Political Islam And Gender Politics

This feisty book as echoed in the title, We Are All Revolutionaries Here, is a fascinating mapping by a Pakistani woman of the journey that a generation of ‘born again’ Pakistanis have taken towards the re-constitution of a Pakistani Islamic identity that rejects the hotchpotch of western culture and Pakistan’s plural ethnic cultures to embrace a version of militant Islam that erases all other versions and problematically condones ‘fringe’ vigilante groups using violence in the name of faith. Babar unpacks the contestations in Pakistan’s socio-cultural dynamics which have been framed in a context produced by the nexus of political Islam and militarism. She tracks this journey through the political trajectories of Pakistani women over these decades. Two images prop up the book ends of this journey. 1947: khaki clad bareheaded women, members of Pakistan’s National Volunteers guards, assertively posing amidst drills, claiming space to shape the destiny of the new state (amidst the audible displeasure of the mullahs).

2007: burqua clad baton wielding women laying siege to the children’s library and policing video and massage parlours and ideationally inculcating ‘Impose Shariah or Martyrdom’. They stride on the public stage as the physical harbingers of a ‘radical’ social revolution and then disappear. As Babar wryly observes, for a gender pushed to the margins, it is ironic that a woman, ‘Our Lady of the Lal Masjid’ becomes the narrator for the social and political climate of a decade.