In his waaz mahfils (public lectures) attended by thousands of women and men throughout Bangladesh, prominent Jamaat-i-Islami (Society of Islam) leader and former parliamentarian Delawar Hussain Saidi routinely discusses the above hadith as part of his effort to highlight the importance attached by the Quran, the Prophet Muhammad, and Islam itself to the role of the mother in Muslim society, and the privileged status of women generally in Islam. Interestingly, he uses the verb ‘to serve,’ transforming the man's question into ‘Whom shall I serve?’ He repeatedly punctuates his lectures on women with the question, ‘Have women come out as winners or losers under Islam?’ And, invariably, the audience responds loudly and enthusiastically, ‘Winners!’

In this article, I argue that leaders of the Jamaat-i-Islami in Bangladesh today regularly invoke women's privileged status as mothers—as in the hadith cited above—to counter the claims of the largely secularist non-governmental organizations (NGOs) operating in the country that Islam has been harmful to women and the only route to progress is to discard the shackles of religion and tradition. The current Jamaat rhetoric marks a significant change from the original Jamaat position—elaborated by the party's founder Abul Ala Maududi—that women's divinely-ordained place was in the home.Footnote ² While he encouraged women to vote at elections, he situated their primary contribution to the Islamic movement in running an Islamic home, raising their children as good Muslims and keeping their husband on an Islamic path. Today, several decades later, Jamaat leaders in Bangladesh still enjoin women to fulfil domestic obligations; however, they also go to great lengths to highlight Islam's recognition of women as ‘individuals’ with ‘individual’ responsibilities to God and Islam as well as Islam's support for women's right to study, work and vote. I contend that the Jamaat in Bangladesh has been prompted to undertake these recent modifications by specific developments in local, social and political contexts, specifically the twin pressures on the Jamaat of operating in a functioning—if often imperfect—democratic polity; and of competing with more secular organizations for the hearts, minds and votes of impoverished women. The Jamaat in Bangladesh thus finds itself in circumstances that are substantially different from those of Pakistan, where the party first thrived under Maududi's leadership, and India (discussed by Irfan Ahmad in this issue), with clear implications for the kinds of changes the party finds itself compelled to make in its message and in the manner in which it communicates its message to the voting populace.Footnote ³

I begin by examining some of Maududi's written and public statements about democracy, women and gender that date back to his earliest days of political activity. Because the Jamaat was originally established as an organization for educated, elite men, the gradual incorporation over the years of non-elite men and women of different classes has been the result of deliberate strategies. I then turn to present-day Bangladesh and trace recent changes in the public rhetoric of the Jamaat-i-Islami on these same subjects.

Maududi on Democracy

The Jamaat-i-Islami was founded in 1941 in British-ruled India by Abul Ala Maududi (1903–1979).Footnote ⁴ He authored several books in Urdu on subjects ranging from Islamic law, political theory and economics to philosophy and gender relations, and his fame and influence spread throughout the Muslim world, thanks to translations in numerous languages.Footnote ⁵ He was repeatedly elected amir or leader of the Jamaat until bad health forced him to step down in 1972.Footnote ⁶ The writings of the chief ideologue of the Jamaat remain required reading for all Jamaat members even today.Footnote ⁷

As a young man, Maududi became particularly interested in reaching out to the category of Muslims in his society whom he saw as Muslim only in name, who were more drawn to the ideas, fashions and customs of the West than to their own Islamic heritage; he called them ‘neo-Westerners’ and ‘Oriental “Occidentals”’. Lamia Shehadeh describes how Maududi ‘came to realize that the best method to transform any society would be to prepare a small, highly disciplined and dedicated, well-informed group to assume leadership in social and political matters’.Footnote ⁸ Over time, he hoped that the group would Islamize the entire society and, only then, would it push for an Islamic state. Although initially opposed to the creation of Pakistan, he later became even more apprehensive that, if left unimpeded, the new country's secularist leadership, ‘ignorant of even the ABC of the Islamic Shari'ah’,Footnote ⁹ would abolish the public role of Islam akin to Kemalist Turkey or attenuate it as in Pahlavi Iran. Thus, following partition in August 1947, Maududi and his followers moved to Lahore and set out to demonstrate their support for Pakistan, hoping that, over time, the new country would be transformed into an Islamic state. Maududi actively participated in the discussions about the constitution of the new state and demonstrated himself to be an active pro-democracy activist when secular, Western-oriented members of the armed forces seized national political power.

While Maududi was clearly concerned about winning over the westernized elite, he seemed fairly confident of a near instinctual support from those at the other end of the socio-economic spectrum, the unlettered majority of the population. In a Lahore magazine interview published in 1967, Maududi was asked whether democracy was indeed the best way forward since the ‘masses’ were surely more likely to support un-Islamic movements that would promise to ‘ensure freedom from want at the expense of faith and religion’. He replied:

His response, representative of the Jamaat's own attitude for much of its history, betrayed a lack of concern with the genuine basic needs and preoccupations of the ‘masses’, assuming that the Islamic state would solve all their problems, that Islam alone could attract their votes, and that the only reason they had not yet demonstrated this love of Islam was that they had not had a chance to cast ‘real’ votes. As it turned out, the 1960s was marked by much public discontent with the Pakistani government: socio-economic problems, accusations by the provinces—notably East Pakistan—of unfair allocation of resources by the central government, as well as demands for the restoration of democracy. The Jamaat, however, as Vali Nasr points out, failed to seize this opportunity to ‘successfully ride the wave of discontent’. The party's overwhelming concern with Islam and democracy rendered it ‘oblivious to the significance of the socioeconomic changes’ the country was experiencing. Moreover, its emphasis on Islam ‘had committed the party to the unity of the state, therefore making it unsympathetic to ethnic and linguistic sentiments, which were now ineluctably predicated upon socioeconomic cleavages’.Footnote ¹¹ Maududi's blind commitment to the unity of Pakistan became starkly visible in 1971 when the central government under General Yahya Khan responded to the Bengali nationalist movement with brutal force—and the Jamaat's cooperation. I will return to this period later in the article.

Maududi on Women's Role in Society

As I noted above, Maududi was deeply troubled by the impact of Western ideas and practices on Indian Muslims and reserved his harshest words for those Muslims who had fallen under the spell of the west. As early as 1935, in an article in the monthly Tarjumanul Quran, he lamented that even women were beginning to succumb to Western influences:

For Maududi, the future of modern civilization depended crucially on the regulation of gender relations. From his survey of world history, Islamic texts and current events, he concluded that Islam, unlike other civilizations, viewed men and women as equal and complementary, a position that is strikingly similar to other dominant Islamist positions on gender.Footnote ¹³

In a 2003 article entitled ‘The true clash of civilizations,’ Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris argued that ‘Samuel Huntington was only half right’ in his 1993 claim about an impending ‘clash of civilizations.’ They concluded that the ‘cultural fault line that divides the West and the Islamic world is not about democracy, but sex. According to a new survey, Muslims and their Western counterparts want democracy, yet they are still worlds apart when it comes to attitudes toward divorce, abortion, gender equality and gay rights—which may not bode well for democracy's future in the Middle East’.Footnote ¹⁴ While a detailed analysis of their argument is beyond the scope of this article, suffice it to say that Maududi would have been the first to agree with their basic premise, so convinced was he of the vast gulf separating Islam from the West. As he repeatedly stated in his speeches and writings, the West had failed to value women for their unique abilities; rather the demands of life in the West and the women's movement had managed to pit men and women in competition with one another in a manner that was entirely wrong and unnatural. Islam, by contrast, had granted women a privileged status in society precisely because of their unique abilities:

Maududi regularly reminded women that, in the religious sphere, they were responsible directly to God. In a February 1948 speech to ‘a gathering of ladies’ in Lahore, he emphasized that they had ‘a separate identity of their own’ and must not ‘lose their identities in those of their men’:

In effect, then, Maududi recognized women as individuals, with individual responsibilities to God. Rather than make men and their roles and responsibilities the standard to which women should aspire—which he saw to be the situation in the West and has certainly been true of certain strands of Western liberal feminism—he insisted that Muslim women should strive to succeed within their designated sphere on the earth (domestic work, childbearing and childrearing) and strive like men only in terms of fulfilling their personal responsibilities to God and Islam.

At the same time, as the leader of a new Islamic movement, Maududi did not hesitate to remind women that they had a role to play in furthering the cause of Islam, if not by directly participating in the movement, by creating the ideal home environment that would produce husbands and sons predisposed to participating in such a movement. In a speech he gave to women in the princely state of Tonk in April 1947, he told his listeners:

In this and later speeches, he discussed at length the important role that Muslim women played in the early days of Islam—as the first convert, the first martyrs, as nurses and, even soldiers, in the early battles:

He dismissed the notion that women cannot effect change in men's character. He elaborated thus:

He was prompt to address:

He then listed a number of ways in which women's situation would improve under an Islamic government, the first of them pertaining to women's right to vote. He informed his listeners that ‘Islam recognized . . . women's right to vote hundreds of years before her enfranchisement under the modern democratic system. . . .Under an Islamic government, every adult woman will have the [same] right to vote as every adult man’.Footnote ²¹ However, Maududi expected there to be certain limits to women's political participation, as he made clear in a speech addressing women in Sahiwal in September 1950:

At a gathering of Karachi lawyers and intellectuals in late 1952, Maududi outlined in some detail what he considered to be the ‘First Principles of the Islamic State’. To be eligible to rule, he argued, one must be Muslim, male, ‘sane and adult’ and ‘a citizen of the Islamic state’.Footnote ²³ The topic of female political leadership would continue to be debated by the Jamaat and other Islamists in Pakistan in the 1980s during Benazir Bhutto's foray into politics as well as in the early 1990s in Bangladesh with the restoration of democracy and the emergence of Khaleda Zia and Sheikh Hasina in the alternating roles of prime minister and leader of the opposition.Footnote ²⁴ However, even during his tenure as amir of the Jamaat, Maududi found himself in the difficult situation of going against his own public position on the subject of female leadership in the interest of what he described as the greater good of the nation.

While Maududi was in prison in 1964, the Jamaat endorsed Fatimah Jinnah as its candidate against the military ruler Ayub Khan in Pakistan's January 1965 presidential elections. Fatimah Jinnah was the sister of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the most prominent leader of the movement for Pakistan, widely recognised and revered as Quaid-e-Azam, the ‘Father of the Nation’. Upon his release from prison, Maududi supported the party's choice, even though this endorsement was in flagrant contravention of his earlier speeches and writings, in which he had cited passages from the Quran to condemn female political leadership. Maududi justified the Jamaat's decision to support Fatima Jinnah's candidacy by pointing to the need to combat a greater evil, Ayub Khan and his martial law regime: ‘On one side is a man; other than his gender there is nothing good about him; on the other is a woman; aside from her gender nothing is wrong about her’.Footnote ²⁵

His reasoning failed to persuade critics within the party or conservative ulama outside. The Jamaat amir of Lahore, Kawthar Niyazi, pointed out that Maududi had made important doctrinal compromises not only in supporting a woman candidate but also in favouring participation in elections since 1951. However, with little internal support of his own or for his position, Niyazi was forced to resign from the party. The purging of dissenting, indeed more doctrinaire, party members became routine over the years as the Jamaat continued its slide into a more pragmatic politics.Footnote ²⁶ Ayub Khan, for his part, was quick to obtain fatwas from ulama stating that a woman could not be head of an Islamic state. Pro-Ayub ulama pointed to Maududi's own writings on the subject and charged him with ‘playing fast and loose with Islamic injunctions’.Footnote ²⁷

Maududi retorted that there was a great deal in Pakistan at the time that was in violation of Islamic injunctions—women ministers and ambassadors, coeducation, men and women working together, air hostesses who ‘serve[d] wine to the passengers’—and demanded to know why there was suddenly such a furore now over a woman candidate for president. He believed quite strongly that ‘the point at issue was not whether women should or should not participate in politics’. Rather, for him, the ‘real question was how could the nation be rid of a personal dictatorial rule which was responsible for the deterioration of Islamic values’.Footnote ²⁸ The elections were held in early January 1965. Ayub Khan emerged victorious, despite claims of irregularities at the polls, and Pakistan was spared the prospect of having to accept a female head of state.

Shehadeh describes Maududi as a truly revolutionary Islamist thinker because he called for a ‘bold reinterpretation of the Qur'an, Sunna, and Hadith, and was gratified not to have been educated as a madrasah, thus keeping his mind unfettered by traditional thought. . .. [He] stretched rationalism and human independence and freedom to their limits’.Footnote ²⁹ But, as she points out, he did not extend this approach to his analysis of women and gender, drawing directly on the very sources, the ‘Hadith and Sunna, which he had just denuded of all authenticity, to shackle women with ever heavier, tighter chains’.Footnote ³⁰ Similarly, while he discouraged strict emulation of even the Prophet, he did not hesitate to tell women that they must follow injunctions that many scholars today argue were meant strictly for the wives of the Prophet, such as the Quranic verses pertaining to veiling.Footnote ³¹ Although his followers in later decades continued to cite Maududi's work faithfully, they demonstrated greater flexibility on ‘women's issues’ in response to changes taking place around them. As is shown in the remainder of the article, this was particularly true of the Bangladeshi context.

The Break-Up of Pakistan

Following the Jamaat's disastrous performance in Pakistan's 1970 elections, when its preoccupation with Islam and national unity won it few supporters—only four of the eighty national assembly seats it contested in West Pakistan and none of the seventy-one seats it contested in East Pakistan—Maududi conceded that the party may have sacrificed too much with its purges and compromises, urging a return to the original holy community. But by then, his day-to-day influence had waned. Within Bangladesh, the Jamaat eventually emerged as a key player in national politics, especially following the restoration of democracy in 1991.

The 1970 Pakistani parliamentary election was significant less for the rout of the Jamaat than for the overwhelming victory of the Awami League, which won almost all the seats allocated to East Pakistan and, one might argue, for the inevitable move towards the break-up of Pakistan. The West Pakistan–based central government's unwillingness to recognise promptly the Bengali Sheikh Mujibur Rahman as the new prime minister of all of Pakistan simply added to the Bengalis’ list of long-simmering economic, political and cultural grievances against the western territories. To make matters worse, the central government was inexplicably slow to respond to the devastating cyclone of December 1970 in East Pakistan. In March 1971, the Bengalis declared independence.

During the 9-month war that followed, the Jamaat of the erstwhile East Pakistan gained notoriety in secularist and nationalist circles for speaking out against the country's independence, for collaborating with the West Pakistani army and for participating in mass rapes and killings. Upon independence, the Jamaat and all other religious parties were outlawed—both because of their activities during the war and because Bangladesh was established as a secular socialist republic. In the years that followed, however, the early ideals were abandoned and parties such as the Jamaat slowly emerged as full participants in the political process, rehabilitated by generals Ziaur Rahman and Hussain Muhammad Ershad, consecutive military rulers in the 1970s and 1980s. Just as with Presidents Anwar Sadat in Egypt and Zia ul-Haq in Pakistan, who made it possible for Islamists to have a larger presence on the political scene in their respective countries, so the primary motivation of the authoritarian rulers in Bangladesh was also to bolster their own political legitimacy through their much-publicized support for Islam.

The Jamaat-i-Islami in Bangladesh

As had happened in the early years of Pakistan, the Jamaat in Bangladesh became actively involved in the movement opposing military rule and in support of the restoration of democracy. Disappointed by Ershad's decision to declare Islam the state religion in 1988—rather than declare Bangladesh an Islamic state—the Jamaat no doubt felt that a democratic system would enhance its chances of achieving the kind of society and state it sought. The Jamaat also played an important part of the movement for what would become the Thirteenth Amendment to the constitution, passed in March 1996, according to which all future elections would be preceded by three months under a ‘neutral caretaker government’ led by a retired chief justice.Footnote ³² Democratic elections, acknowledged as generally free and fair by a multitude of domestic and international observers, were finally held in 1991 and, again, successfully in 1996 and 2001. The Jamaat has contested all three elections and although it has not been able to make an effective bid for national power, it has managed to win enough parliamentary seats over the years to serve as a crucial coalition partner to the more successful parties. Jamaat leaders in Bangladesh maintained, in interviews with me, that the party was in no rush to win elections and quite prepared to wait until the population at large was supportive of the move towards an Islamic state.

Much like the main supporters of Islamist movements in other parts of the world, the vast majority of official Jamaat members in Bangladesh today—men and women—are middle-class, well-educated and urban-based.Footnote ³³ However, what differentiates the Jamaat in Bangladesh from Islamist movements elsewhere—in much of the Arab world for instance, where parties such as the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt operate within distinctly undemocratic contexts—is that it has been allowed to and has chosen to operate as a political party in a democratic national polity. The Jamaat, therefore, is now necessarily concerned with numbers. Moreover, as importantly, the massive mobilisation of impoverished and illiterate Bangladeshi women fostered in recent years by international and indigenous development organisations has made them an unusual constituency within the Muslim world and a force that can no longer be ignored. The Jamaat appears to have come to the realization that it cannot expect to win national power by relying exclusively on educated middle-class support in the midst of mass illiteracy and without addressing the needs and concerns of the increasing numbers of poor women who now demand educational and employment opportunities.Footnote ³⁴

Since the United Nations Decade for Women (1975–1985), international organisations and donor countries have directed millions of dollars into projects targeting women throughout the developing world, and Bangladesh has received its fair share of funds and attention. Bangladeshi individuals and organisations have managed to achieve global renown with innovative strategies in the arena of development and poverty alleviation, for instance, with microfinance and adult education. Millions of women are now affiliated with one NGO or another, and while the thousands of NGOs in the country vary in their strategies, objectives and degrees of effectiveness, it must be acknowledged that, by their very presence in rural Bangladesh and their interaction with women, they have begun to transform social and gender relations.Footnote ³⁵ What is important for the purposes of the analysis here is that, particularly since the resumption of national elections in the early 1990s, many NGOs have engaged in voter education programs to help the uneducated poor make informed voting decisions. This is in addition to other social development programmes many NGOs already had in place, such as in the areas of adult and legal literacy and women's rights. While the majority of NGOs have remained non-partisan—simply helping their members to identify honest, hardworking local candidates for office—a few NGOs have urged their members to vote either for or against a particular party.

The latter sort of targeted campaigning was particularly visible prior to the 1996 elections.Footnote ³⁶ The year marked the 25th anniversary of independence and secularist organisations celebrated the occasion by campaigning actively in favour of the ‘ideals of 1971’ and against those who were opposed to the movement for the independence of Bangladesh. However, the rallies that I attended and the distributed literature that I read during that campaign season were not always clear on what those ideals were. For instance, the four founding directive principles or pillars of the 1972 constitution were nationalism, democracy, secularism and socialism, yet one heard very little about socialism. The primary issue appeared to be the tension between the secular foundation of the nation and the decidedly more Islamic direction the state had taken in the past two decades. Thus, some organisations campaigned openly against the Jamaat-i-Islami, reminding their listeners of the party's 1971 opposition to the break-up of Pakistan and Jamaat workers’ involvement in rapes and killings of the local population, as well as of its more recent criticisms of NGOs targeting women. The Awami League, which had led the movement for independence, emerged victorious in the 1996 elections and returned to power after twenty-one years. The Jamaat, which had won 18 seats in 1991, came away with just 3. Both the Jamaat and its opponents seemed convinced that the newly-mobilized ‘category’ of impoverished women voters had been responsible for the Jamaat's disastrous performance. Interestingly, rural women who consider themselves to be good practicing Muslims turned their backs on the Jamaat in 1996, not so much over the 1971 issue, but as they were persuaded that the Jamaat was opposed to their efforts to improve their lives through NGO activities.Footnote ³⁷ This lesson, I contend, has led the Jamaat in Bangladesh to rethink its relationship to the poor and to women, in order to win eventually mass support for Islamisation. Thus, although Maududi and the Jamaat did indeed recognise the importance of women supporters early in the Jamaat's history, what has changed in the Bangladeshi context in the past decade or so is that the Jamaat's public rhetoric has moved beyond affirmations of the spiritual equality of men and women and celebrations of women as mothers of future generations of Muslims, to a clear recognition that the impoverished, uneducated majority of the country's women have both material and spiritual needs. In other words, it is not sufficient simply to promise voters direct passage to heaven if they vote for the Jamaat. Women are also concerned, for example, about access to education and employment, procuring sufficient food to feed their families, and a safe environment within and outside the home. Although the Jamaat had certainly made some overtures to rural women before 1996, there appears to have been a more systematic campaign to woo impoverished, illiterate women in both rural and urban areas in the years since, with clear implications for the message directed at these women and the manner in which the message is delivered.

Traditionally, the Jamaat has reached out to prospective supporters through written literature, direct personal contact and large public lectures; today one discerns subtle changes even within these time-honoured strategies. The waaz mahfils or public lectures that often last several days and nights are particularly interesting because they are attended by thousands of men and women, and audio recordings of the lectures of the more popular Jamaat speakers—such as Delawar Hossain Saidi—are widely available on inexpensive cassettes. While waaz mahfils themselves are not a new phenomenon in Bangladesh, what is interesting is how Jamaat leaders have used the waazes to appeal to women directly, as a distinct and independent audience. Since 1997, Saidi has set aside at least a half-day during the waazes to be devoted entirely to, as he calls them, ‘the mothers and sisters’. Cassettes of these women's sessions are available separately for sale and distribution.

In a 2005 lecture for a women's gathering in Bogra in northern Bangladesh, Saidi began by reminding his listeners that women and men are equal in the eyes of God, and that they receive equal sawab or reward from God for the same deeds.Footnote ³⁸ He further reminded them that when the Prophet came to this world, women had no rights, it was a curse to be born a woman in that era, and infant girls were regularly killed; Islam changed all that. He identified three stages in a woman's life—daughter, wife and mother—and elaborated at length on the kind of behaviour towards one's daughter, wife and mother that God would reward. He spoke at length about many of the positive comments that the Prophet is said to have made about daughters: for example, that the angels of God come into a home in which a daughter has been born and bring blessings to her and to those who love her; that one should always bring back gifts for one's children when one travels but should give the daughter her gift first. He then narrated an incident in which the Prophet had reprimanded a man who showed more affection toward his young son than his young daughter, by putting the former on his lap but not the latter.

Saidi turned next to marriage and a woman's life as a wife. He spoke of the special bonds of love that God has destined between husbands and wives, but lamented that the wholly ‘un-Islamic’ practice of dowry in today's Bangladesh has made it impossible for such bonds to develop. He attacked those who constantly criticise inheritance provisions in the Quran, pointing out that, while men can inherit only from their father, Islam allows women to acquire wealth from a number of different sources. Most notable among Islam's financial injunctions, he pointed out, was the mohrana or dower, the wealth that a man is required to give his wife as a condition of marriage. Although this is faroj (Islamically compulsory), it is not practiced properly and, to the contrary, the incidence of dowry—a transfer of wealth from the bride's family to the groom's—is on the rise. Moreover, traditional Islamic doctrine stipulates that the wife is not required to spend a single penny on household expenses, no matter how great her wealth; all expenses pertaining to the house and family are the responsibility of the husband.

Finally, Saidi talked about women's responsibilities and status as mothers. He discussed the hadith cited at the beginning of this article to show how highly the Prophet esteemed mothers. Saidi dismissed the belief, particularly popular in rural Bangladesh, that heaven lies at the feet of one's husband. He cited a hadith in which the Prophet had said that heaven lies at the feet of one's mother and that no child can ever compensate a mother for the time, effort and pain she put into bearing and raising him or her.

Saidi moved on to discuss more general matters about Judgment Day, when everyone will have to account for each deed, good or bad, in life. For those who might wonder how many volumes would be needed to record an individual's every deed, he used the analogy of the chip inside a mobile phone. ‘If man can produce the technology to store so much information on so small a surface, imagine what God can do!’ He then deftly returned to women's specific responsibilities in life as part of his discussion of what counted as correct behaviour during one's ‘fleeting’ time on earth. He told his listeners that observing purdah was faroj (compulsory) in exactly the same way that prayer and fasting were: ‘Islam has given women many opportunities. . .. It is not the case that just because you have been born women, you cannot get an education, work, run a business. . .. You can do everything, but you must do it in purdah. For example, just as you have come to the mahfil today in purdah—alhamdulillah’. He added that purdah did not ‘hinder women's progress’. Rather it is a dhal, a ‘shield’ like that carried by the police when they have to face rallies and want to protect themselves from stone-throwing protestors. Like the police shield, Saidi continued, the burqa protects women from the inappropriate gaze of male strangers:

He emphasized Muslim women's right to study and work—as long as they observe purdah—in several of his other lectures too including, for example, a waaz on ‘The Rights of Women and Non-Muslims’, addressed to men:

Another common theme in his lectures has been the notion that God has, in fact, made it easier for women to attain divine rewards. For instance, at a waaz for women in Comilla in 2006, he pointed out that women are not required to give azan (the call to prayer) or participate in jihad. He cited a hadith in which the Prophet said that because a woman suffers in many ways during pregnancy, she will receive sawab from God that is equivalent to what she would have received had she spent all those months fasting. Similarly, for breastfeeding women will receive sawab equal to what she would for saving a dying person.

He closed the Comilla lecture in his usual manner, by leading a prayer in which he asked God to bless the thousands of mothers and sisters as well as young children present at the gathering. He asked God to forgive them all and to assuage women's sorrows: ‘those who are married but have no children, God, please give them children; those who have grown children but have not been able to get them married, please make that possible; husbands and wives who do not get along, do not love one another, whose home is like jahannum, God, please create love and affection (mil-mohabbat) between them’.

The Hearts, Minds and Votes of Poor WomenFootnote ⁴⁰

How exactly have women in Bangladesh responded to these recent overtures from the Society of Islam? To a small group of the nation's women, the Jamaat does offer a promising future, in this world and the next. Destitute slum women I interviewed in Chittagong just before the 2001 elections insisted that through their involvement with the Jamaat, they now knew how to pray properly and they understood the importance of purdah, fasting and the meaning and interpretation behind many of the Arabic Quranic prayers they used to routinely memorise and recite. When I asked some women about their religious practices prior to their encounter with the Jamaat, they replied:

They had learned that there were many supposedly ‘incorrect’ Islams, corrupted over the centuries by local customs and practices, and only one correct Islam—that propagated by the Jamaat. These women thus dutifully attended the Jamaat's meetings, attempted to live by its teachings and no doubt voted for it at election time because they believed these actions would help safeguard their passage to heaven. Taking their faith and belief in the afterlife seriously, one can argue that their motivation behind supporting the Jamaat was one of self-interest, albeit intangible and unverifiable.

It was clear that the women had also gained a valuable lesson in how they could use the democratic process to achieve the kind of government they believed they wanted. That the Jamaat workers had discussed voting and elections in some detail with the slum's inhabitants became evident from the poor women's responses to my questions regarding their plans for the upcoming elections. One woman I spoke with expressed hope that the current prevalence of violence against women would come to an end under an Islamic government that required women to observe purdah:

She had not been persuaded by detractors who had warned her that a Jamaat government might prevent her daughters from working outside the home:

She also believed that an Islamic government would be able to ensure the piety of its citizens by mandating breaks for prayers. In the end, she felt strongly that the Jamaat—as a party of real Muslims—deserved a chance to run the country:

The perception among many women that the Jamaat is absolutely honest and above the corruption that plagues politicians everywhere is also of enormous importance. Although a few Jamaat men, including a former member of parliament, have appeared on the graft lists prepared as part of the caretaker government's anti-corruption drive in 2007,Footnote ⁴² it is not clear what impact this will have on the greater reputation for honesty that Jamaat candidates have long enjoyed relative to candidates of other parties. Indeed, a background check of all electoral candidates by the Election Commission in 1996 found that the Jamaat was the only major party with no bank loan defaulters on its slate! More recently, the two Jamaat leaders who were given cabinet positions following the 2001 elections emerged as the most efficient and least corrupt of all government ministers—this squeaky clean reputation also holds true for Islamists in government elsewhere, such as the ruling AK party in Turkey and the Hizballah parliamentarians in Lebanon. By the personal example of its elected members as well as formal party rhetoric of religiosity and honesty, the Jamaat can project an alternative to the corruption and patronage politics that has long characterised the political scene, under both authoritarian and democratic rule.

There are, of course, certain limits to the Jamaat's overtures to a distinct female constituency, and it is this reluctance that continues to cost them dearly at the polls. Even in 2001, after all its direct appeals to women voters and its participation in a four-party alliance led by the victorious Bangladesh Nationalist Party, the Jamaat won only 17 seats. I contend that this is in part because the Jamaat continues to cast women in a subordinate role in society—despite its talk of spiritual equality between men and women, despite a recognition that women today want to and need to work outside the home and despite an acknowledgement that Muslim women, mothers or not, already have suffrage. It continues to insist on a strict form of purdah as the most important marker of authentic Islam and opposes women working alongside men in garment factories and NGOs—the two largest and most visible employers of Bangladeshi women in recent decades; it adopts male-biased positions on issues with immediate implications for women such as family law; and finally, it refuses to field female candidates for parliament. The refusal to field female candidates for parliament illustrates perfectly the contradiction inherent in the Jamaat's support of democratic rights for women and perhaps offers an explanation to why all women, especially poor, illiterate women, do not flock to support the party.

Although Jamaat members have publicly supported the increased presence of women in parliament, accepted parliamentary seats from the women's quota (of indirectly elected seats), and indeed has been part of a coalition government under a woman prime minister twice–in 1991 and in 2001—the party still refuses to nominate women candidates for direct election to parliament. There are, of course, impoverished women who actively support the Jamaat and voice strong opposition to female politicians. One woman I interviewed was quite adamant that no self-respecting Muslim woman would even want to run for public office: ‘Why should they when there are men who can run?’ She insisted that if elected to parliament, women are expected to shake hands with non-kin men, walk on the streets in the midst of strangers, get their hair cut in a short bob—conduct she felt was highly inappropriate for any God-fearing Muslim woman. One young woman sitting nearby chimed in, ‘There can be no question of there being a female prime minister when there are plenty of men around to do the job’.

However, my research clearly shows that the vast majority of poor women are beginning to think otherwise, that many women have developed an interest in politics recently precisely because of the presence of women prime ministers and the growing number of NGO-supported women in local elected office. In many areas, rural women have also had the opportunity to interact with powerful women, such as heads of NGOs and important NGO workers. For many women, these are all clear indications that, as many said to me, ‘Women can now do anything!’ These women are left dissatisfied by the Jamaat's view of women, as what Linda Kerber calls ‘deferential citizens’ or voters ‘who freely chose their social superiors to office rather than exercise a claim on office themselves’.Footnote ⁴³

Gender, Democracy and the Tranformation of Islamist Politics

In the 65 years since it was founded, the Jamaat-i-Islami has shown time and again that it is cautiously open to persuasion and change. Founded in 1941 as a community of pious men, it declared its intention in 1951 to contest general elections in West and East Pakistan and became an advocate for democracy. It would be another 20 years before it would recruit working-class men or any women. It initially opposed the creation of Pakistan but then accepted the fait accompli and tried to mould the new nation in its own way. For a very long time, it paid no attention to the socio-economic concerns of the majority of the population, the so-called ‘masses’, taking their support for granted and arguing that Islam would solve any and all problems. In Bangladesh, this has proven to no longer be an option—if it wishes to survive as a political party—given the furious mobilisation among the impoverished majority by NGOs, and among women in particular. This has had clear implications for the content of its campaign promises and their methods of outreach—and not without some success.

During election years, the Jamaat has made a special effort to tell women voters that they alone should decide for themselves how to cast their vote, irrespective of their husband's wishes.Footnote ⁴⁴ What is interesting is that in recent years, the Jamaat has sought to maintain the support of non-elite women voters even between election campaigns and this strategy is manifest from the manner in which Saidi discusses gender issues, from both the content of his message and the method of delivery. Although it would be an exaggeration to say that Saidi and the Jamaat in Bangladesh have diverged significantly from Maududi's own message on gender issues in order to woo women voters, it is clear that they have made an effort to strongly emphasise women's equality to men in front of God—and in the election booth. As is evident from the above analysis of a few recent waazes, Saidi goes to great lengths to reassure women that Islam is supportive of their rights, that Islam has made women winners, not losers. Maududi had been quite insistent in his writings about the sexual division of labour, whereby ‘the woman has been made queen of the house. Earning a living for the family is the responsibility of the husband, while her duty is to keep and run the house with his earnings’.Footnote ⁴⁵ Saidi reaffirms this basic dictum but repeatedly stresses that women are free to go out and study and work as long as they are appropriately dressed.

Perhaps the most remarkable difference between the speeches of Maududi and those of present-day politicians such as Saidi lies in the very nature of the language used, in particular the efforts of the latter to present their message in a manner that would make it accessible to the unlettered majority of the population. The language is straightforward and colloquial; the lectures are filled with references to local beliefs, popular hadiths and the concrete woes of the rural poor, such as dowry and security. It is worth noting that, according to Daniel Brown, Maududi considered Abu Huraira, a contemporary of the Prophet, a liarFootnote ⁴⁶; yet, the hadith about the importance of the mother that Saidi regularly cites was relayed by Abu Huraira himself. Finally, one also discerns from today's lectures and writings that the Jamaat feels the need to respond to the attacks of, as Saidi and other Jamaat leaders call them, ‘so-called progressive forces’ in Bangladeshi society and, of course, prolific Western academic and popular writers.

Over the past six decades then, the Jamaat-i Islami, at least in its Bangladeshi incarnation, has transformed itself, in response to changing realities around it, from an organisation of elite and educated men hoping to reform nominal Muslims, to a political party that contests democratic elections and actively seeks the support of the poorest women in society. Although it is tempting to dismiss these small modifications in the Jamaat's presentations of its message as based on sheer instrumentality—the desire for votes—I argue that they also represent an Islamist accommodation to changing social and political realities. Although the combination of the twin pressures of a democratic polity and mobilised women renders the Bangladeshi context unique in the Muslim world, there are nonetheless important lessons to be drawn regarding the transformative potential of Islamist politics and the possibilities for change.