Georgetown University
Beyond Activity and Passivity The Oral Life History of an Afghan Refugee Woman in Pakistan
Aiza Khan Professor Reza Pirbhai ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Writing a thesis is harder than I expected and more rewarding than I could have imagined. I would like to acknowledge all the people whose assistance was a milestone in the completion of this project.
I have to start by thanking my mentor, Professor Reza Pirbhai, without whom this project would not have been possible. During my first class at GU-Q, Professor Pirbhai and I discussed individual agency and determinism; I was adamant that people had agency and he tried to explain to me that it was more complicated than that. Over the past four years and particularly in his mentorship of this project, he has made me a more sophisticated thinker and better able to understand the nuances of the subject.
I am tremendously grateful to Dr. Sophie Richter-Devroe, whose work introduced me to the value of oral history and inspired this thesis. Your guidance and advice has been instrumental in the completion of this project.
To Amma, Halima and Pharhan Mamu, for their endless support from thousands of miles away. I truly have no idea where I’d be if it weren’t for your faith in me.
To all those who have been a part of getting me there: Danish, Fatima, Haider, Fatema and Ayesha. Thank you for supporting me throughout the entire process. I will be grateful forever for your love.
Lastly, I am grateful to all the women who shared their remarkable stories of strength and resilience with me, especially the woman whose life this thesis narrates. Without you, this would not be possible. Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION 1 HER STORY 16 BOOKS/KITAAB 25 PURDAH/PIETY 31 SABR/ENDURANCE 39 INQUILAAB/WAR 47 CONCLUSION 52 BIBLIOGRAPHY 58
INTRODUCTION
McCurry, Steve. “Afghan Girl.” National Geographic Magazine Vol. 167, No. 6, June 1995.
The cover of a National Geographic Magazine in 1995 featured a photograph titled
“Afghan Girl”. This portrait became one of the most popular magazine covers in history and the face of the US-led war against the Soviets in Afghanistan. The girl in the picture was Sharbat
Gula, who was twelve years old at the time (Qasim and Safdar). The caption read “Haunted eyes tell of an Afghan refugee’s fears”. Decades after the picture was taken, however, it was discovered that the look of horror on Gula’s face was not one of a “refugee’s fears”, but rather of being photographed without her consent (Azami, Nauman & Dawar).
In addition to the violence of unsolicited photography, Steve McCurry’s photograph was part of a larger epistemic violence committed against Afghan women. This epistemic injustice entails the silencing of their voices and portraying them as not having any agency. DuPre notes six visual signifiers to mark Gula’s victimhood: her veil, childhood, eyes, anonymity, refugee- status, and femininity (336). This discourse of victimhood takes away all agency from the victimized and yet puts the victim at the forefront by serving the warped ends of the creator of this discourse (337). By analyzing these signifiers, DuPre insists that the image was orchestrated to tug at the heartstrings of its American audience in order to help Reagan generate more tax dollars under the guise of US aid to Afghanistan. In fact, DuPre is not the only scholar to note that Afghan women “provide the perfect grounds for an elaborate ventriloquist act in which they serve as the passive vehicle for the representation of US interests’’(Schwartz-Du Pre 336, Kumar
& Stabile 778).
Post 9/11 representations of Afghan women, particularly those issued in the Western world, are replete with examples of such assumed or imposed victimhood. These narratives are simplistic, reductive and at best, only partially true. For example, in 2016, the George W. Bush
Institute published a book called We Are Afghan Women. It claims to capture the voices of
Afghanistan’s women. In the introduction, former First Lady of the United States, Laura Bush, depicts these women as the victims of barbarity and abuse at the hands of many atrocious regimes that have ruled Afghanistan, from the Soviet-backed government of Mohammad
Najibullah to the Taliban. In particular, Bush recalls being horrified and appalled by the extreme cruelty and conditions imposed on Afghan women by the Taliban. After having established that
Afghan women have been helpless under these regimes, Bush proceeds to explain how American contributions have impacted these women positively. She discusses at length how many more girls attend schools and colleges, and how the Western liberal model of education delivered at institutions introduced since the American intervention in 2001 have positively influenced these women’s lives.
Laura Bush’s narrative confirms the continued use of the long-repeated, reductive and essentialist trope of Afghan women, like Muslim women more generally, as damsels in distress.
They are docile, passive and lack agency. Their sole salvation, in fact, has been Western intervention. This thesis will test the validity of these claims by engaging in dialogue with an ordinary Afghan refugee woman in Pakistan. In particular, by means of field research involving intimate interviews with multiple persons, it documents the oral life history of an Afghan woman refugee – referencing her as ‘Summaiyya’ to protect her privacy. Besides critiquing existing representations in the process, this thesis articulates a more nuanced understanding of the experience of Afghan women.
In this thesis, I narrate Summaiyya’s story and through her experiences, preferences, aspirations and her own understanding of her circumstances, I challenge the stereotypical representations of Muslim and Afghan women. I argue that while Summaiyya’s decisions and life choices would not be desirable to all, the reality that she made those decisions for herself demonstrates that she was an agent in her life. I also argue that Summaiyya felt limited by her socio-economic and political circumstances, and not her particular experiences of womanhood, as per the stereotypical representations.
This oral history is guided by a library of valuable work published on a variety of subjects ranging from Afghan women, Muslim women, agency, subversion, resistance, representation, Afghan history and historiography and the refugee experience among others.
Nancy Tapper explains that women have been excluded from anthropological discourse about the region due to ethnographic and cultural bias against them, and this epistemic violence does not capture reality (20). Tapper’s book Bartered Brides: Politics, Gender and Marriage in an Afghan Tribal Society, is a study of marriage in the Afghan Turkestani Maduzai tribe, but also provides information on the roles and treatment of women in the larger Afghan cultural context.
In this ethnography, she questions the absolute nature of male authority in the household and in the community particularly in segregated societies.
Tapper insists that because male authority, honor and reputation is hinged on the loyalty and behavior of the women in the tribe, women hold considerable power in the community
(xviii, 104). Because men are able to draw status claims based on their control over women and their control over women’s productive and reproductive labor, Maduzai women have the power to undermine male authority in the household and in the community (22, Chiovenda 181). In homes like Summaiyya’s, where women’s roles are seen as limited to the domestic sphere,
Tapper notes that women's activities within that sphere are essential to the functioning of the household as well as the community as a whole.
Furthermore, in studies such as Tapper’s on women in segregated societies, subversion is a popular trope. Tapper uses the term subversion to describe “certain possibilities for women’s action which, while they are implicit in the dominant ideologies of gender espoused by both men and women, nonetheless are constructed in opposition to the ideals of male dominance which they contradict”' (21). Lila Abu-Lughoud also sees subversion as a prominent vehicle that women employ to assert their agency. She flips Foucault’s popular assertion that “where there is power, there is resistance” (1978: 95-96) to “where there is resistance, there is power”, which she claims is more intuitively sensible and fruitful for ethnographic analysis (42). Amineh Hoti builds on Tapper’s idea of subversion and argues that “any society prohibiting women’s access to a professional sphere tends to develop alternative, quasi-autonomous female networks of circulation. Gossip and gifts between women demarcate a ‘sub-society’ serving as a psychological outlet between women demarcate a sub society serving as a psychological outlet in a situation of male domination” (Hoti 11).
Tapper, in her study of the Durrani Pashtuns notes institutionalized elopement, lesbianism, prostitution and magic are women’s ways of subverting patriarchal authority (22).
Abu-Lughoud sees subversion in women smoking cigarettes in their segregated spaces, in their songs, poetry, and stories. She arrives at this conclusion by noticing that the women see masculinity as the absence of the womb rather than femininity as the absence of a penis. They see men as governed by their sexual desires, and women as more rational (48). Both Tapper and
Abu-Lughoud note that it is the segregation of spaces that allows for women to be subversive in these ways because men are not permitted to enter these spaces giving veiled women the room to act (46).
Benedicte Grima contests the ideas presented by Abu-Lughoud and Tapper. She agrees that often male honor is placed on women’s modesty and subservience, and that women contribute to it through their chastity and obedience. Hence, a woman could hinder family honor through her disobedience. However, Grima argues that such acts of disobedience or subversion cannot control honor because women, particularly in segregated societies such as the Afghan one, are almost completely dependent on their families. Women who don’t have male guardians work outside to earn a living, and are deemed vulnerable to abuse and exploitation. This makes work outside daunting and deeply undesirable (The Performance of Emotion among Paxtun
Women 164-165).
Abu-Lughoud, however, is skeptical of making a blanket judgement about women in segregated spaces because they are not a homogenous group. In her study of the Egyptian Bedouin group, the Awlad Ali, she captures the diversity of women’s beliefs, disagreements between women of different generations, ages, and clans. She also notes the impact that the proximity to Cairo and its consumer culture has on women of younger generations, and how their definitions of modesty and their subsequent lifestyles differ from those of their elders. Such homogeneities often make generalizations misleading and untrue. By virtue of conducting an oral history rather than a wider ethnography, I found myself unable to make a judgement as my work was focused on one person and was grounded in the conversations that we shared. These controlled variables, although not absolute, allowed for a more focused and profound understanding of the subject matter but remained guided by larger ethnographies of Muslim and
Pashtun women.
Amineh Ahmed Hoti further presents the heterogeneity of Pashtun women by demonstrating the differences in the norms and customs between women from differently classed and landed tribes. Hoti’s work guided my study as I explored Summaiyya’s complex identity of being married into a Pashtun landed tribe from a Persian-speaking white-collar family. Hoti notes that kinship networks are maintained by women, particularly in elite families where the rituals of gham-khadi (joy and sorrow) are taken care of by the women in the household. All matters relating to births, deaths, weddings, congratulations and condolences are hosted, attended and observed by women and it is their participation in these rituals that maintains social cohesion and reciprocal ties to kin. Hoti argues that “Khans (Pashtuns) derive authority from the ownership of land, provision of hospitality and reputation for honor” (10). Most of these are female domains.
Approaches to the observances of gham-khadi are not homogenous either. Hoti notes that in many families, especially those that have moved away from their ancestral land and relocated to large cities face disruption in these practices. They experience a sort of double bind, whereas to not observe the ritual is shameful and to carry it out is burdensome (132). The relocation associated with asylum seeking is much more abrupt and disruptive, and so it is likely that a much stronger sentiment towards these communal rituals exists among refugee populations. The disruption of gham-khadi results in hostilities and severing of ties with loved ones (141).
Summaiyya grappled with this disconnect with her family in Afghanistan and the internet influenced the ways in which she practiced gham-khadi in terms of ease of access and communications, as Hoti identified.
Of course, Afghan women also cannot be discussed without consideration of the men in their lives. Andrea Chiovenda, in her ethnography of Afghan men, unpacks the notion of masculinity between pre-war and contemporary Afghanistan. Her understanding also enriches this study. She notes that according to the Pashtun moral principles, pukhto paalal, the vile aggression that is attributed to Afghan men, is unacceptable. In her conversations with men, they point out to her that there is a clear distinction between “good” and “bad” violence. Suspicion, irrationality and a poor temperament result in bad violence, while good violence is used to defend and protect family, kin and communities (182). A simplistic attribution of violent behavior to Afghan men ties in neatly with Gayatri Spivak’s discussion of “white men saving brown women from brown men”, Spivak insisting that this simplification silences the voices of brown men by scapegoating them for the violence committed against brown women and reducing men to the role of the perpetrators of such violence.
Simultaneously, Chiovenda acknowledges that the existence of violence perpetrated by
Afghan men cannot be denied. The men she interviewed attribute this violence to the lack of opportunities and pent up aggression due to the decades of ceaseless war. Militia commanders provide these men, particularly from the working and lower class, with economic opportunities in exchange for engaging in armed violence. With no other way to feed themselves and their families, these men are forced to engage with militias (186). Alternatively, these men argue that if they do not engage with these militia and refuse their monetary assistance, their land and properties are taken from them by force and they have no choice but to hand them over. They then become dependent on assistance from these militia, and so committing acts of violence becomes a part of their everyday life (187).
Tahira Jibeen’s study on the well-being of married Afghan refugees further contributes to the understanding of the perpetrated violence. She discusses in great length the various stressors that come with the experience of being a married refugee man and the impact that the lack of control and perceived lack of control has on the male who is displaced and responsible for the wellbeing of his family. This lack of control also stems from the inability of these refugees to generate an income. Most Afghan refugees in Pakistan, like Summaiyya’s husband, are from agricultural and rural areas, and farming their land is their primary source of income. Restrictions on land-ownership placed by the Pakistani government on these refugees has been a great source of stress, especially considering that self-reliance is a matter of pride and self-respect in Pashtun culture (Dupree 978).
Daanish Mustafa, Nausheen Anwar, and Amiera Sawas, in their article "Gender, Global
Terror, and Everyday Violence in Urban Pakistan", further investigate and describe the gendered violence that takes place in the Afghan Pashtun community in Pakistan. They explain the dichotomy of the genders, their performativity, and its impact on the lives of Afghan women.
Building on the works of Dupree, Chiovenda and Jibeen, they argue that the socio-political situation created circumstances that enable gender to be performed in ways that delineate the authorities and Afghan men, and Afghan men and Afghan women, the former assuming the role of the masculine and the latter becoming feminized in both binaries. This is enacted in both public and private spheres, and the authors detail how due to this, the geo-politics and military structures of power trickle down to the domestic level and influence the lives of Afghan women in Pakistan.
In a similar vein, Rosemarie Skaine, in her book The Women of Afghanistan under the
Taliban details the limitations and restrictions placed on Afghan women within Afghanistan as well as Pashtun women in Pakistan. She details their hindered mobility due to the Taliban’s emphasis on a constricting form of purdah. This resulted in women’s limitation to the private sphere of the home, and away from public spaces, workspaces, and educational institutions which took a toll on their physical, mental and financial health, and directly impacted their autonomy. Hafizullah Emadi further describes how Afghan women’s groups such as the
Revolutionary Association of Women in Afghanistan (RAWA) found the purdah imposed on them to be beneficial as they smuggle books and other materials otherwise unavailable to women
(108).
These works provide valuable insight into the many variables that impact the life of
Afghan women, whether refugees or not. They, therefore, heavily inform the methodology I have chosen to follow; that is, to approach such questions as agency through an oral life-history following feminist approaches to in-depth interviews.
Oral life histories are frequently used to document the narratives of non-hegemonic classes due to their possible lack of literacy or access to writing (Hesse-Biber 191, Portelli 104).
They are also used in studies of cultures that have strong oral traditions where descriptions of events, folk tales, songs and stories are passed down from one generation to the next. The two reasons are often related because it is the lack of access to writing that contributes to the development of strong oral traditions (Portelli 99, 102). The Afghan tradition is one such tradition, and an oral history approach helped me better understand the lived realities of Afghan women refugees.
Oral history is not intended to understand historical events, but rather to understand the meaning of these events for people who have experienced them or have been impacted by them
(Portelli 99). For this reason, my study does not claim objectivity or generalizability, but prides itself on the subjectivity of the narrator. I do not claim the presence of an objective truth because my work is based on the conversations I had with my focus - Summaiyya - which included the questions I asked her as well as her responses. Naturally, the exchange worked both ways. This study also uses this method to understand the impact of the events in Afghanistan and Pakistan in the late twentieth century on Summaiyya’s life.
Oral history further creates room for tonal changes, volume, pace, body language and emphasis when interviews were documented and transcribed. These variables are important in capturing the sentiments of the people which provide as much information as the spoken word
(Portelli 98). Not all my exchanges with Summaiyya took place in speech - the interviews were held in Urdu which was not her first language. Other visual and verbal cues were essential to my understanding of her perspectives. Oral history also promises the ability to capture hesitance and reluctance - something I might not have been able to identify in other methodologies (Hesse-
Biber 205).
With a narrow focus, an honest delivery of our conversations is important to my work.
Oral history reduces the hierarchies between the subject and object of a study relative to other methodologies in which historians speak for their subjects in what Portelli describes as a “ventriloquistic” endeavor (105). He defends oral history as an immersive endeavor for the historians who, aware of their positionality, engage with the narrator and their context in order to present a “truer” history (103). Feminist research methodologies also emphasize the importance of interviewer’s cognizance of their power relationship with the interviewee (Hesse-Biber 185).
Oral history methods of research have the authority to set the tone or agenda for the interview but have minimum control and restrictions over the responses of the interviewee. The ethics of such methodological practices dictate that the interviewer allows the interviewee to lead conversation but keep their overall topic in mind (Hesse-Biber 186).
My sampling method was random and I relied on word of mouth to connect with potential subjects. My sample was limited to one person so I only had to meet a few people until
I met Summaiyya. I met with her in person every day over a two week period in Pakistan. We met in her home, where she felt most comfortable. I decided to speak with Summaiyya because she seemed comfortable and willing to speak with me. Her family was supportive of this decision as I was connected with her through her son, Jamaluddin which added to her comfort. She had lived in several places and migrated in waking memory which was important to my study. The study consisted of semi-structured interviews which included questions around major life events and experiences. Her responses to these questions paved the way for future conversations. These interviews were recorded for my reference.
This methodology is further informed by my theoretical approach and the broader questions I intend to tackle in light of my findings. Gayatri Spivak’s essay, “Can the Subaltern
Speak”, is my primary guide. She uses the word “subaltern” to describe the colonized native populations that colonizers characterized by their subordination. She identifies the subaltern as a heterogeneous group, falsely represented as homogenous in Western discourse (23). She argues that individuals, particularly within the subaltern class, cannot be seen as autonomous on the grounds that the production of knowledge is inherently capitalist, created for the purpose of exploitation and economic gain, and it is this knowledge that sculpts peoples’ consciousness
(21). Hence, she maintains that the intellectual elite both directly and indirectly assume the voice of the subaltern for themselves. While Spivak uses colonial discourses on the practice of sati
(widow immolation) in South Asia to make her point, I argue that the American discourse on
Afghan women also constructs them as subalterns. My primary contention with Spivak, however, is that she takes a very cynical approach to the subaltern by concluding that this group, in fact, cannot speak. My thesis will argue that although the colonizers seek to assume the voice of the subaltern, there remain avenues through which the subaltern can be heard. I will demonstrate that oral history is one of these avenues.
Spivak employs the works of Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida and Said to identifying herself as a “practical Marxist feminist deconstructionist”. Her work proceeds by examining the problematic binaries in narratives regarding the subaltern and the absence of adequate vocabulary in the existing discourse concerning subaltern women. She attributes this to the fact that the production of knowledge is not innocent and is always value laden - values that she believes French post-structuralist theory holds and propagates. She agrees with Foucault,
Deleuze and Guattari on the heterogeneity of power, but disagrees with them on their schematic perception of ideology. Spivak believes that a schematic perception blurs the relationship between “interest” and “desire” – the theoreticians’ desires, guided by their interests, align them with the bourgeoisie. As such, theoreticians undermine the material and emphasize the cultural, which blurs subject/object distinctions (23). These distinctions are essential when making subaltern voices heard. As a result of intervening desires of such thinkers and ideologues, Spivak believes that women in Asia and Africa are rendered invisible in colonial discourses unless they are seen as parts of the “third world” (24). She attributes this invisibility to these women being outside the means of production, hence not possessing a codified value in a capitalist society. She argues that knowledge expresses the financial interests of its producers, and that knowledge itself is a commodity. It is exported from the colonizers to the colonized world. The exclusion and erasure of voices of women in the third world in discourses that concern them is indicative of an epistemological fracture in anthropology. As a result, she finds anthropological ventures to be
“ventriloquistic”, and this is a concern that this thesis tackles methodologically, by using oral history as the medium of research. Oral history overcomes such ventriloquism by immersing the researcher into the study and removing claims of objectivity.
Spivak argues that this epistemic and ventriloquistic violence ensues when the theoretician and the ethnographer deems themselves “transparent” (29). The motives and desires of the researcher seep into the study and dictate the course because the intellectual elite holds more power over the produced knowledge than the subaltern. She sees value in ideology and insists that its absence can lead to dangerous utopianism and work against global justice.
Simultaneously, essentialist knowledge production succumbs to the same shortfalls.
Furthermore, the subaltern cannot be given a voice by such Eurocentric theorization. The solution that Spivak provides, however, is not to disrupt the production of knowledge. In order to address the issue of such epistemic violence, she recommends the academic to be aware of their positionality as they engage in their academic discourse so as to not make their engagement with their subject ventriloquistic. Saba Mahmood extends Spivak’s argument to the silencing of Muslim women’s voices in the post-9/11 world. She problematizes Western feminism’s conflation of women’s agency with active resistance to male power and presents the idea that agency is not necessarily exercised by conflict. Mahmood presents a case of Muslim women in Egypt exercising their agency by supporting patriarchal structures against what appear to be their own best interests as an example of this. What is undesirable to one might be freely chosen by another. In this way, she argues that feminist movements in the West have set notions of agency that obscure the way many women in
Muslim societies exercise their autonomy (6). Mahmood argues that if chosen freely, illiberal action can also be an act of agency and Western feminism, such as the one in Laura Bush’s book described above, does not have room for it.
Mahmood explains that societal norms are not only created, reinforced or resisted but also lived and experienced. She wants to shift away from the binary perception of the creation and destruction of such norms (22). She presents the example of the emphasis on Muslim practices such as veiling and the emphasis on Islamic rituals in the colonial era as a case of this non-binary. The practice of such rituals by men and women alike in the colonial era, according to
Mahmood, was an act of freedom and social protest against the enforcement of colonial policies of cultural domination (25). Mahmood, therefore, argues that agency and freedom can be found even in conformity to the norm. To Mahmood, agency exists in a system where people are able to freely make decisions even if their decisions are made from a limited set of options, an argument summarized in the following quote: “The constraining nature of these alternatives notwithstanding, I would argue that they nonetheless represent forms of reasoning that must be explored on their own terms if one is to understand the structuring conditions of this form of ethical life and the forms of agency they entail.”(187) Prompted by Mahmood, in this thesis I turn to the Deobandi movement in South Asia and the rise of Deobandi-inspired religious sentiment in Afghanistan after the Soviet invasion, including the Taliban Movement, exploring them as other expressions of indigenous agency expressed through the norm. However, I keep in mind that the idea of agency itself has been critiqued by thinkers as a neo-liberal ploy. Rosalind Gill insists that “the neoliberal subject is required to bear full responsibility for their life biography no matter how severe the constraints upon their action” (Gill 438). Gill’s criticism is valuable because it demonstrates that all life events are not the result of deliberate choice. Any arguments for absolute free choice and complete lack of autonomy in such scenarios would be invalid. It is this critique itself that pushes for a closer examination of the idea of agency and an understanding of its nuances.
With these three theoretical perspectives and the extant literature on Afghan/Muslim women in mind, this thesis narrates the oral life history of Summaiyya, testing them through this
Afghan refugee woman’s lived experiences. My findings and argument are presented in four broad categories discussed in individual chapters. 1) “Books/Kitaab”, detailing the books she read, the books that were made available to her, and the impact they had on her life. 2)
“Purdah/Piety”, detailing her understanding and perspectives on dress, fashion, the limitation of women to physical space and her opinion on the matter. 3) “Sabr/Endurance”, detailing her self- sacrifice for loved ones, her grit in the face of cruelty and atrocity, and the role of faith in her steadfastness under difficult circumstances. 4) “Inquilab/War”, describing the events of the
Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and their impact on her life as a young girl.
In the final analysis, I demonstrate that there is little truth to stereotypical representations of Muslim and Afghan women. While Summaiyya lived a difficult life in which she frequently felt limited by her socio-economic conditions and her refugee status, she did not feel confined by her womanhood, nor did she feel particularly victimized as a result of it. I employ Saba
Mahmood’s work to present that while Summaiyya’s preferences and decisions would not be agreeable to all, the fact that she made those choices for herself proves that she was an agent in her life. HER STORY Summaiyya is the eldest of five siblings and the only sister to four brothers. She was very close to her parents and they were very fond of her. Summaiyya’s father was educated and worked a white collar job in Kabul. The family lived in a nearby village. When she was an adolescent, her father consulted with the village leaders and insisted that all girls in the village should be given a chance to receive an education. The village leadership turned down his appeals, but he ensured that Summaiyya went to school for as long as he could.
Summaiyya recalls going to school until the sixth grade. This is where she learned to read and write in Farsi and Pashto. Her father had hoped that she would continue her education, but despite his efforts this was not possible. Under Daud Khan’s government, when she was about six years old, she recalls that women were forced to attend school. People had no choice in the matter. When he was assassinated, many people in her village did not want to send their daughters to school anymore. As farmers, many did not see the value in educating them. Later, when the mujahideen gained influence, even those who wanted to send their daughters to school couldn’t anymore. Despite her own and her parents’ wishes, Summaiyya could no longer attend school. The mujahideen shut down girls’ schools by force and pressured all girls who had reached puberty to get married. If found single, the girls would be abducted and coerced into marrying members of the mujahideen. It was this impendence that pushed Summaiyya’s father to get her married.
“No one could do what they liked. People were afraid for their daughters. No one had any choice. Even their professions and workplaces were chosen for them. Everything was imposed
(by the Taliban). It was chaos… now Afghans continue business as usual even when war is going on around them. They’re not afraid of anything anymore.” Summaiyya remembers several violations of her home in this period. She recalls that her house was raided by Soviet and communist militia who forced their way into her house and turned it upside down when conducting a random inspection. This militia assassinated her neighbors, buried villagers alive, needlessly killed their cattle, destroyed personal property and used violence to assert their dominance. Summaiyya believes that many of these assassinations happened because the ideology of the communist militia clashed with that of the Muslim
Afghans - she remembers many people including neighbors and distant family members being killed upon proclaiming their faith. Her house was also raided by the mujahideen who threatened to abduct her for marriage. After a few weeks of searching anxiously, her father found a suitor for her. Summaiyya was engaged to marry Rashid for about a year. Roughly a month before her wedding, the final violation of her home took place. Her house was bombed by American drones.
She recalls being home with her mother and brothers when they were alarmed about the drones overhead. They rushed out of the house and fled to a nearby canal. Within minutes, most of their house was reduced to rubble. Summaiyya slept in the open during the weeks leading up to her wedding.
She has neither any recollection nor photographs from the day of her wedding. Sleeping in the damp outdoors, she had contracted a bad case of malaria and had a high fever on the day.
She made it clear that her parents had consulted with her about her marriage to Rashid, but both
Summaiyya and her parents felt so helpless in the face of their circumstances that they felt they had no other option.
When I asked her about her dowry, she told me that her parents could only afford what was roughly 50,000 Pakistani rupees. When I inquired about her mahar, she chuckled. “They promised me one gold ring, earrings and a three year old calf, but then they didn’t give me anything.” At this point, her nephew started to laugh. “My grandfather is very miserly”, he exclaimed, “never tells anyone how much money he has and keeps it all to himself”. Summaiyya was quick to make a comparison, “my brothers are educated,” she told me, “They know it is a sin to withhold the dowry”.
Rashid’s family is significantly different from Summaiyya’s and she recalls having a difficult time adjusting to this change. Her family speaks Persian and Rashid is a Pashto- speaking Pashtun. Her family is educated while Rashid is from a land-owning and agricultural family who saw little value in education. The translator, her young nephew, laughed and remarked that she was still adjusting and that her limited Pashto was testament to that - according to him, she often mispronounced words.
The adjustment period was interrupted by another significant change - about two months after the wedding, Rashid and his family decided to move to Pakistan. In the early nineties,
Summaiyya migrated to Pakistan with her husband, in-laws and their young children who she helped raise. “I was sorrowful; I was leaving my whole family behind. They were happy because they all migrated together”, she told me.
Upon arrival, she stayed in an overpopulated refugee camp in the bordering Khyber
Pakhtunkhwa Province, then known as the North-West Frontier Province in Pakistan. “We would run out of food rations halfway through the month. Once my brothers-in-law could work, we moved to the city. There were no work opportunities in the camp, it would flood often and would get so cold in the winter.” She recalls. When I enquired about whether she had been able to earn an income, she told me that she had taken on some handicraft work in the camp and continued it later in the city. She embroidered and crocheted small flowers on women’s shawls for 5 rupees each. She seemed proud when she told me that her clients liked them very much. She told me that she used that income primarily towards her children’s expenses. She continued to do this when the family moved out of the camp to Rawalpindi.
In Rawalpindi, Summaiyya’s brothers in law took on blue collar jobs and frequently worked on daily wages to support the family. This lasted for a few years, until one of the brothers-in-law decided that the family should move to the Shamshatoo Refugee Camp in
Peshawar.
Shamshatoo was run by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, an Afghan warlord, and leader of the
Deobandi group, Hezb-i-Islami. She praised him for his assistance to refugees in Pakistan.
Shamshatoo, she described, was very well organized; refugee families were assigned houses, unlike Haripur where they were housed in flimsy tents, food rations in Shamshatoo arrived frequently and in abundance from Saudi Arabia, free education was provided for both girls and boys, and vocational training was available. They also had the benefit of being in a metropole -
Peshawar, where they both spoke the native language, Pashto and could find work. Her nephew, however, remarked that Hekmatyar was “very strict”. When I enquired about what this meant, he told me that he would have people killed if they were “open” - if found in possession of music, playing loud music, smoking cigarettes or engaging any such supposedly promiscuous activities, he would have them “dealt with”. Summaiyya remarked that she felt this was excessive.
When in Shamshatoo, the family had intended to wed Summaiyya’s youngest sister-in- law. Her husband met with the suitors and while the family prepared for the wedding, without consideration for his sister, he instead gave their daughter’s hand in marriage. Their daughter, from what Summaiyya told me, was in her early teens. When I asked her whether she was in favor of this decision, she told me that she had no idea until the wedding was finalized and he had accepted her dower on their daughter’s behalf. She was wedded to a Pakistani Pashtun family in a nearby village, and her daughter usually only visited her annually. Summaiyya had a tone of helplessness when she talked about her daughter.
The family after living in Shamshatoo for a few years moved back to Rawalpindi. One of her brothers-in-law made this decision. By this time, Summaiyya’s elder sons were teenagers and started working to support the family. They vendored small toys and balloons in marketplaces.
Her eldest son, Abdurrehman, Summaiyya remembered fondly, was very intelligent. One of his friends hired him in his family’s electronics shop in Rawalpindi. Here, he manned the cashier’s desk and in his free time, taught himself to read and write. Abdurrehman’s income allowed the younger two brothers to attend school. His self-taught knowledge was such that he would correct his younger school-going brothers’ English. Summaiyya told me this several times. She was very proud of him. Due to our language barrier and the nature of the content of our conversations, the story only began to take shape after a few meetings.
In one of our meetings, I met Summaiyya’s extended family. Her sister-in-law was visiting with her children. Unlike Summaiyya and the women that she lived with, this part of her family was fluent in Urdu. They dress in the supposedly less conservative Pakistani attire of shalwar kameez, watch Pakistani soap operas and send their daughters to school. Unlike the rest of the family, this faction had broken off and chosen to live in a separate house. When I spoke with them, they spoke highly of Summaiyya. They thought she was pious, above all things and found her to be very resilient. Summaiyya’s nieces remarked that she only ever said good things and never spoke ill of anyone. They respected her tremendously for all that she had endured and the faith she had demonstrated and upheld through such difficult times. They mentioned that her husband had been merciless particularly in his treatment towards her, but also generally toward other family members. I was a little startled to hear these things because she had not spoken much to me about her husband. Summaiyya was present during these conversations.
The following day when I enquired about this, she did not say much. She took my hand and placed it on her face just underneath her eye socket. A wedge of her cheekbone was missing.
Her sister-in-law had mentioned that Summaiyya’s husband had attacked her with a knife. I enquired whether this was that instance. She disclosed that it was not a knife but his metal tipped shoe. He had come home very angry one night and tackled her to the ground. He then kicked her face which broke her cheekbone, indented part of the bridge of her nose and left her bleeding profusely. He had then left and the family rushed her to the hospital. Summaiyya seemed saddened by this but did not display any other emotions.
In a different conversation she told me that he was ill-tempered. He was not only abusive towards her, but also his sister, sisters in law, his mother and his children. He would get particularly upset when he ran out of money. He would then ask her for money and if she refused, for any reason including when she did not have any left, he would beat her. When she embroidered and crocheted for a living from home, he would take all of her income.
The topic of Summaiyya’s husband always seemed to touch a raw nerve and I was not sure why. It was not until she mentioned her son Abdurrehman’s martyrdom the third time we spoke about him that I realized why she had been so upset.
Abdurrehman, as described earlier, had stepped into the role of the family’s breadwinner as a boy. When I asked her whether her husband had supported her in their experience as refugees, she responded with “he didn’t even care for his children… my elder two sons did not talk to him”. Abdurrehman and his father constantly got into fights. “He would step in and try to fight off his father when he beat me. His father didn’t like this so he threw him out of the house.” Abdurrehman would sneak in to meet Summaiyya when his father was not home and slept at his work for a few months. Then he went to Afghanistan and joined the Afghan Special Security
Forces. “He would send remittances and insisted that it was his responsibility to provide for the family. He said that I had done enough and did not need to work anymore. I was growing tired and my eyes had lost the precision needed for embroideries.” She spoke fondly of Abdurrehman
- he seemed to do no wrong. He worked in Afghanistan for a few months before he was killed.
“He was performing isha prayers at the mosque when he was shot by an enemy he made in the field”, she told me. She felt proud. Summaiyya traveled to her brother’s house in Kabul for the funeral. She told me that she did not cry loudly and that she was grateful to God for his fate. It seemed to me that Summaiyya idealized suffering and martyrdom, something I will discuss in a later chapter.
“When Abdurrehman’s father learned of his death, he did not arrive at the funeral until a day later. When he did, he seemed overjoyed.” Summaiyya spoke bitterly. “He didn’t return to
Pakistan after this. He went back to his village and took over the family’s land. He pays people to farm it for him and lives a gluttonous life. He lives alone there but he is clever with his words.
People like him. He was elected the representative of the village.” When I asked whether he sent remittances to his family she scoffed and told me that he takes half of Abdurrehman’s state mandated pension too and that Jamaluddin goes into debt trying to support his father’s lifestyle.
She said she did not want to live with him and would not go back to the village. However, when
I asked her what she would do if he asked her to move back, she said she would. He was, after all, her husband.
In a separate conversation, I spoke to Summaiyya about the stereotype that Afghans have a lot of children. I asked whether she made the decision to have a (relatively) small family. She told me that she did not. I asked whether her husband had consulted with her about this. She said he did not. Then she said it again. She did not sound very emotional. She implied marital rape but seemed detached and it gave me reason to believe that she did not see much wrong with it.
She said that she was grateful to God and it was only thanks to His mercy that she did not have more children. She had never used any contraception. She also mentioned that she had in-fact been menopausal for ten years. For me, this didn’t add up because that would mean she had become menopausal at the age of 35 which likely indicated a health condition. She also used the word pakeeza, meaning clean and pure for being menopausal which indicated that she saw menstruation as dirty. This will be discussed further in the chapter titled Purdah/Piety.
After Abdurrehman’s death and her husband’s return to Afghanistan, Summaiyya along with her brothers-in-law and children moved out of Shamshatoo in Peshawar and back into
Rawalpindi. Her brothers in law broke off from their joint-family home and each moved into a separate home. Summaiyya continues to live with one of her brothers in law and her sons split the rent with their uncle. One of her sons studies in India, another in Islamabad, and one works in
Rawalpindi. Her daughter lives a few hundred miles away with her husband’s family.
Summaiyya often feels restricted in terms of physical space and finances.
The house feels claustrophobic to her. Her brother-in-law occupies one story with his wife and five children, and she occupies the floor above them. She has one small kitchen, a bathroom, a large living room which doubled as a bedroom, a small veranda that holds their stove and a small hujra for guests. Most of our conversations took place in the hujra. The walls are scarcely decorated and the only decorations are two clocks branded with the name of the shop that Abdurrehman worked at and a small wooden map of Afghanistan on which she pointed out her village to me. The family is supported with part of Abdurrehman’s pension and Khalilullah’s (her second-born son) salary. These two incomes also support Summaiyya’s daughter because her husband had been imprisoned in the Gulf. She pointed out several times that her son was frequently in debt to his friends because it was difficult to make ends meet.
Summaiyya spends her days doing housework and other chores, and devotes her free time to prayer and reading religious texts. She indulges in some Pakistani soap operas, her nephew disclosed to me, but she seemed offended when I discussed her interest in such things. She said that she was devoted only to her faith and felt that the rest was a waste of time.
She is particularly stressed regarding her sons’ weddings, something she feels she was unable to do due to the family’s financial circumstances. She said that if they had more space and could afford another family, it would be the first thing she would do. This seemed to weigh on her quite a bit.
In one of our conversations, I asked her what she would have liked to be if she could be anything in the world. She excitedly told me that she would have liked to be a teacher. “I would have done it free of charge!” she chuckled. BOOKS/KITAAB
When we spoke about her past, Summaiyya mentioned that she enjoys reading. When I inquired further, she proudly introduced her books to me. Her collection consists primarily of prescriptive religious texts involving anecdotal lessons from the life of the Prophet Muhammad, the lives of his companions, texts from influential religious reformists, a Deobandi text that presented itself as a guide to becoming the ideal Muslim women, and finally, another text presented as the guide to avoid become a sinful and hell-bound woman.1 The last two books, she noted, were quite informative and they seemed to have influenced her life deeply. These books are of the same genre as the widely read and historically influential Bihishti Zewar, authored by
Maulana Ashraf Ali Thanawi (d. 1943).
The origins of this genre, like the Deoband Movement to which Thanawi belonged, dates to late-nineteenth century British India. Deobandism proved to be the one of the most influential clerical responses to British colonialism in South Asia. This included the British essentialization of Muslim women’s lives as defined by purdah, primarily meaning gender-segregation and veiling (Pirbhai 9). Bihishti Zewar is a particularly widely distributed and received example of the Deobandi perspective on the ideals of womanhood, which also spurred the publication of vernacular translations and localized reprints of the book, such as Summaiyya’s copy of Jannati
Khaza. The latter version was published and widely distributed in Pakistan in the late 1970s and
1980s under General Zia ul-Haq’s ‘Islamization’ policy. (Metcalf 13). It also had an inordinate
1 Namely, Jannati Khaza (Heavenbound Woman in Pashto), Gunahgaar Aurat (Sinful Woman) Seerat-e-Nabawi (Characteristics of the Prophet Muhammad), Mukashifat ar Qulub (Reformation of the Heart) by Imam Ghazali, Zindagi Guzaarney ka Tareeqa (A Guide to Living Life), and lastly; Gunaah-e-Kabirah (The Greatest Sins). effect on the perspectives of the Afghan mujahideen who identify as members of the Deobandi sect and were trained in Pakistan during Zia’s regime (Barfield 171). The mujahideen, in turn, had a profound impact on Summaiyya’s life and her world-view - from her life in Afghanistan, her migration to Pakistan, and life in Shamshatoo camp run by Hezb-i-Islami Party leader
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. The party is also doctrinally Deobandi. When I enquired about where she got the books, Summaiyya told me they were prizes that her children had won at school. Her children had received most of their education in Shamshatoo, the only place that provided it for free. As a result, it is not surprising that Jannati Khaza landed on her bookshelf.
Books in the genre of Jannati Khaza are written for women and not for men. The lesson they emphasize is that women must follow a specific lifestyle in order to enter heaven. They create a set distinction between public and private spheres and mostly confine women to the private. Women are restricted to the household, responsible for homemaking, child-bearing and rearing, and are not to transgress the boundaries laid out for them by their male counterparts.
This gender binary is presented as an indicator of piety and sexual virtue - their perfume was not to be smelt, their voices not heard and their jewelry not seen (Metcalf 7). Indeed, this genre of books makes women’s self-sacrifice, confinement and dependence on their male counterparts the key to a preservation and continuity of “morality”. Women are presented as more likely to be troubled by their nafs and “always on the verge of moving out of control, of displaying excess, of spilling over - in where they go, what they buy, how much they talk, what they eat” (Metcalf 14).
As a result, they were in need of the instruction and guidance of their male guardians, and had to be restricted to certain realms. This was made part of their purdah.
Education, nevertheless, is presented as essential to a woman in this and other texts of the genre, argued to enhance their ability as good homemakers, child-rearers, and companions to their husbands. Literacy in Arabic or various vernaculars is particularly important to ensure that women are able to gain the necessary religious knowledge to be good Muslims (Metcalf 26,
Pirbhai 6). Home economics also requires knowledge of arithmetic, but this education is not meant for women to engage in economic activity outside the domestic sphere. In the instance that women are forced by circumstance to engage in financial activity and attempt to gain economic independence, works in this genre limit them to what are now known as the feminine professions of teaching and healing. Women are presented as intrinsically nurturing and empathetic, and hence suited for such caregiving roles. Other than these roles in the public sphere, these texts instruct women to limit their economic activity to artisanship and crafts such as knitting and sewing from within the domestic sphere (Pirbhai 8). As such, these texts make clear distinctions between “heaven-bound” and other women, dividing them even within their increasingly segregated spheres, making it easier to dismiss women who believe in or advocate for a different lifestyle (Metcalf 10).
The impact of this Deobandi perspective is well-reflected in Summaiyya’s attempts to earn a living during her time at Shamshatoo camp. Her attempts were limited to embroidering people’s shawls and knitting quilts from home. But the more general ethos of these works is apparent throughout her life. She deeply values her literacy and education despite her difficult and often contradictory circumstances. She takes pride in her ability to read the Quran, something she reminded me she did every time I asked her about her day. She also seemed to take pride in the books she had read and the fact that she was literate in both Farsi and Pashto.
The genre of books was something that she seemed to be fond of as well. When I asked if she read other books, she responded in the negative. She doesn’t watch soap operas nor does she indulge in any such “worldly activities”. She is committed to being a better Muslim, and this literature, she thinks, will help her achieve this goal. For this reason, as well, reading is the one activity she spends most of her free time doing.
When I asked her what the teachings of Jannati Khaza were, she responded:
It says to fulfill your responsibility toward God, your husband, toward your children, and
even your neighbors. This book instructs to not upset them and try to be of service. It
says to be good to everyone whether they are Muslim or not, to raise your children well
and teach them about Islam and the correct path. If you do all of these things then
inshallah you will be protected from hellfire and sent to heaven. A heaven-bound woman
is she who is good to all of society.
These are things she does practice, as well as she can, in her life. When it was time for prayer in my presence, she would excuse and pray in full. However, when she stepped out, she ensured that a family member kept me company. She periodically checked in to see if she had said anything to upset me when I took a pause. I noticed that she did this with all of her guests and visitors. Nevertheless, prayer would not be forsaken. Summaiyya seemed satisfied with herself in that she had taught her children to pray and developed the habit in them to do it five times a day.
She told me that her sons all woke up for Fajr. At another time, she told me that her children would not miss their prayers even when busy with work or studies. This was important to her and she felt that she had fulfilled her responsibility.
Thanawi’s Bihishti Zewar specifically instructs mothers to “inculcate the habit of offering salat” in their children and “teach him to recite the Quran” (468). Despite her own relationship with her husband, she is proud that her sons maintain a good relationship with their father, send him remittances and care for him. She believes that this is their religious obligation towards him - something she had read in the books. She told me, “A good Muslim woman would not interrupt her children’s relationship with their father”, reflecting Thanawi’s instructs in
Bihishti Zewar that “it is the duty of the mother to create respect for the father in the child’s heart” (469).
As discussed in the chronology of her life, when I inquired about whether she would consider living with her husband again, she told me that she would not live with him out of her free will, but if he asked her she would oblige and go back to Afghanistan. This, she mentioned, was her responsibility toward her husband, and while she did not say explicitly that it was said in the book, she used very similar language to express herself. Thanawi, after all, stresses the importance of absolute obedience to one’s husband in his text: “If he orders you to tie your hands and remain standing the entire night, then the prosperity of this world and the hereafter is in this that you bear this minor difficulty of this world and thereby attain the prosperity and success of the hereafter” (460).
When I asked her whether requesting a divorce or a khulaa was ever an option, she responded in the negative. “We consider it taboo”, she told me. She alluded to “we” being
Pashtuns and Muslims. “It is not desirable”. Again, this reflects Thanawi’s strongly worded case against divorce. He writes: “It is mentioned in a Hadith that of all the permissible actions, divorce is the most detestable in the sight of Allah Ta'ala” (492). Her patience and steadfastness in her relationship with her husband is discussed in more detail in the chapter titled
Sabr/Endurance, but it is important to note here that in response to her description of the book’s contents, when I asked her whether the same books existed for “Heaven-bound men”, she did not respond. Her nephew jumped in and told me, laughing through his words, about a bazaar that was replete with books like this for women, but not men. Summaiyya did not seem amused. She told me that this book could be used by men as well. She pointed to the books that included stories of prophets and their companions and pointed out that those were written for men as well and that they had important lessons for everyone.
Speaking of the book by Imam Ghazali that she also owned and read, she informed me that “this writes about the outcomes of kabira [major] sins and the stories of prophets - the punishments for immoral behavior, dishonestly, taking interest, drinking alcohol. There are a lot of Hadiths here about taking interest.” The taking of interest and drinking of alcohol were things that she associated with the masculine and the public domain, and Summaiyya felt that these books provided men with adequate guidelines.
When we circled back towards the treatment of women in this conversation, she told me that Jannati Khaza gave examples of the Prophet Muhammed treating women with kindness.
“He spent time with his wives, helped them with household chores and was friendly with them.”
“Would it not be nice if books directed towards men told them this?” I asked her. “This [book] does,” she told me. “Men just do not pay attention.” I asked if she had her sons read it. She laughed. Interestingly, her response was in line with Thanawi’s argument. When he was asked to write a companion guide of Bihishti Zewar for men, he maintained that the existing book was adequate for both genders and added a mere appendix titled Bihishti Gauhar (The Heavenly
Gem) to the existing book, containing guidelines for practices he deemed appropriate for men
(Metcalf 9). PURDAH/PIETY My conversations around modesty and piety highlighted the variety of ways in which people understand purdah. Literally meaning “curtain” or “veil”, the way women understand purdah clearly varies depending on their region of origin, their age, their educational attainment, family traditions, wealth and religiosity. What I found to be fairly consistent among the people I spoke with is that their understanding of purdah was very closely tied to their dress to the extent that the two were nearly synonymous in many conversations. It was not a topic that could be approached directly - every time I asked a woman what purdah meant to her, she would look at me with a bemused expression. There seemed to be a common unspoken understanding of what it was, and it was odd to them that I did not understand it. Their understanding became clearer to me when we discussed fashion decisions. One woman explicitly informed me that her husband does not appreciate her wearing the Pakistani shalwar kameez because he found it to be vulgar.
The kameez in particular, she told me, was revealing and she did not like wearing it either. The kameez is a long blouse that normally extends to the knees and has slits along either side from the waist to the knee length. The open sides, she felt, were immodest. The Afghan gagra, on the other hand, are more loose fitting shirts and are closed from all sides. She felt this was more modest.
Her sister-in-law interrupted to inform me that she feels similarly, but was discriminated against when she stepped out in Afghan clothing. She had young children who fell sick often.
When she took them to the doctor, the doctor would refuse to treat them because they were
Afghan and turn her away. The only indicator of her being an Afghan woman was her dress - she was fluent in Urdu. However, she did not want to resort to the immodest Pakistani attire to address this discrimination so devised an alternative plan and began wearing the more ambiguous and neutral black abaya. I found this an interesting way of subverting the discrimination she faced.
Nancy Tapper provides an interesting discussion of the topic of subversion of male authority among Pashtun women. She notes that women have been excluded from anthropological discourse about the region due to ethnographic and cultural bias against them, and this epistemic violence does not capture reality (20). In reality, women’s agency is a lot more nuanced, and they are sometimes able to subvert the power structures that oppress them. Tapper uses the term subversion to describe “certain possibilities for women’s action which, while they are implicit in the dominant ideologies of gender espoused by both men and women, nonetheless are constructed in opposition to the ideals of male dominance which they contradict” (21). Lila
Abu-Lughoud also sees subversion as a prominent vehicle that women employ to assert their agency. She flips Foucault’s popular assertion that “where there is power, there is resistance”
(1978: 95-96) to “where there is resistance, there is power”, which she claims is more intuitively sensible and fruitful for ethnographic analysis (The Romance of Resistance 42). These women, in their adornment of alternative dress, were able to subvert the power that the state and discriminatory practices exercised against them while simultaneously preserving their values of modesty.
A younger girl whose parents had migrated as children told me that she is open to wearing everything, Pakistani clothes, Afghani clothes, even the supposedly immodest
“Western” tights, but she had to wear a large shawl over them all when she steps outside. This is a personal choice and she feels more comfortable when she is “covered”. It is modest and respectable. She doesn’t feel that she needed to wear an abaya or looser clothing as long she was able to cover herself with a chador. However, not all women I spoke with had the ability to dress in their preferred apparel nor were they able to follow their personal beliefs around modesty.
Gulnoor, a refugee in her late fifties, was forced to flee Afghanistan with her two children after her husband’s passing. In Afghanistan, she collected and sold scrap paper and tin for a living. When the Taliban took control of Jalalabad, she found herself unable to earn a livelihood.
She frequently ran into them and they beat her for being out in the streets unaccompanied by a male guardian. They also beat her for being immodest and not being adequately “covered” – she couldn’t afford closed shoes and her sandals bared her feet to other men. Unable to make ends meet, Gulnoor moved to Pakistan with her children. In Pakistan, she continues to collect scrap for a living. She wears a gagra partug and chador, and feels that this is appropriate for her age when she is out in public.
Although Gulmoor struggles to make ends meet, she is opposed to allowing her daughter to work. She insists that it is vulgar for young women to be seen in public in her culture. Even if she were to work from home, she would have to leave home to learn the sewing or embroidery or the skill she would practice, and Gulnoor found this deeply inappropriate. “We would rather die of starvation than make our girls earn”, she told me during our conversation. Her son, who overheard my conversation with Gulnoor, is of the belief that “Afghanistan suffered because of such traditions. They gossip about girls who go to school and make a living. They find it shameful.” Gulnoor finds the Taliban’s definition of modesty to be excessive and limiting.
However, this particular understanding of modesty is limited to her own age group and is not appropriate for younger women who should not leave the domestic sphere. She herself was only able to be out in public as a breadwinner and later as a widow, but as a single young woman she would have rather starved than step out of her home. When I spoke to Summaiyya about modesty, she had some family members visiting and so I was able to speak with a group of eight women of different ages. Her nieces, who are all teenagers, were comfortable wearing both the Pakistani shalwar kameez and the Afghan gagra partug. They wear a large chador when they stepped out, which they find to be modest, but the particulars of their dress don’t matter so long as they are covered. One of her sisters-in-law feels the same way and finds it to be appropriately modest. Another, who considers herself to be
“heavier” finds that the Pakistani clothes make her look “vulgar” and she feels more decent in the gagra partug. However, this is based only on her size and she feels that people with different body types could dress differently.
Since a lot of this conversation revolved around being modestly dressed in public, I asked whether it was to earn the respect of other people. The women collectively responded in the negative. They said that clothing was personal. “We wear everything, Pakistani clothes, Afghani clothes, tight and loose fitting clothing - you wear them, we do too. But when we go out we wear a large dupatta. It is important to be covered. You like yourself more covered, too.” I asked if they felt safer if they were covered. Summaiyya’s nephew Nabeel jumped in and said, “When a woman wears a burqa, no one can tell if she’s young or elderly so everyone stares at her”. The room collectively burst into laughter. The consensus was that clothing did not necessarily make them feel safer. There was, however, an acknowledgement of a culture of shame around women who did not dress in a particularly modest fashion. I wanted to understand the specifics of the understanding of modesty in their household so I probed further.
I asked what women were to do in societies where they would be discriminated against or stared at for dressing modestly. In response, they told me about distant relatives who had moved to Russia. The women in that family found a happy medium wearing a hijab over their “western” clothes. They all found this to be acceptable. I then asked Summaiyya how she liked to dress when she went out. She told me that she wore the gagra partug and covered her head and face. I asked again what purdah meant to her and what she thought was appropriate. She asked if I was inquiring what “old fashioned” people in her village dressed like until we got to the specifics of the burqa that Afghan women wore in the Taliban era. “That’s so old fashioned! No one wears that anymore!” one of the women in the room chuckled. “The Taliban forced people to wear them. If a woman wore slippers and her feet showed they would beat her and beat her husband.
They would tell them to be ashamed of themselves for their immodesty,” Summaiyya told me.
“It was unreasonable.”
The imposition of the blue burqa most associated with the Taliban is popularly seen as the ultimate sign of the oppression of Afghan women by that group. Lila Abu-Lughoud notes that liberals sometimes confess that they are surprised that Afghan women did not instantly discard their burqas once the Taliban were removed from power in 2001 (Do Muslim Women
Need Saving 35). She notes that this stems from the false assumption that the Taliban invented the burqa and insists that a more sensible and nuanced understanding of the dress of “women of cover”. The burqa is one of many forms of covering observed for centuries by women across the
Muslim world, and was worn by factions of Afghan women before the Taliban took control of the region. It is observed as a marker of women’s modesty, status and respectability. It is also observed as a marker of the separation of men’s and women’s spheres, in which women are attributed with the domains of home and family and men are attributed with the public domain.
Purdah as a marker of women’s modesty is further highlighted by Hanna Papanek in her study of the purdah in Pakistan in the 1970s. She breaks down the practice of purdah into two broad observances: the segregation of spheres and women’s dress. The separation of living spaces into private and public spheres as described earlier is part of the first observance. It is also demonstrated in the vertical segregation of career paths. Some of the most acceptable and highly respectable professions for women are teaching and medicine because they operate in largely segregated spheres; without female teachers and doctors, many women who observe purdah would not have access to medical and educational services. While following these professions, women can also be effectively segregated from men (524).
When I asked Summaiyya what she would choose if she could follow any profession without any restrictions or limitations, she said she would have liked to be a teacher or a healer.
Her reasons for choosing these professions were the same as the ones Papanek described. She also felt that medical professionals had failed women like her, believing that they made access to medical care expensive to the point of inaccessibility. She further believed that she had been deprived of an education by her circumstances and she wanted to be able to provide a school education to Afghan girls. These two professions, she concluded, would allow her to fulfill her religious duty and also carry out her observances of purdah.
The other domain that Papanek describes in which purdah is observed is the domain of women’s dress. She describes the burqa as a liberating invention for “women of cover”. She finds it such because she sees it as a device that enables women to remain private even when in the public sphere; she describes it as a “portable seclusion” (520). Abu-Lughoud describes the burqa as a “mobile home” (Do Muslim Women Need Saving 36). Both Abu-Lughoud’s and
Papanek’s descriptions of the burqa capture how secure Summaiyya and the women discussed above felt in their burqas and chadors. Modest dress was a marker of their faith and respectability, and functioned as a guard against harassment from strangers when in public.
Burqa and chador are the norm to them, and they give little thought to their choice of dress, but when I probed they all remarked that they felt comfortable in the anonymity and the modesty of their dress. Of course, they also poked fun at the idea of it, evident through Nabeel’s joke about hooligans mistakenly ogling elderly women.
To these women, the burqa or their chador is not merely a question of bland convention or protection but kept room for fashion. Summaiyya’s criticism of the Taliban is that they were unreasonable in their expectations of what women could reveal and women’s general permissibility to public spheres. When the purdah created a virtual segregation for women to move freely in public, the women had the liberty to keep room for fashion and personal style.
Summaiyya and her sisters in law’s criticism of the blue burqa itself is that it was not fashionable. They also took that opportunity to comment on the even blander brown burqa that women in some parts of Pakistan wear, and how at least the Afghan burqa was a prettier color than its dusty Pakistani counterpart.
In a separate conversation about what she liked to wear, Summaiyya showed me some of her clothes. She owns an array of tunics and gagras that she likes to layer. She wears color, but only the colors that she finds appropriate for her age. She wears chadors, and she matches them carefully with her gagra partug. She prefers to cover her face with her chador when she leaves her home - a prescriptive limit on modesty set by the Deobandi texts she read - but is not restricted in the specifics of her dress.
This limitation of the covering of the face is set in Maulana Thanavi’s Bihishti Zewar and
Summaiyya’s copy of the vernacularized Jannati Khaza. “It is not permissible for a young woman to expose her face in the presence of ghayr mahrams, nor should she stand in a place where she could be observed... To do so is a major sin” (Thanavi 381). Thanavi and the author of
Summaiyya’s book prescribed that women cover their face when in public, however, did not specify the manner in which they had to do so. As a result, they chose what they deemed fit, be it a black abaya and niqab, a blue burqa or a chador - as long as her face is covered, it does not matter the medium Summaiyya chooses. As long as her face is covered, Summaiyya is following her faith. SABR/ENDURANCE Summaiyya holds the ideas of sacrifice and martyrdom in very high esteem, and this has dictated her life’s decisions in many instances and in several ways. The most obvious instance of this is that when I asked her what she would like her anonymized name to be, she chose the name
Summaiyya. When I enquired about her reason for this, she told me that Summaiyya was the name of a woman she holds in very high esteem because she had been the first martyr in Islam.
Summaiyya was among the earliest converts to Islam. She is recorded to have been either extremely poor or, in some traditions, a slave woman. This made her more vulnerable to attacks by enemies of Islam. She is noted for her endurance and steadfastness in the face of atrocity and is known to have been tortured to death by a Meccan leader. She is attributed with the title of the first martyr in Islam (Razwy). “She suffered for her devotion to her faith”, Summaiyya told me with deep admiration, “but her belief didn’t falter. I want to be named Summaiyya”.
When I asked her about some other women that she admired, she named Malalai of
Maiwand. Malalai was a shepherd's daughter who lived in a village in the outskirts of the
Maiwand battlefield where the British troops fought Afghans in 1880. Malalai was among the women who brought water and helped the wounded on the battlefield. When she noticed Afghan morale declining, she waved the Afghan flag and chanted encouragement that renewed their resolve. Soon after, Malalai was shot dead, but Afghan troops won the war (Adamec 312). Her contributions are deemed noteworthy in this victory and she is popularly known as the “Afghan
Joan of Arc”.
In sum, both Summaiyya and Malalai were ordinary women; a slave and a shepherd.
Both stood up to and sacrificed their lives in the defense of Muslims against non-Muslims. My
Summaiyya admires them for their endurance and sacrifice and wants to emulate that in her life, and she does. Her endurance and sacrifice are, in fact, reflected in several instances in her life.
One of these instances is her difficult marriage.
The word miyan in Urdu is appended with names to denote seniority. The word literally means “master” or “lord”. It is also appended to Allah, and South Asian Muslims popularly refer to God as Allah Miyan. Metcalf notes that this is an attempt to make God “comprehensible and familiar”. Miyan is also a familiar way of referring to one’s husband (37). In rural Pashto speaking areas, women refer to their husband as malik, which holds a similar connotation (The
Performance of Emotion Among Paxtun Women 164). The use of such language establishes a hierarchy between the husband and wife and a likeness of the husband to God. The use of such language in Bihishti Zewar and its vernacularized Jannati Khaza solidifies this power relationship between the two. Summaiyya understands, responds to and uses the same language.
She told me several times that it is her responsibility to obey her husband. She never refuses him, and as noted in her life history, she is even willing to go back to Afghanistan to live with him if he so asks. She also feels that she had no say in how many children she had. When I asked her if her husband consulted with her regarding planning their family, she responded in the negative and said that even though her husband wanted more children, she is grateful to God for only having given her five. It implied that she neither had any bodily autonomy, nor any say in her family. Her decisions to move had always been made by her male guardians.
Summaiyya clearly feels that subservience to her husband is her wifely duty as well as her religious responsibility. Thanawi, in Bihishti Zewar cites a Hadith stating clearly that, "When a man calls his wife to engage in sexual intercourse with him and she does not go and because of this he sleeps away angrily, the angels continue cursing this woman till the morning" (459).
While the reliability of this Hadith is widely contested, Thanawi presents this to be sound in the Bihishti Zewar/Jannati Khaza. The use of Ahadith like these not only make marital rape permissible, but valorize the obligation for wives with threats of punishment if they refuse and promises of reward if they endure. In fact, Thanawi goes so far as to place obedience of the husband second only to the pillars of faith. He writes:
Pleasing the husband and keeping him happy is a great act of ‘ihadah and displeasing
him or keeping him unhappy is a major sin. Rasulullah sallalldhu ‘alayhi wa sallam said:
‘The woman who offers her five times salat, fasts in the month of Ramadan , protects her
honour and respect, and obeys her husband has the choice of entering jannah from
whichever door she wishes to enter from.’ This means that from the eight doors of jannah
she can enter through whichever door she wishes without even having to knock on that
door.’ (458)
Pleasing the husband is presented as an integral religious duty, without fulfilling which a woman cannot be Heaven-bound. Summaiyya believes these texts.
In addition to pleasing and pleasuring their husbands, these texts encourage wives to silently and privately suffer any misdeeds or abuses inflicted on them by their partners. They are encouraged to not respond or react regardless of the nature of the abuse, for if they “do not keep quiet and display any defiance, then the entire incident will have ‘disastrous consequences’”
(Thanawi 465). Thanawi does not delve into what these consequences might be, but promises that once the husband’s anger subsides, he would become regretful and apologetic and if God is willing, he would not be angry with their wives again.
Several stories of the domestic violence inflicted on her by her husband and her father-in- law were relayed by her and her female relatives. She had been beaten and left injured on several occasions, the most significant being the instance when her husband fractured her cheekbone and broke the bridge of her nose. From the way she narrated this to me, she implied that this had been a common occurrence.
When I asked her whether she thought to ask for help, she told me that there was no one she could turn to. “Where would I go? My family was in Afghanistan. Everyone here (her in- laws in Pakistan) was afraid of him. He beat anyone who tried to interfere.” Being a refugee further complicated her situation. Refugee camps weren’t conducive to single women, and she had four children to care for. Divorce, as discussed in the chapter titled Books/Kitaab, was highly undesirable and not a valid option to Summaiyya. Her circumstances prevented her from exploring the option of leaving her abusive marriage, and it is possible that she found guidance and solace in the texts she read.
Another explanation for Summaiyya’s silence comes from Benedicte Grima. Grima describes gham, or “suffering”, as a private matter and insists that the Pashtun woman’s tragedy is that her status comes from her silence about her struggle. In the context of the performance of emotion, Grima further complicates the reader’s understanding of public and private domains.
She argues that the only private domain when it comes to emotions is that of one’s mind and everything outside that domain is public. In this domain, she argues that Afghan women are expected to perform “paxto” (The Performance of Emotion among Paxtun Women 7-8).
The performance of paxto to Grima is the performance of gham or grief. This gham is a staged retelling of the private grievances of the woman to an audience, and the more she has undergone, the more gham she has. This gham, Grima argues, is what makes up a good story.
These stories are told in rituals of gham and about rituals of gham.2 Women even gather outside of these rituals to share these stories and women who have experienced the most hardship share
2 See Amineh Hoti’s Sorrow and Joy among Muslim Women: The Pukhtuns of Northern Pakistan. Cambridge University Press, 2006. Discussed in the literature review. the stories with the most gham. They are also held in high esteem for their gham, which encourages them to further animate their stories with tears, tonal changes and emotions (The
Performance of Emotion among Paxtun Women 119). Grima makes it clear that the staging is not
“exaggerated melodrama, as it might be perceived from the outside”, but rather a tragic aesthetic which makes tales sad and thus good (The Pashtun Tapos: From Biography to Autobiography
247).
While Summaiyya’s stories were not staged, her suffering and her consequent stories of gham resulted in other women in her family to hold her in high esteem. “Do tell chachi’s story”, her niece told me in one conversation, “she’s suffered a lot of gham.” “Her stories make us cry”, another one chimed in, “when she cries, we cry. She’s so innocent.” Her sister-in-law then proceeded to tell me some of the abuses that Summaiyya had faced as testament to her suffering and endurance. When I spoke to Summaiyya about this, she narrated the tales of domestic violence described above.
Another atrocity that demonstrates Summaiyya holds endurance in high esteem was the death of her son Abdurrehman. Abdurrehman had been martyred in Kabul, and Summaiyya was not informed of his demise until she had arrived there. She described this experience as follows:
They had not told me that he was martyred. They had just told me that my mother was
very ill. When we were on the way I had an inkling that someone had died, but I did not
think it was my son. My blood pressure dropped on the journey so I had to see a doctor.
When I entered, they put his dead body in front of me. I did not cry like other women,
didn’t mourn loudly. I just cried quietly and congratulated him on his martyrdom. All the
women would tell me to cry so I would feel better. But I told them I was very happy
when God gave me this son and I was happy the day He took him from me.” Summaiyya was sorrowful, but sincere in this statement. Sacrifice, particularly the sacrifice of one’s life in martyrdom is very important to her. “There is no better death”, she told me, and for his noble death, she was grateful. Martyrdom was the death that her heroes had been destined to experience and in sharing that experience, she felt that her son was heroic. The fact that he was martyred in a mosque during prayer multiplied her admiration. She also informed me that she had to have sabr (endurance), for “hopelessness is no better than blasphemy”.
Bihishti Zewar and Jannati Khaza talk extensively about the virtues of sabr. They also discuss the virtues of it in the particular context of the death of a child. Thanawi cites an appropriate Hadith in Bihishti Zewar: “’I take an oath in the name of that being in whose hands is my life that even if a woman miscarries, that fetus will draw its mother to jannah with its umbilical cord if the mother has made the intention of reward’. That is, she exercised patience with the intention of being rewarded.” (629) Summaiyya’s sabr in the face of the loss of her child came with a promise of reward in the afterlife and she believes this wholeheartedly.
The extent of her suffering and her sabr can only be understood in the social context in which mother-son relationships are defined in Pashtun culture. A Pashtun mother is expected to be completely devoted to her son and prepared to sacrifice her own life for him. As an adult male, her son is expected to return his mother’s devotion by supporting her and caring for her when she is elderly (The Pashtun Tapos: From Biography to Autobiography 249). Abdurrehman was not just Summaiyya’s son, but her firstborn and the family’s primary breadwinner. He had only begun to adequately provide for his family when he was killed. He had a deep regard for his mother and intended to support her. Summaiyya has a special love and appreciation for
Abdurrehman because of this. His loss, as a result, is very significant to Summaiyya and her endurance of this loss needs to be understood in this context. She grieves the loss of her son profoundly and is sorrowful about her fractured and abusive relationship with her husband, however, she does not recognize these as her suffering.
They were tragedies in her past, but what she continues to endure is her forced estrangement from family due to her refugee status and the poverty that had been inflicted on her. She was stripped from her family as a child to be married off in order to prevent a forced marriage into an insurgent group. She was later forced to flee to Pakistan, across the border from her family, due to political circumstances. She had only been able to meet her family twice in the three decades since she had left Afghanistan - one of these times was upon the death of her son. She was unable to visit when her father passed away and longs to see her mother and brothers.
She has and continues to undergo tremendous suffering due to her financial circumstances. She was forced to live in refugee camps in abject poverty, unable to afford necessities and provide for her children. Her children were forced to become laborers and three of her five children were deprived of the opportunity to receive an education. One of her sons had to risk and lay down his life, because the only line of work that allowed him to adequately provide for his family required him to face those risks. Summaiyya feels claustrophobic in her current home, but all she can afford is a small house with her extended family. This two story home houses nine people and all rooms double as makeshift bedrooms. Having spent decades in refugee camps, she longs for a peaceful home. Her sons are of marriageable age, and it is customary for her to find them brides. Her financial circumstances, however, prevent her from fulfilling this duty as she is unable to afford a wedding and feed an additional member in the household. Nor does the house have room for more family members. Her inability to fulfill this duty weighs on her heavily. Summaiyya encounters a variety of complicated sources for her suffering. The most basic conditions of her life, however, were set by three large political forces: the Soviet invasion of
Afghanistan, the Taliban regime that followed and her refugee status in Pakistan. The tragic events that she faced - the bombing of her home, the shutting down of her school, a less than ideal marriage, estrangement from her family, loss of a child and a life of poverty and uncertainty - were all set in motion largely by these three events. She feels some of these tragedies more strongly than others and it makes sense that she is preoccupied with her current state and her financial circumstances because they would allow her to plan and work towards a more secure life for herself and her children. INQUILAAB/WAR The Persian, Pashto and Urdu word for revolution is inquilab. This is also what the
Soviet Union named its “communist revolution” in Afghanistan. Since the Soviet invasion in
1979, therefore, the word inquilab has taken on a number of meanings to Afghans. It was appropriated by the Russian invasion itself and most people I spoke to refer to the invasion as inquilab. But most significantly, none use it with a positive connotation. I heard stories of personal and generational trauma tied to the invasion. Second and third generation Afghan refugee children in Pakistan describe horror stories that had been passed down to them from parents and grandparents of family members and neighbors being beaten and tortured, kidnapped and murdered. Summaiyya’s home is replete with stories of inquilab.
Afghanistan was governed as a monarchy, leading to internal strife between monarchists, liberals and leftists in the early 1970s. A bloodless coup d’état by ostensibly liberal forces led to the end of the monarchy in 1973. Summaiyya was born around this time. By 1978, Afghanistan had plunged into civil war, starting with a violent coup by members of the Marxist People’s
Democratic Party of Afghanistan who declared the country a Communist republic. Party leader and Afghan President at the time, Nur Muhammad Taraki, called for a social, political, and economic revolution - an inquilab - in the country (Leake 244).
Summaiyya recalls being in school at the time Taraki rose to power. Her father worked in the capital, a few kilometers from their village. Inspired by changing policies in Kabul, he tried to sway village leadership to mandate girls’ education. Village leaders denied his requests, but during Taraki’s era, Summaiyya witnessed her peers being forced to attend school against their own and their families’ wishes. Poorly enacted reforms such as this abrupt enforcement did not sit well with most people, stirring resentment towards Taraki and his party, and by extension towards the growing Soviet influence among rural populations and religious leaders (Leake 244).
In less than two years, the state nearly collapsed and the Soviet Union invaded
Afghanistan in 1979, occupying the country for the next ten years (Barfield 171). As religious sentiments against the Soviet Union flared, so did Soviet aggression. Through the Marxist
People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan and the Soviet Union’s appropriation of the word inquilab, the word took on a negative connotation to the average Afghan. At first I was puzzled by Summaiyya’s use of the word inquilab because she used it to describe only atrocities. I asked her whether it meant different things in Urdu and Pashto. She quickly clarified “inquilab means azadi. Freedom”.
“Who was fighting for freedom then?” I asked.
“When ordinary Afghan people rose up against the Russians they (the foreigners) called them the mujahideen. The mujahideen would attack passing Russian vehicles. When the Soviets fought they called themselves ghazi3, and when they died they were martyrs. Still innocent people were dying the most.”
“So Afghan people were being killed in the middle of this war between the Russian and the mujahideen? Then who were the inquilabis? The Russians or the mujahideen?” I asked again.
“They (the Soviets) were wrong in calling themselves inquilabis. They were forcing people to convert out of their faith.”
“So when they said freedom it was freedom from faith?” I probed further.
“Yes, yes. They would dig mass graves and bury people alive. When they would kill people, people would chant the takbir, and the Russians would bury them alive. They asked if they were their friends or enemies and if they said they were the enemies of Communism they
3 Warrior in Pashto. buried them alive. Once the Russians demanded seventy Afghan pilots to bomb their own country, but they refused and the Russians buried them alive while they chanted the takbir. One of them was my cousin. Afghans have suffered a lot of cruelty at the hands of the inquilabis.”
“When the Russians talked about the inquilab, did they claim to also revolutionize the lives of women?” I inquired.
“They claimed to, but they were only cruel to the people of my country.”
“What did they claim they would do for women?”
“They said they would liberate the people, but were only cruel to them. The Russians were very cruel. They would perform operations on people’s private homes. They would misbehave with women, kill their animals. The Afghans do not tolerate such treatment of their women so they would fight against the Russians. The people rose up in protest. They felt humiliated. ”
The mujahideen, according to my conversation with Summaiyya, were only reacting to the cruelty of the inquilabis. The United States was wary of this and shortly after the Soviet invasion, predicted that local political and social resistance to the Communist regime would arise. The CIA published a report aptly noting, “Communist revolutionaries have tried to overturn tradition rather than adapt to it, to eliminate local autonomy, to destroy the elite class by confiscating its land, and to undermine the authority of the Muslim religious establishment”
(Leake 249). The expansion of Soviet control towards South Asia still worried the United States, so they aided the so-called mujahideen - Pakistani-trained jihadists - against the Soviets. During that decade of war, a million Afghans lost their lives and millions of refugees fled to Pakistan
(Barfield 171, Dorronso 316). “In Daud Khan’s era no one knew who the mujahideen were. When the inquilab started, the mujahideen came. It was after Taraki took over that we saw them. Taraki was a
Communist. The Russians wanted to convert people outside Islam. But people didn’t want to convert and they resisted,” Summaiyya told me.
The inquilab ended as the Soviet Union lost its hold of Afghanistan to the mujahideen, however, it had long standing consequences for ordinary Afghans like Summaiyya.
The collapse of the Soviet Union and the dissolution of the Afghan Socialism in 1992 resulted in the factions of mujahideen - now backed by a multitude of global and regional players - to compete for power. Many of these factions were separated by a porous border with Pakistan where many Afghans had taken refuge. In Pakistan, they were united with politicized Afghans who operated from Peshawar in exile. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar of the Hezb-i-Islami was one of the politicized refugees in Pakistan and, as previously mentioned, he operated the Shamshatoo refugee camp in Peshawar. Summaiyya resided in this camp for a few years in the early 2000s.
She knew little about Hekmatyar, but was familiar with his name. When I asked her about her time in Shamshatoo, she only had good things to say. “It was run by Hekmatyar - the mujahideen leader. There were a lot of facilities there. Separate schools for girls and boys. When separate schools were not available, boys would go to school during the day, and the girls would go to school in the nighttime. We would regularly get food rations. Life was good there.” Two of her children were educated in Shamshatoo.
Hekmatyar was a deeply influential man and had direct control over Shamshatoo where he provided inhabitants with access to “schools, medical facilities, mosques, madrassas and a crime free security”. He recruited foot soldiers to fight for the Hezb from this camp. Within the camp, he circulated extensive propaganda of political, social, religious and cultural nature in print (Johnson 195-209). Summaiyya consumed much of this propaganda as most of the books she read, described in detail in an earlier chapter, were given to the family in Shamshatoo. Her everyday decisions, her worldview and her ideals are deeply impacted by these texts.
The inquilab had a continued impact on Summaiyya’s life in both direct and indirect ways even after she had left the country in which it was taking place. When she described the
Soviet atrocities during the inquilab with a strong distaste and expressed a sense of injustice, I was prompted to ask, “Then what is inquilab really? What does it mean for you?”
“To me inquilab means honesty, justice, equality and ease for all. If you do well for someone and think good of them. It is in making life easier for those around us and providing comfort to people and allowing for freedom is inquilab. What more is there to it? They kill innocent people in Afghanistan. Young people die there, old people die. They bomb people. That is not inquilab. That is not freedom. Innocent people going about their everyday lives are killed.”
Despite this understanding of the word inquilab, Summaiyya continues to refer to the
Soviet invasion with the same word. The word itself has been appropriated by the Soviet
Invasion and has since been incorporated into the way history is written and retold. This was reflected in my conversations with some other people too. In a different conversation, when I asked some younger people what inquilab meant, they confidently and nonchalantly replied that it meant “war”. They had only heard the word inquilab being used in the context of the atrocities that the Soviet invaders had committed against their people, which resulted in them seeking refuge in Pakistan. To these young people, inquilab was the war waged against their ancestors.
The word had taken on a new meaning. CONCLUSION
By sharing Summaiyya’s life, her experiences, desires, disappointments, hopes and dreams, I had hoped to challenge the stereotypical representations of Muslim and Afghan women. Steve McCurry’s portrait of Sharbat Gula depicts Afghan women as tormented and docile. Time Magazine in August 2010 published a similar cover with a more overt agenda - an image of Aisha Bibi, an Afghan woman with her nose cut off. This moving and gory image was captioned with the words, “What Happens if we Leave Afghanistan”. In this image, like that of
Sharbat Gula, the message that the US-led coalition since occupying Afghan is there to promote
Afghan women’s rights through the “War on Terror” (Do Muslim Women Need Saving 29).
Images of Afghan women needing to be saved from vile Afghan men continue to be plastered in popular media. I had intended to test these assumptions through documenting and narrating my conversations with Summaiyya. However, she pushed me to test the very premise of my study and in doing so, she confirmed some of these stereotypes, debunked others and taught me that the experiences of an entire nation’s women could not be reduced to politically motivated magazine covers.
Summaiyya, like many of her peers, was unable to complete her education and was forced to marry young. She regretted that she had not been able to attend school and had to marry as a teenager. However, it was not a patriarch that hindered her path - her family had supported and encouraged her. Nonetheless, she had no choice in the matter. It was her state and her circumstances that stood in her way. She does not see the state as a compilation of nefarious and bigoted men, but rather aggrieved and humiliated men trying to regain control. Furthermore, she does not see her religion as a problem. Her faith in God and her identity as a Muslim are deeply meaningful to her. This influences her choices and decisions. She chooses to spend her free time dedicating herself to her prayers and religious duties. She prefers to read texts of a religious nature and ponders over them. She uses the advice she received from these texts to guide how she raises her children, how she approaches her relationship with her husband, how she dresses and the ways in which she occupies space and navigates the world.
Her faith brings her a sense of identity and community, but also causes her tremendous difficulty and heartache. She finds solace in prayer and comfort in fulfilling her religious obligations toward the people in her life. She takes pride in the fact that she has taught her children to do the same and that she had raised them to be compassionate and devout. She also inculcated a love for learning in her children and it is evident in that two of them, despite all odds, financial difficulties and minimal guidance, are the first in their family to attend university.
She is proud that they have both secured scholarships and excel in what they do, and that she has been able to support their journey. She attributes this to God and to the value of education that her faith has inculcated in her.
She dresses the way her faith dictates and moves through the world in the way she deems appropriate for Muslim women. Her belief in purdah and understanding of modesty in many ways limits her. There are limitations on her attire, her physical space and consequently her choice of profession. She wears a chador and covers her face in public. She does not reveal her face around men and chooses an occupation that allows her to work from home and engage only with women. However, she does not feel limited by these restrictions and holds onto her faith fiercely. While these limitations might not be desirable to all, and certainly not suit the palate of the average consumer of popular magazines in the West, they are a result of Summaiyya’s free choice. This is an assertion of her agency. As Saba Mahmood argues, “the meaning and sense of agency cannot be fixed in advance, but must emerge through an analysis of the particular concepts that enable specific modes of being, responsibility, and effectivity. Viewed in this way, what may appear to be a case of deplorable passivity and docility from a progressivist point of view, may actually be a form of agency—but one that can be understood only from within the discourses and structures of subordination that create the conditions of its enactment” (Mahmood
14-15). Purdah in particular is used to portray Muslim women as unable to speak for themselves and lacking agency. The covering of one’s face, however, does not mean that one is oppressed and in need of saving. As Abu-Lughoud further notes, instead of partaking is such labeling of
Muslim women and silencing the subaltern, so to speak, “we ought to talk to them to find out what problems they face rather than treating them as mute garbage bags” (Do Muslim Women
Need Saving 9). Summaiyya’s oral history suggests that oral histories are more generally one way in which this can be achieved.
Summaiyya also endures tremendous suffering at the hands of her husband. He tormented her, married their daughter off without consulting with her, treated their children poorly, abandoned her and exploits the family’s financial resources. Still, Summaiyya stays with him and continues to fulfill her responsibilities toward him. She provides two reasons for this decision: firstly, that they are religious duties toward him that she is obligated to perform regardless of his behavior, and secondly, her circumstances prohibit her from considering the possibility of leaving him. Saba Mahmood’s argument is again insightful when considering
Summaiyya’s first reason. Summaiyya’s assertion of agency was in remaining with her husband, because she made the decision to do so. Mahmood insists that agency must be separated from
“the goals of progressive politics” (14). The goals of progressive politics are evident in both portraits, the forced headshot of Sharbat Gula in National Geographic and the carefully crafted narrative in the Time Magazine cover featuring Aisha Bibi. For this reason, this thesis is committed to taking seriously and bringing to light the lived experiences of an ordinary Afghan woman. Mahmood insists that in order to do so, we must shed such a lens of progressive politics and see agency as being detached from freedom. Agency, she contends, is the ability to have desires and pursue them. Independent from agency, she argues that freedom is the “capacity for self-mastery and self-government”, and “the absence of restraints of various kinds on one’s ability to act as one wants” (11). It is, therefore, in the sense that Summaiyya desired to stay with her husband was able to pursue that desire, that she had agency.
Freedom, on the other hand, is an extraordinarily rare condition because very few people have the absolute ability to do as they please without limitations or restraint. When Summaiyya’s second reason is considered, therefore, it becomes clear that while she has the agency to pursue her desire to stay with her husband, which she deems her religious and cultural obligation, she does not have the freedom to consider leaving him. Discussed in the chapter Sabr/Endurance, she expressed that being a refugee in a country where she does not have family or friends nor the resources or support to be able to consider an alternative limits her options. Mahmood’s distinction between freedom and agency, therefore, also addresses Rosalind Gill’s concerns around agency being a Neo-Liberal ploy as she points out the reasons why freedom is rarely an acquirable position. People can be free agents even if they make decisions that might not be desirable to other people. In fact, it is an assertion of their agency to be able to make these decisions for themselves, even if people like Summaiyya do not fully control what happens to them.
The question of freedom brings me to the circumstances that limited Summaiyya. As described earlier in the discussion on the disruption of her education and repeatedly in the chapter titled Inquilab/War, Summaiyya felt deeply restricted by the political climate in her country. She was close with her family and so is unhappy that she had been stripped away from them because of politics. It has restricted her from considering the option of leaving her husband, as described above, but it had also created other obstacles for her. She has been unable to complete her education despite her and her family’s wishes. She had been married young, and to a less than desirable match. She had been deprived of a home when her house was bombed by a drone from a country that she did not know. Her refugee status was another thing she did not have control over. It also resulted in her poverty. Worries about money have kept her preoccupied because her family, for most of their time in Pakistan, were unable to secure a steady income. Moving between refugee camps and cities and working odd jobs, her family had struggled to make ends meet in their three decades as refugees in Pakistan and they continue to face this struggle for the foreseeable future. She finds it bizarre that her faith, her chador and her relationship with her husband could cause more concern to some than her ongoing struggle to put food on the table.
Texts like the one from Laura Bush emphasize the former over the latter. Lila Abu-
Lughoud notes that in her radio address on November 17th, 2001, Bush “blurred the very separate causes of Afghan women’s suffering: malnutrition, poverty, class politics, and ill health, and the more recent exclusion under the Taliban from employment, schooling, and the joys of wearing nail polish. On the other hand, her speech reinforced chasmic divides, principally between the ‘civilized people throughout the world’ whose hearts break for the women and children of Afghanistan and the Taliban-and-the-terrorists, the cultural monsters who want to, as she put it, ‘impose their world on the rest of us’.” (Do Muslim Women Need Saving 32).
Summaiyya found such assumptions and representations deplorable and deceptive. By sharing
Summaiyya’s life, her experiences, desires, disappointments, hopes and dreams, therefore, this thesis challenges stereotypical representations of Muslim and Afghan women with the realization that Afghan refugee women’s lives are complex, remarkable and cannot be reduced to caricatures of damsels in distress. They face difficult circumstances and are often limited by them, but they still have desires that they chase. Claims of activity or passivity, resistance or subservience, and agency or lack thereof, are reductive at best as these women negotiate and navigate their circumstances with a keen sense of their own best-interests. BIBLIOGRAPHY
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