INTRODUCTION

In his ‘Rethinking Pakistan's Political Economy’, S. Akbar Zaidi (2014:50) argues that ‘“class” has become a category that has lost relevance for the social sciences’ in Pakistan and that ‘the country has been forced into an analytical Islamic framework as if no other sense of existence or identity existed’. This chapter confirms Zaidi's observation by referencing it against Alavi's (1988) thesis on women, class and Islam. The comparison reveals how Alavi's earlier class analysis has since been replaced by the privileging of Islam as a category of analysis in a body of post 9/11 scholarship. It also demonstrates how defensive apologia, offered by those who claim a left identity, has prevented the emergence of a new and gendered reading of Pakistan's political economy, since it has been busy saving Islam and the Muslim man from feminist critique and global imperialism.

The first three decades of the newly independent state of Pakistan were marked by successful pressure from women's groups and activists for the feminisation of its policies and institutions. The 1977 military coup by General Zia ul Haq was followed by a regime under which the earlier ambitious modernisation period was replaced by an aggressive conservatism enforced by a social and legal Islamisation campaign. This was met with resistance from a small but vocal Pakistani women's movement during the 1980s. According to Hamza Alavi,

This acknowledgement of the agency of women's resistance to a masculinist state and of the importance of their contributions towards Pakistan's democratisation is a departure from Alavi's (1972) original un-gendered thesis of the overdeveloped Pakistani state in which women are an invisible category. But the criticism regarding Alavi's gender blindness warrants deeper investigation. Women's rights movements in Pakistan have held contradictory relations with military regimes. These relations have been hostile and confrontational at times and at others, yielded advantageous or beneficial policies for women.