without discrimination and with historical objectivity, rather than spreading moral panic, practicing selective piety politics or, supporting anti-democratic populism.
The writer is a feminist researcher and activist based in Karachi. She is the author of “Faith and Feminism in Pakistan” and several published articles on women, secularism and religion
