Introduction
In Pakistan's elections of October 2002 a coalition of ‘religious parties’ was elected into government in the North West Frontier Province's provincial assembly. The political parties making up this coalition, the Muttahida Majlis-e Amal (MMA), or United Action Front, claimed during the campaign that they would introduce ‘Islamic’ or shari'a law into Pakistan's legal system. Indeed, they did quickly set to the task of ‘Islamizing’ the Frontier: playing audio music cassettes was banned in the region's public transport vehicles, for example. In the summer of 2003 I was in the Frontier conducting research in Chitral – a mountainous region that is predominantly populated by Khowar-speaking ethnically Chitrali Muslims. Chitral too had seen the victory of MMA politicians in both the provincial and national assemblies. After their election, these men issued statements saying that Chitrali women working in the offices of international development NGOs active in the region should wear the Afghan burqa to work. Many of Chitral's mullahs complained both before and after the MMA's election success that the sight of men sitting with women in plush white jeeps whilst listening to Indian music cassettes was corrupting the emotions of Chitral's Muslims. They argued in their mosque addresses that the presence of women in public was a form of public indecency that rendered women prostitutes in the eyes of Islamic law. In the face of these Islamizing injunctions, several women verbally challenged the messages of Chitral's ‘hardened’ men of learning and piety (dashmanan). They claimed that the dashmanan were hypocrites bent on perverting the ‘true’ teaching of Islam for their own political benefit. This paper explores the responses of these women to the MMA's Islamizing messages. Its focus is on a category of small town Muslims whose voices are rarely, if ever, documented in anthropological accounts of South Asian Islam – women who are critical in public and vocal ways of ‘Islamism’.
I have spent a great deal of time over the past 12 years exploring the nature of Muslim life as enacted in the region's households and villages. Such spaces impose important limits upon the access of women to the world outside of the home: Chitrali women rarely if ever enter the region's village and small town bazaars. Moreover, many ‘Islamizing’ movements are influential in the region today: the Jama'at-e Islami and the Jama'at-e Ulama-e Islam both boast significant support bases and these parties also emphasize the centrality of strict forms of purdah to Chitrali Muslim life. At the same time, some if not many Chitrali young men have also attended para-military training courses organized by so-called ‘Islamist’ organizations that have played an active role in ‘jihadi’ violence in Kashmir and Afghanistan. At first sight, therefore, it would appear that the messages of politically influential Islamizers in Chitral are homogenous and their reception is incontestable, especially by women living in this deeply purdah-conscious society.
By exploring the responses of Chitrali women to the Islamizing legislation of the MMA, however, I hope to present a far more complicated picture of their role in the making of Chitrali Muslim life. My arguments are informed by two major bodies of scholarship on the personal lives of Muslim women. Firstly, several ethnographies have documented the way in which women in village settings frequently play powerful and decision-making roles within the intimate domains of the home. Such accounts argue that such spaces are free from constant male-scrutiny and the ‘techniques of power characteristic of modern states and capitalist economies’ (Abu-Lughod Reference Abu-Lughoud1986, Reference Abu-Lughoud1990). Secondly, many ethnographic accounts have sought to theorize the types of agency that are asserted by women who play an active role in movements of Islamic reform.Footnote 2 Mahmood, most notably, has sought to document the ways in which women participants in the Cairo-based ‘piety movement’ she studied, seek to discipline their bodily dispositions within Islamic ethical conventions (Mahmood Reference Mahmood2001). By consciously learning ethical dispositions that allow them to fully submit to God's will, these women challenge the relevance of simplistic models of the autonomous self to the analysis of the role of women in movements of Islamic reform (Mahmood Reference Mahmood2005).
Both Abu Lughod and Mahmood have, thus, offered important insights into the agentive possibilities for women of both practices of purdah and participation in movements of Islamic reform. More broadly, their work forms part of an expanding body of writing that seeks to penetrate beneath the ‘level of expressed belief and opinion’ in order to understand the ‘common substrate of embodied dispositions’ (Hirschkind Reference Hirschkind2001: 638) that lies below. Many of the Chitrali women I know, however, live vocal, risk-taking lives, and play an active and public role in their region's intellectual and political life. Displays of critical intellectual prowess and the experience of the emotionally infused play of the mind are, indeed, central to the enactment of Muslim virtuosity in Chitral (Marsden Reference Marsden2005). There is a rich culture of joking, impersonation, music, dance, poetry and travelling in the region, and these everyday practices ensure the ongoing vitality of local ways of being Muslim in the face of an array of homogenizing pressures of ‘Islamist’ movements. All-male night time public musical programmes at which performers combine Khowar-language poetic verse with contemporary satire are one type of social events where complex standards of emotional and intellectual refinement are enacted and instantiated. High-intensity debates and discussions that take place in the homes and orchards of village people as well as more formal occasions such as school meetings are another. In all these village spaces, Muslims holding different ideas concerning what it means to be Muslim engage in ongoing debates and discussions. These do not inevitably lead to violence or antagonistic standoffs between reformists and their opponents. Rather, they sustain the region's intellectual life and add to the ceaseless questioning and contestation of Chitrali ways of being Muslim. It is not, however, only Chitrali men who play a part in these public displays of critical thinking and debate. Women, as I document below, also engage in intellectual contests with one another, and with Chitral's Islamic authorities. They are not simply dismissed by other Chitralis as being immoral, nor are these women merely tolerated because of their man-like or exceptional personalities (e.g. de Munck Reference De Munck2005). Their contributions to Chitrali intellectual life, rather, are widely valued, a source of discussion by the region's people, and this dimension of life is being further stimulated by new developments in education, learning and literacy today.
The women I focus upon here are not merely engaged, thus, in debates with other women or close kin within the intimate settings of the region's homes about matters concerning the running of everyday family life (although the role that personal choice should play in the making of marriage matches is a recurring theme of the discussions I explore here). Rather, some of them talk about and present themselves as having the capacity to inform public opinion about hotly contested religious and moral matters. These include, for example, the role that shari'a law should play in regulating the personal lives of Chitral's Muslims, and the authenticity or otherwise of the Islamizing statements of the region's dashmanan. There are, of course, several high-profile campaigners for women's rights in Pakistan who are widely known in the West because they are interviewed and quoted in the international media coverage of sensitive shari'a law cases, especially those involving sexual violence and adultery charges. In contrast, the women discussed here are from low or at best middle status Chitrali backgrounds who live in a region that lies on the peripheries of the Pakistan nation state. They are often educated as far as higher secondary level and some of them have Bachelor degrees, yet they have undertaken degree courses in the region's government colleges or have been correspondent students in Pakistan's Open University.
There is a lingering assumption in some anthropological writing on Islam that people who express views that are critical of reform-minded forms of Islam are either privileged and liberal, or, alternatively, immersed in un-reflexive forms of local or ‘traditional’ Islam (e.g. Ahmad Reference Ahmad, Ahmad and Reifeld2004). Yet the critical views expressed by Chitrali women I know cannot be dismissed as those of an atypical and privileged elite or ‘traditional’ Muslims who are ‘resisting’ reform-minded forms of doctrinal Islam. What is important about these women, rather, is that their approaches to being Muslim defy the relevance of such categories for understanding Chitrali Muslim life. Much of what they say simultaneously builds upon and challenges the ideas of reform-minded Islam. At the same time, they also think deeply and critically about local conceptions of Islamic virtuosity in ways that reflect their own diverse personal experiences of life within and beyond Chitral's villages and small towns.Footnote 3
In spite of the powerful political role occupied by Islamist parties in the region's political life, the difficulties for ‘a singular Islamic discourse to prevail or remain uncontested’ (Soares and Otayek forthcoming Reference Soares, Otayek, Soares and Otayek2007) characterize above all else being Muslim in Chitral today. Women who challenge the teaching and activities of Chitral's dashmanan are active contributors to this ongoing process of contestation. At the same time, there is also much more to the thinking and behaviour of Chitral's madrasa-trained mullahs who might easily be assumed to be true founts of Islamic reformism than we might expect. Chitrali ‘bearded ones’ do seek to project themselves in their speeches as being ‘heavy’ men of religion – it is they who often accuse women who dare to shop in the bazaar of being ‘little prostitutes’. These men and their moralizing attacks, moreover, are not simply dismissed by Chitrali Muslims: mullahs are often described by Chitralis as being buzurgs, or saint-like men of ascetic renunciation who are so pure, for example, that they are able to discern if someone has partaken in illicit sexual relations, or been immoral enough not to wash after sexual intercourse. Yet piety does not even define these men in any simple sense. Some, for example, are said to be ‘beautiful’ sheli and playful (cheruti) men, who love smart clothes, slick haircuts, expensive perfumes, and take visible pleasure in telling sexual jokes during the course of their mosque addresses.
In other words, whilst all the Chitrali Muslims I know are concerned by questions regarding what it means to be a ‘proper’ Muslim in relationship to the teachings of the region's dashmanan as well as the Islamizing messages of Islamist parties and movements active in the region, these are not the only questions they consider relevant when setting to the task of ‘being Muslim’ and presenting themselves as Muslims to other Khowar-speaking people. By exploring the way in which Muslims in the region address a complex nexus of questions and debates concerning interactive modes of personal morality, comportment and self-presentation, I emphasis the ways in which Chitralis not only fashion but also project themselves as Muslims at multiple and varying levels and in relationship to diverse concerns, during the course of their daily lives.
Islam and Social Transformation in Chitral
Chitral is the northernmost administrative district of the North West Frontier Province of Pakistan. It is a relatively remote region: in winter all roads to the region are blocked by snow and ice. Chitral is different in many ways from other regions of the Frontier. The Frontier is dominated politically and numerically by Pashto-speaking Pukhtuns, who have been the focus of sustained anthropological study (Ahmed Reference Ahmed1983; Banerjee Reference Banerjee2000; Barth Reference Barth1965; Lindholm Reference Lindholm1982). Yet most if not all Chitral people, who call themselves Chitrali or Khó, are proud to assert that they are different in profoundly important ways from their Pashtun neighbours (O'Brien Reference O'Brien1895; Robertson Reference Robertson1899). The main language spoken in Chitral is Khowar – an Indo-Aryan language unintelligible to both Pashto and Urdu speakers (Bashir Reference Bashir, Bashi and Israruddin1996).Footnote 4
Khowar-speaking Chitralis identify themselves as being either Shi'a Ismai'li or Sunni Muslims. There have been episodes of violent conflict between these communities, yet they continue to live together largely peacefully in many of the region's villages. Many Sunni Chitrali young men are students (talib-e ilm) at ‘down country’ reformist Deobandi madrasas (e.g. Malik Reference Malik1996). Such people often claim that Ismai'lis are non-Muslims; they also seek to enforce strict veiling standards on the region's Sunni women.Footnote 5 Returnee madrasa students, for example, often try to persuade their sisters who work as nurses and health visitors in the region's hospitals and basic health centres that they should no longer go to work. Women, they say, should not even leave their homes, let alone be permitted to visit the houses of men to whom they are not related, or, worse, work on night shifts with male doctors and patients. Such advice (nasihat) is often politely ignored by both these women and their fathers. Nevertheless, disputes over a father's decision to allow his mature daughters to leave their homes in order to work or study are an important dynamic of life in the region's homes.
Chitralis, thus, are knowledgeable and well-informed about a variety of Islamic normative standards of belief and behaviour. Yet, rather than being either automatically deferential to or simply resistant to the figures of authority – the Taliban, mullahs and the representatives of ‘Islamist parties’ – who want to prescribe this kind of Islamic standard for all, they are active, reflective and thoughtful about how and whether to embrace these norms. Those who have embraced ‘reform-minded’ forms of Muslim identity occupy only one part of a much broader spectrum of Muslim thought and identity in the region.Footnote 6 Despite the anti-music strictures of the region's largely Deobandi-trained dashmanan, for instance, musicians play at all-night concerts, and Chitralis vocally express the attitudes they have regarding contentious issues, such as the status of Ismai'lis as Muslims and the influence of Taliban forms of Islam on Chitrali life. The region's women too hold a very diverse range of ideas regarding what constitutes the living of a good Muslim life. Over the past 10 years increasing numbers of Sunni Chitrali women have actively participated in women-only preaching tours organized by the Tabligh-e Jama'at. At the same time, many women claim that the pious women who come to Chitral from ‘down Pakistan’ to preach are ‘hypocrites’: they visit Chitral not to share their knowledge of Islam, but, rather, to indulgently escape from the summer heat of Pakistan's dusty cities.
The focus of this paper is Markaz, a small town with a population of about 20,000. It is historically a Sunni settlement, the population of which is ethically diverse. There are significant numbers of Pukhtuns who work as traders, shopkeepers and hawkers. Whilst Dari-speaking Afghan refugees, who settled in the town's bazaar after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, work as labourers for the region's Chitrali families and own thriving business, especially butchers and tea-shops. This region of Pakistan, then, is deeply influenced by political instability in Pakistan and in a range of neighbouring countries, most notably, Afghanistan.
Chitrali society has also undergone rapid social and economic transformations over the past generation. At one level, the social estates of the region's landowning families have gradually broken down leading to complex transformations of local values concerning the social responsibilities expected of wealthy Chitrali families to their poorer neighbours. At another level, Chitralis have seen the emergence of new types of well-paid professional employment in Pakistan's civil service and a range of international ‘development’ NGOs (cf. Parkes Reference Parkes and MacClancy1996; Staley Reference Staley1982: 259–65). At the same time, rising levels of education in Chitral have also had significant implications for the diversity of women's life experiences in the region. According to provincial government surveys, literacy rates and levels of school attendance in Chitral are now the highest for both men and women in the Frontier province.Footnote 7 The experience of education for young Chitrali men and women, moreover, does not cease with the completion of their school or college education within Chitral. Many of them now study in both academic and skill-based vocational courses in Pakistan's major cities, especially Peshawar and Karachi. Young men from Markaz pursue, in particular, social science degree courses in the town's government degree college as well as in Peshawar University; rising numbers of young town women also now embark on such forms of university education. Finally, growing numbers of young women also leave their villages in order to train as nurses and health workers in hospitals in Pakistan's major cities.
The educated women whose lives I discuss here are not city professionals or the children of elite Pakistani families for whom Western education is a normal feature of life. Rather, they are the first generation of women to have received a formal school and higher education. At the same time, the experience of agricultural work and urban migrant labour is an important dimension of the experiences of all Chitralis, even those who now work in as managers in the region's NGOs. Many if not all of the region's well-educated men financed their graduate and postgraduate studies in Pakistan's cities by working as factory labourers, shop attendants and domestic servants. What it is significant to note is that a majority of young Chitralis are now educated to higher secondary level and beyond, and they are either employed or seeking employment in non-manual professions, such as teaching, development work and the medical sector. Thus, the types of life experiences that characterize many of the young and relatively well educated people explored in this paper are not confined only to the viewpoints of a small bubble of young and educated ‘moderns’ in a world otherwise dominated by agricultural work or factory labour. Levels of literacy, rather, are high in Chitral, and the experience of education over the past 20 years has transformed social life in this region of Pakistan where it is now the norm for the region's youth to have experienced modern, school- and university-based forms of education.
The ‘Contractors of Islam’
As many anthropologists have noted, the expansion of both secular and religious forms of education alongside the importance of new types of print and electronic media in the Muslim world have broadened the spectrum of people able and willing to take part in debate about Islam. Much of this work focuses on well-known and mostly male Muslim media personalities and suggests that such ‘new Muslims’ have contributed to the fragmentation of political and religious authority in the Muslim world and the emergence of alternative forms of public Islam (e.g. Eickelman and Anderson Reference Eickelman, Anderson, Eickelman and Anderson1999; Soares Reference Soares2005: 255).
Fewer studies, however, relate these concerns to small town and relatively remote Muslim societies such as Chitral or ask how far women in such settings contribute to debates about public Islam. I now focus on the life of one Chitrali woman who in recent years has actively sought to play a vocal and public part in Chitrali debates about what it means to be Muslim, most notably by challenging the pronouncements of Chitral's Islamizing dashmanan. The things she says and does do not represent those of Chitrali women generally, yet the controversial public statements she makes about the corruption of the region's mullahs have garnered considerable attention in Chitral since I first met her in August 2003. More broadly, I have encountered many women in Chitral who actively, although less publicly, challenge Chitrali understandings of the types of speech and comportment considered suitable for the region's women as well as the dictates of the region's ‘bearded ones’. The critical assertions these women make about the messages of the region's dashmanan point to ways of being Muslim that cannot simply be understood as the product of ‘Islamic reform’. Instead, they involve individual Muslim women exploring what it means to live a virtuous Muslim life in a world where the pressure to comport oneself according to the moralizing dictates of the region's dashmanan has heightened in recent years, and led to a growing disenchantment with ‘Islamist’ politics as being about petty moralizing and corruption.
In August 2003 I made the twelve hour journey between Chitral and Peshawar in a shared taxi with a Chitrali man who worked as a clerk in a government office in Markaz and his sister who was married in Peshawar, and going home to visit her relatives. The other traveller was woman called Amina, from Markaz, in her early forties, and employed as a health advisor with an internationally financed ‘development’ NGO working in Chitral – she was travelling alone and had been in Peshawar for a medical check-up.
I had first met this woman earlier in the day at the airport after the cancellation of our Chitral bound flight: fully veiled, she had approached me in the airport waiting room, in itself a daring and unusual move.Footnote 8 After a short time in the car, Amina told me that she was working for the rights of women (auratano haqq) in Chitral. In recent days she had issued a number of statements to the press and also made several speeches ‘against’ the region's religious authorities, or dashmanan. In the small car that we had hired Amina announced that Chitral's dashmanan were nothing more than tsar zhibak, or the ‘eaters of funeral feasts’. They were interested in Islam, she said, only because they wanted to fill their stomachs: in reality they cared little about either helping the region's people or encouraging them to understand in greater depth the ‘true’ meanings of Islam. Amina, moreover, did not make what could be interpreted as deeply offensive remarks about Chitral's dashmanan to me alone: the Chitrali Sunni man and his sister were also taking a full part in the conversation. The critical remarks Amina made about the dashmanan were articulated in a semi-public setting and in the presence of Sunni people to whom she was not related.
Amina also goes to considerable lengths to have her views heard in wider circles within and even beyond Chitrali society. In the car she showed me a photocopy of a newspaper paper she had written for the Chitral Times – an Urdu-language local newspaper that is printed in the region's district headquarters. In this paper, she accused the mullahs of being ‘Islam's contractors’ (islamo tikadaran): they were, she wrote, prepared to do anything so long as there was a financial benefit in it for them. In addition to her writing, she had also given speeches at a conference in Peshawar organized by the Aurat Foundation – a major Pakistani NGO established in 1986 and concerned with women's empowerment in the country. In her address, she told me, Amina had once again publicly called the mullahs ‘Islam's contractors’, and demanded that they should tell people the real meaning of Islam – that it conferred ‘rights’ on women – rather than just using their positions of religious and now also political authority for their own benefit. Amina did not merely use safe, intimate or nameless arenas to express her outspoken views, she was, rather, a named contributor to public and contentious debates about Islam.
Given Amina's widespread notoriety for expressing independent views in Chitral and elsewhere, it was, therefore, not a surprise to hear that her comments had invoked critical responses from the region's dashmanan. Chitral's dashmanan, as elsewhere in Pakistan, often legally pursue people they consider to be committing blasphemy, a criminal offence punishable by death in Pakistan's legal system.Footnote 9 Amina's male colleagues had, indeed, been so worried about the ferocity of her speeches and writings that they had pleaded with her to be more moderate. They thought that the possibility of their organization coming under attack from the dashmanan and their ‘tough’ and ‘emotional’ (jezbati) supporters was a real possibility. Yet Amina was not prepared to change either what she said or wrote: if the mullahs wanted to meet her, she told her colleagues, then they knew where her home was.
Amina makes critical remarks about Chitral's mullahs in public spaces associated with the dangerous world of all-male politics, such as meetings organized by controversial NGOs and political parties. Moreover, she uses the print and electronic media to further her criticisms of the region's dashmanan. Playing an active role in public and verbal debates about Islam and Muslim life in Chitral is also something that she sees as having earned her a name in Chitral and the wider region. If making critical pronouncements concerning the status of the region's Sunni authorities is one way in which many Chitrali men display their masculine bravado, then Amina's remarks demonstrate the ways in which publicly voicing critical and even controversial views in public about contentious issues is not something that is confined to male forms of speech and behaviour alone. Chitrali women rather also seek to cultivate and earn reputations for being intelligent (kabil), bold and powerful (takatwar), and doing so is also widely considered an important marker of their own moral self-worth.
Telephones, marriages and mullahs
The ability to act in an assertive, confident and fearless way in the face of criticism from the dashmanan is, then, critical to Amina's everyday mode of self-projection. Amina, of course, shares a dislike of Chitral's dashmanan with many others in the region – notably ‘new Muslims’ (Eickelman and Anderson Reference Eickelman, Anderson, Eickelman and Anderson1999) who are educated, often support movements of Islamic reform that are critical of the authority held by Islam's ulama, and may also be active members of ‘Islamist’ parties such as the Jama'at-e Islami. It would also be easy to imagine that Amina belonged to a very different category of Chitrali Muslim: a wealthy and high status woman from a local family who hold political power and have a stake in weakening the influence of the region's politically active mullahs. I aim now, however, to show that Amina's criticism of the ulama arises neither from her having embraced reform-minded forms of Muslim thought, nor from her class or status subjectivity, but from the complexity of her personal experiences of life as a woman in northern Pakistan. More broadly, her story points toward the degree to which much of being Muslim in Chitral today involves individuals selectively incorporating very different and sometimes seemingly contradictory forms of Muslim thought and identity.
In our subsequent meetings Amina has often told me that she does not fear the mullahs, but, rather, they fear her. On one occasion, she told me, a young male relative from a nearby village had arrived at her house in the midst of night with a young woman – he proclaimed to Amina that he wished to marry the girl, but that neither of their sets of parents had agreed to the match. The two lovers (‘asheqan) told Amina that they had searched for a mullah to undertake the marriage ceremony (nikah). Yet no trained men of religious learning from their village would agree to conduct the rites – they were afraid, supposedly, because the girl belonged to one of Chitral's gentry (adamzada) families, that was also wealthy, whilst the boy was from a ‘low’ (pst) village family, possibly of one-time bonded labourers. The village mullahs feared, therefore, that the girl's influential father could make legal objections to the marriage. There was the possibility that the mullah who conducted the marriage ceremony would find himself the ‘enemy’ (dushman) not only of this powerful family, but also with the region's police and local judiciary. So, an unmarried couple were in Amina's house, they had run away from their homes without the permission of their parents, and had thus far not found a mullah willing to carry out their marriage ceremony. As a result, they faced the very real possibility of legal action initiated by the girl's parents on the basis of Pakistan's Islamic personal laws (hudood). It was after having faced the possibility of forcible separation either by the state or their parents that they had turned to Amina for support.
Amina's response to this situation highlights the complex ways in which different categories of local people – in this case a ‘new Muslim’ woman – interact with Chitral's dashmanan. Having confirmed with the girl that the boy had not ‘forcibly’ taken her with him, but that she had ‘fled’ with him as a result of ‘her own choice’, Amina told me that she picked up the telephone and called one of Chitral's most influential dashmanan: the ‘alim who is the chief judge in the district shari'a court. She had thought carefully about approaching this particular dashmanan: if she could persuade him to carry out the nikah rites then the couple would face no future legal problems. He was the Qazi (Islamic judge) in the region's shari'a court – the man, in other words, who ratified all Chitral's marriage certificates (nikah namah). At first, he refused to undertake the marriage ceremony, claiming that he did not want to condone elopement as a proper from of marriage. In response to the Qazi's refusal to offer help, Amina did not acquiesce to his judgement, but instead asked him another direct question: what, exactly, was un-Islamic about the marriage? According to her account, the Qazi had been rendered ‘without an answer’ (la jawab), and agreed to come to her house immediately to perform the nikah: he came, the two young lovers were married, and Amina ordered them to return to their homes. Amina narrated the story in front of our travelling companions, saying that it was clear proof that the region's mullahs were scared of her and, moreover, were compelled to behave in exactly the way she told them.
In her account of this event, Amina did not merely telephone the mullah in order to ask for his advice regarding the most Islamic course of action she should take about the couple in her home. Rather, she depicts herself as having engaged in an interactive debate with this high-ranking Qazi. It was she who advanced the steps that he should take in order to legally ratify the young couple's love for one another. Many scholars of the Muslim world have documented the ways in which asking for religious advice from mullahs and trained Islamic authorities is a normal feature of everyday women's experiences (notably Peletz Reference Peletz2002). At the same time, scholars working in more urban contexts have shown how attending courts is another ‘key arena in which they (women) express their grievances and express differential aspects of patriarchal authority’ (Osanloo Reference Osanloo2006: 200). Few accounts of Pakistan's Frontier suggest, however, that women engage in active debates and discussions with trained men of piety. In other words, the complex negotiations and interactions that took place between Amina and the Qazi in their telephone conversation highlight both the ways in which ‘new Muslims’ actively challenge and contest the authority of Islam's men of piety, and the possibility that women also play an active role in these discursive processes.
There are, however, also more conventional anthropological models that would allow us to explain the sequence of events discussed above. Firstly, and most obviously, it could be seen as a clash between Islamic reformism, on the one hand, and older local traditions of status hierarchy, on the other. The married couple included the daughter of a landowning family of one-time gentry elites and the son of a low-status family. Distinctions between the local elite of gentry-like landholding families, and a class of landless labourers who were once the serfs of Chitral's self-proclaimed lords, remain important in Chitral today. The ongoing importance of status distinctions to Chitral life has come under attack from both many of Chitral's Islamizing dashmanan (who say they are un-Islamic) and from young and educated men and women from a diverse range of backgrounds (who say that talk about the region's hierarchically nested status groups (qaum) is gandah, or dirty, and a sign of being animal-like and uneducated). Yet what it is important to recognize is that the Qazi did not enthusiastically endorse the couple's decision to elope in marriage, or talk about it in positive terms as reflecting the weakening of traditional types of marriage practice and the growing ascendancy of Islamic doctrinal standards for organizing family life in the region. At the same time, interpreting this event as an example of a reform-minded mullah playing an active role in the weakening of un-Islamic forms of status distinction also overlooks the active initiative played by a woman in securing the eventual realization of the lovers’ marital union.
Secondly, was Amina only able to persuade the mullah because she was the relative of a powerful man in the region, the type of person the mullah was either indebted to or actively seeking out as an influential patron? Amina, however, is from a mid-ranking family of ordinary town people – her family are not wealthy by local standards, and nor did they occupy positions of power and authority either in the old Chitral state or the region's local bureaucracy today. This woman, moreover, is a divorcee: she was married to a Punjabi man at the age of sixteen, whom she divorced after a marriage that lasted about ten years. Amina is the type of woman that South Asia specialists often depict as being marginalized from social life and matters of intimate decision-making, let alone the making of public forms of religious and political life.
A third way of understanding the significance of the telephone conversation between Amina and the mullah would be to see it as structured around the very different types of education they had experienced and the influence of this on their status in Chitrali society. Did the influence that Amina held over the mullah reflect the deference of a traditional man who had undergone religious training in Pakistan's madrasa network to a modern and educated person? Yet Amina is not comparable to Pakistan's elite human rights lawyers and activists. Nor, indeed, is she well educated even in comparison to other Chitrali village women, many of whom have attended English-medium fee-paying schools in the region and undertaken BA and Masters courses at Peshawar University. Amina, in contrast, ‘educated herself’ only after having sought a divorce from her Punjabi husband by following a distance-learning BA course run by Pakistan's Allama Iqbal Open University. The notion, moreover, that this particular mullah felt threatened by Amina's superior education is unlikely because he was no ordinary, low-status, or poor village mullah, but the man in-charge of Chitral's district shari'a courts. The Qazi earns a high government salary by local standards, occupies one of the region's most powerful positions of religious authority and is also an influential figure in the local wing of the Jama'at-e Islami party – the party of which Chitral's current Member of National Assembly is a member. This story points to more complex dynamics than that of a politically savvy mullah seeking to ingratiate himself with a powerful local family or a traditional man of religious piety deferring to the power of a modern and educated woman.
Amina's interactive exchange with the Qazi shows that women in Chitral's small towns do not inevitably passively submit to ‘traditional’ men of religious authority. Discussions involving women and trained dashmanan can play a critical role, rather, in shaping the thought process of the region's Muslims. They also influence the nature of the moral judgements Chitralis make about sensitive dimensions of people's intimate lives. Far from simply being an antagonistic debate between a small town woman and an influential mullah, this event evoked an interactive process of mindful engagement between a new Muslim and a trained man of piety in a way that allowed both parties to present themselves as being able to think and act in sensitive ways concerning the matter before them.
There is a final level of complexity that needs to be considered if the social and intellectual dynamics behind this telephone conversation are to be understood in their full complexity. Over the past 10 years this Qazi has assiduously cultivated a reputation in Chitral for delivering especially ‘hard’ (sakht) speeches about the standards of Islamic comportment he expects from the region's men, but especially women. In the winter of 2001, for instance, he gave a sermon at which he argued that if a woman appeared in the bazaar she would automatically invalidate her marriage and could, therefore, be legitimately forcibly married by any man present. Marriage, according to the Qazi, is undone by an act of un-Islamic public indecency – in this case a woman's decision to go shopping in the bazaar renders her a prostitute worthy of public sexual humiliation. It would be easy to assume that the Qazi would think in similar terms about elopement marriage – love marriages are proof that secret, amorous and even sexual liaisons take place between Chitrali men and women, something that illustrates the wider moral degradation of an ideally sexually segregated Muslim society, and causes the urgent need for the enforcement of even stricter practices of purdah and forms of shari'a law.Footnote 10
At the same time, there is more to the Qazi's reputation than firebrand speeches alone. As in many other South Asian Muslim societies, Chitralis often poke fun at dashmanan for being out of date and overly traditional. The childlike ‘simplicity’ of these men is both a source of humour and admiration.Footnote 11 In contrast, the Qazi is known as a man who cares deeply about his appearance. Chitralis do not merely distinguish between different types of dashmanan in relationship to the schools of Sunni Islamic thought with which they are associated, or the political parties with which they are affiliated. Rather, the ways in which these men present themselves and their bodies to the region's public are also important in determining the ways in which they are categorized, judged and evaluated. My friends often told me that the Qazi meticulously prepares himself each day before he walks through the bazaar to attend his office in the district shari'a court and, later, to lead the prayers in the bazaar's main mosque. He dons an immaculate white shalwar kamiz, a tailor made jacket, a cream-coloured Chitrali hat, and sprays himself with sweet smelling and alcohol-free perfume brought to him by his Chitrali friends working as labourers in Dubai – all dimensions of his personal appearance that lead Chitralis to describe him as being a ‘playful’ dashmanan. He is known, moreover, to enjoy taking great pleasure by surprising his mosque audiences by making jokes about matters of sexual desire and attraction during the courses of his speeches. On one occasion he told men gathered that it is not only they who are pestered by the town's fashion conscious girls – he too receives sexy telephone calls and that is why he carries a cordless telephone wherever he goes.Footnote 12
The Qazi works hard to earn a reputation for being a man of who holds exceptional strict views regarding the forms of personal morality the Muslims should embody during the course of their daily lives. At the same time, he presents himself as somebody who has the capacity to make risqué jokes about love, sex and desire. Yet the Qazi is not only said to be a ‘hypocrite’ who does ‘one thing on the surface and another underneath’ by the region's people, although many people do think and talk about him in these terms. Instead, he is often described as attractive (sheli), playful and ‘fully human’ (pura insan). Thus, even men who might be assumed to be the archetypal founts of reform-minded Islam in Chitral are flexible and choice-making in their personal and public lives, and, as do many other Chitrali Muslims, frequently switch between different registers of self-presentation during the course of their daily lives.
Similarly, Amina's distinctive mode of engagement provokes much discussion in Chitral, yet she is not universally condemned for being un-Islamic. Many women from a diverse range of backgrounds who live in Markaz talk about Amina in very positive terms. Farida, is an Ismai'li woman who is not formally educated, has four children and is married to a man who works as an administrator in an international NGO in Markaz. When I mentioned to Farida that I had met Amina she said she was an ‘excellent daughter’ (zabardast zhour). Many other women and men also told me that Amina's response to the difficult and even dangerous situation in which she had found herself showed that she was a good (jam) woman capable of speaking her mind (tan luan dik) and ‘living a life of her choice’ (tan zindagi o chit). They contrasted her to other town dwellers who they described as being unhappy, weak and unable to live life according to their own choice.
Amina says and does things ‘in the open’ (wereigha) and this makes her different in positive ways from other Markaz women and men. Her fearlessness, lack of hypocrisy and ability to bring things out to the surface that other people kept hidden in the domain of the ‘secret’ (khoasht) are what they value in particular. Amina, indeed, also often expresses her views regarding the role that a woman's personal choice should play in the making of marriage matches. She had been telling girls that they should ignore the views of their parents and elope in marriage with the boys they liked. If they found a boy who was honest and polite, suitable for marriage and who also held some form of employment (naukari), they should have no reservations about eloping with the boy in marriage if their parents opposed the union. If they sat in their home waiting for their parents' choice (nan-taatan chit), they risked being married off by force to an old, fat and ugly Punjabi man, and spending the rest of their lives filling their husband's hookahs with foul smelling smoking tobacco. Amina openly challenges ‘traditional’ ideas about marriage, and there are significant parallels between her thinking about these matters and what have been termed as both modernizing and reform-minded forms of South Asian Muslim thought.
Yet Amina has not embraced the teachings of reform-minded forms of Islamic thought and disputation in any simple sense. She is not an active participant in the women's wing of any Islamic reform movements important in the region and she works with NGOs that are criticized both by the region's Islamists and ulama, including, for example, the Aurat Foundation. At the same time, she has also played an active role in establishing and running low-finance NGOs established by Chitralis with the specific purpose of addressing issues regarding the treatment of the region's women. These organizations were established in response to accusations made by many people in the region that some Chitrali men form a part of well-organized ‘groups’ that systematically search for poor parents who are willing to give their daughters in marriage to Punjabi men in return for a significant bride price. These Chitrali ‘middlemen’ (dallal) are said to take a cut of the bride price. There are also pervasive rumours which suggest that such marriages are a front for powerful ‘mafia’ groups to procure fair and beautiful Chitrali girls to work in Pakistan's sex trade. It is also widely suspected that marriages between young Chitrali girls and Punjabi men are encouraged by the first wives of these men as a cheap way of procuring a household servant in the guise of a second wife. The frequency of all these types of marriage is widely said to have brought a ‘bad name’ (badnaam) to Chitral's people. Many Chitrali young men often tell me how ashamed they feel when their friends in ‘down Pakistan’ ask them if it is true that Chitralis ‘sell’ their daughters. Amina, thus, is involved in a range of collaborative interactions with other Chitrali Muslims. These collaborations seek to address sensitive moral problems faced by Muslims in the region today; they use a discourse of reformed Islam in order to emphasize the right that young Chitrali women have to refuse marriage offers advanced by their parents. Yet they also reformulate local understandings of Islam according to a model that differs significantly from the notion of Islamic revival. In 2002, for instance, a ‘Legal Aid Forum’ was established in Markaz with the aim of protecting the ‘rights’ of Chitrali women. Its members check vehicles leaving Chitral on their way to ‘down Pakistan’ for Chitrali women who appear to be travelling with non-Chitrali men and even assist in arranging marriages for young Chitrali brides who have divorced their down country husbands.
Amina is not the only Chitrali women engaged in this type of activity. Suraya, for example, has earned a name for being an especially active participant in debates about the ‘sale’ of Chitrali daughters to ‘down country’ husbands. She is in her early thirties, from a Sunni Chitrali village, and is the daughter of a village ‘bearded one’. She completed a Master's degree in sociology at Peshawar University, before gaining employment as a ‘Social Organizer’ in an international development NGO working in Chitral – she is also one of the co-founders of the Legal Aid Forum. Many Chitral men and women talk about Suraya as being especially ‘educated’ (talimi yaftah), but also ‘advanced’ in her thoughts and behaviour. In particular, she is said to be modern’ (tajdid) and ‘fast’ (tez), in matters of dress, speech and comportment in a way that other Chitrali women are not: she wears fashionable Pakistani clothes usually associated with the county's cities, and sometimes even Western-style trousers (pantaloon).Footnote 13 Some Markaz men and women, indeed, did tell me that there has been much ‘propaganda’ about Suraya's lifestyle: as is the case with other ‘bold’ Chitrali women, she was open to accusations of being morally lax and even sexually lose. Yet such ‘bold’ women are not simply dismissed as being either immoral and of bad reputation or as embodying manlike qualities that render them acceptable although unmarriageable. Boldness, rather, is widely conceptualized by Chitralis as having an attractive and feminine dimension, especially by the region's educated young people.
It is not, however, only in relationship to matters of dress, bodily comportment and extra-marital relationships that Suraya is said to be ‘fast’ and an active contributor to life in the region: she, like Amina, is known as being capable of challenging the Islamizing dictates of the region's dashmanan by speaking her mind. After being told by the region's MMA representatives that women working in offices should wear the Afghan burqa I was told by many men and women in the region that Suraya had conveyed a message to Chitral's representative in the National Assembly. In her message, she had apparently told the MMA Mawlana that on the day he went to Islamabad and persuaded all the women who worked in the assembly building that they should wear the burqa, then she would also put on hers. Yet as long as he sat next to rich and glamorous women Senators then why should she be expected to wear the burqa and not them? Suraya was said to bring the attention of her fellow Chitral people to double standards set by the region's dashmanan. One Ismai'li woman – who is in her early thirties, originally from a village about forty miles from Chitral, but currently working as a teacher in Markaz – told me, for instance, that she had always thought that Sunni women lived more confined and purdah-conscious lives than the region's Ismai'lis. Having met Suraya, however, she had come to realize that many Sunni women were far more ‘advanced’ than she had previously thought.
Suraya and Amina are amongst some of the New Muslim women who are now playing an active and increasingly public role in the intellectual and political life of their region. Their lives demonstrate the assertiveness of women in a region whose political culture is currently dominated by a coalition of Islamist political parties and in a small town setting within which rigid forms of sexual segregation are pervasive features of everyday Muslim life. Additionally, they point towards the many layers at which the region's Muslims seek to fashion and project themselves to their fellow Chitralis as good Muslims, the diverse types of religious and political influences on which they draw as they do so, and the increasingly wide range of opinion forming public figures who are currently intervening in the moral debates animating moral thought in the region today.
Conclusion
This paper has focused on the lives of women who live in rural and small town settings and are often critical in vocal ways of ‘political Islam’. At the same time, these women also seek to contribute to debates about Islam's place in their society and assert their own forms of moralizing standards in relationship to those advanced by other influential figures of religious authority in the region. Such women are not an atypical feature of Muslim life in Chitral – they do, rather, play a critical role in the ceaseless discussions concerning the place of Islam in Chitrali society today. Some of the things that such women say and do point toward important tensions between ways of being Muslim advanced by ‘New Muslim’ moralizers who have benefited from raising levels of higher education and other approaches to Muslim life that are advocated by the region's madrasa-trained men of piety. Yet the modes of self-presentation deployed by Chitral's madrasa-educated mullahs rarely straightforwardly fit into the straightjackets of ‘reformism’ or, indeed, ‘Islamism’.
In similar terms to Simpson's paper in this volume, the moral debates and diverse modes of public self-presentation important in Chitral today are a clear reminder of the inherent ambiguity and inconsistency of all social life. They also emphasize the degree to which for many Chitralis the expression of controversial and often decidedly individual opinions, beliefs and attitudes is an important feature of everyday Muslim life in a world where there is little day-to-day consensus. In this complex multi-vocal setting, work contrasting ‘expressed beliefs and opinions’ to more fundamental and underlying ‘common substrates of religious dispositions’ (Hirschkind Reference Hirschkind2001: 638), risks privileging an emphasis on understanding how Muslims seek to enact and embody coherent subjectivities in relationship to Islamic traditions of self-discipline, at the expense of recognizing the complexity and significance of the multiply-layered ways at which Muslims project themselves during the course of their daily lives. Women like Amina and trained dashmanan such as the Qazi elucidate the diversity of these modes of self-presentation. More importantly, they point towards the importance of these for understanding the continuingly multi-dimensional nature of moral life and ‘being Muslim’ in a region of South Asia that has been deeply influenced by profoundly purifying forms of Islam, especially over the past 30 years. Being Muslim in such a setting is a simple task neither for the region's Islamizers or their detractors.
On the one hand, there is a pervasive sense of popular disenchantment with the authenticity of public expressions of Islamic piety in Chitral today, both as they are enacted by ordinary Chitrali Muslims as well as by the region's powerful Islamizers. This feeling of disenchantment and often cynicism is now also shaping the ways in which even the region's apparently most ultra-orthodox Islamists set to the task of projecting themselves to the region's people: if the Qazi presents himself as a fount of untainted piety he is as likely to be accused of hypocrisy as much as being as a saint-like buzurg. Thus, he tempers his public piety by publicly expressing his own inconsistencies: sexy jokes and his ‘playful’ appearance are some of the ways in which public piety and locally acceptable forms of impropriety are combined in the Qazi's personage. Amina projects herself as being open and straight-talking: she leads a controversial life of critical engagement with everyday normative conventions, by breaking purdah and making statements concerning the centrality of women's choice and emotional feelings to marriage. As a young divorcee, this leads hers open to being targeted by Chitrali Islamizers as a source of corrupting and un-Muslim immorality. Yet her risky strategy of open straight talking positions her within ongoing Chitrali moral debates about the pervasiveness of immoral hypocrisy, corruption and the politicization of religion, thereby adding her voice to public debates about being a Chitrali Muslim.
This paper opened with a brief description of some of the ways in which Chitral's madrasa-educated dashmanan have sought to Islamize daily life in the Frontier since their election to provincial government in 2002. The following pages have then sought to illuminate the ways in which these Islamizing policies have resulted in complex responses from the region's Muslims. In an already deeply ‘Islamized’ world, thinking of Chitrali Muslims as reformers and traditionalists or as Islamists and neo-fundamentalists, conceals the complex and inherently unfinished nature of their responses to ongoing Islamizing processes, a pervasive disenchantment with the authenticity of public expressions of personal piety that is expressed by many of the region's Muslims, and, in this context, the continuing emergence of new ways of being Muslim, modes of personal self-presentation and categories of Islamic public opinion forming figures.
