Pakistani Women Are Not All Right

When I was ten years old, a man undid his pants in front of me and began masturbating, in a busy alley in Lahore’s Main Market. I was sitting in the back of my aunt’s open-cabin van. What amazes me is that he did this in one of the most crowded places in the city. As he crept close to me, penis in fist, I scrambled off the van and sprinted into my aunt’s furniture store in Raja Center. Days later, I confided in my grandmother. She pursed her lips and told me not to speak of the incident to anyone.

When I was fourteen, a man groped me between the legs at a Stereo Nation concert in Lahore. We were in a throng; there were hundreds of us. Most of my friends were groped that night. The collective horror of it—almost everyone in our group of eight assaulted—is something we talk about to this day. At twenty-five, again in Lahore, in Liberty Market, I was groped by a man—he grabbed my left breast—as he handed out flyers for fried chicken. As I twisted my body away from him, he melted into the crowd.

Are you tempted to ask what I was wearing each time I was harassed? To be a woman in Pakistan is to encounter this question and its subtext everywhere we go. It is to encounter the cultural assumption that sexual assault can be prevented by dressing and behaving “modestly,” no matter that CCTV footage of busy streets in Pakistani cities routinely shows women in burqas being harassed. Seven-year-old Zainab Ansari—victim of one of the most henious cases of rape and murder in Pakistan—was fully clothed as she was led away by her rapist. But to be a woman in Pakistan is to have a slew of alternative facts thrown one’s way, all day, every day—on TV, in sermons, at banks, on the road, in the privacy of one’s bedroom.

Take the example of Imran Khan, who, when asked by Jonathan Swan, in 2021, about the epidemic of rape and sexual violence in Pakistan, responded, “If you raise temptation in the society . . . it has consequences in the society.” Swan asked whether he believed that what women wear is part of the “temptation,” and the then Prime Minister replied, “If a woman is wearing very few clothes, it will have an impact on the man unless they are robots. I mean, it’s common sense.” The statement was widely criticized, and Khan made several attempts, including in this magazine, to establish that his words had been taken out of context. But his statement had achieved its desired result: it hinted to his legions of supporters that the onus is on women to prevent sexual harassment.

In 2018, Aurat March, a local version of the Women’s March, attempted to expand the contours of the discourse on women’s freedoms—social, economic, political. Every year since then, major Pakistani cities hold Aurat March in the face of much criticism. In fact, the march has become so controversial that merely participating in it casts one as provocative.

Aurat March stirs moral panic in Pakistan, “an overriding and pervasive fear that the very fabric of society is being destroyed by the spread of some perceived immorality,” Arsalan Khan, an assistant professor of anthropology at Union College, New York, told me. “Women’s self-assertion is framed in the idiom of sexual immodesty and thus a threat to family and society.”

In Karachi, where I marched this year, I spoke with a twenty-two-year-old Hindu girl who was marching against forced conversion to Islam; with a fifty-year-old communist activist whose cause was economic equality; with an eighteen-year-old trans girl who was marching against her violent, alcoholic father; with two medical students in their early twenties who were sick of sharing their live Uber locations with their parents; with a twenty-seven-year-old manager of a textile firm who was protesting the sexual harassment faced by his female colleagues; with a forty-year-old instructor who gives free martial-arts lessons to women; with a nineteen-year-old queer girl who wanted to remain anonymous and had lied to her parents in order to attend the march.

Just a few days before the Karachi march, police had attacked Aurat March protesters in Islamabad with batons. A photo of the activist Farzana Bari removing barbed wire with her bare hands went viral. In Lahore, the caretaker government had agreed to provide security to the marchers but refused to provide a no-objection certificate—official permission to hold a rally—for fear of clashes with a religious party’s rival “Modesty March.” A woman petitioned the provincial High Court to ban Aurat March on account of, she argued, its deviance from societal values. The court rejected the petition.

In order to accommodate working women, the Karachi Aurat March was held on a Sunday. I returned from the march late at night, exhausted but wired, my phone brimming with audio notes from the people I’d spoken to. The difference between the more celebratory Karachi march, in Sindh, and the more combative Lahore and Islamabad marches, in Punjab, was immediately apparent. Punjab is overpopulated and violently divided, whereas Sindh, also overpopulated but more in step with its Sufi antecedents, has tried to accommodate the marginal and the vernacular. (The majority of Pakistani Hindus, for example, live in Sindh.) In Punjab’s angry and crowded urban culture, the old syncretism is lost in the cacophony of a revived illusion of patriarchy under threat. In a time of double-digit inflation, more and more women have to migrate to urban ghettos in search of work. More and more lower-middle-class and middle-class women face sexual molestation in public transport every day in Lahore and Punjab’s other overcrowded urban centers.

The difference in tenor between Aurat March and the protests of Pakistan’s feminists in the nineteen-eighties is striking. The marches of the eighties were centered on the repeal of anti-women’s-rights legislation; they were part of a wider campaign against General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, the country’s dictator at the time. Women were struck with batons, tear-gassed, arrested, and imprisoned even then, but the antipathy from men wasn’t so charged. My mother, a journalist who participated in several marches in the eighties, told me, “I remember the support of ordinary men on the street. They would march silently in solidarity behind the police trucks that were taking us to prison.”

The marchers of the eighties didn’t elicit the kind of visceral reaction that we do today because they weren’t cutting so close to the bone: they weren’t challenging men’s deepest identities and appearing to “emasculate” them. Today’s societal pressures have been made worse by the immediacy of social media, which elicits out-of-proportion responses.

As I caught up with the reaction to the marches across Pakistan, I noticed a video, which has since gone viral. It showed twenty-year-old Syed Muhammad Ali, a student of computer science, in his home town of Lahore, holding a placard in Urdu that said “When Are We Going to See a Vaccine for Patriarchy?” The reporter interviewing him appeared to be in an aggressive mood. “This is an Islamic country,” the reporter said. “Do you think these marching women should be dressed this way, and should be sloganeering this way?”

“What’s wrong with their sloganeering?” Muhammad Ali asked.

“Mera jism, meri marzi,” the reporter responded, referring to a controversial slogan “My body, my choice,” from 2018, which the Pakistani right said spreads fahaashi (obscenity) and which the Pakistani left said was a self-evident truth.

“So whose choice is it going to be? The maulvis’ choice?” Muhammad Ali asked, referring to Islamic clerics.

For the next five minutes, the young man and reporter argued passionately about the nature of the march. The reporter claimed that female protesters dressed scantily, and referred to them as “keeray,” meaning worms. Muhammad Ali stubbornly defended the women and their right to march.

“First of all, you can’t call women worms. Stop objectifying women. You just called them worms,” Muhammad Ali said.

“O.K.,” the reporter said. “Just answer one question.”

Muhammad Ali cut him off. “This is the problem with Pakistani men—they objectify women. Sometimes a worm, sometimes some other thing.”

“O.K., I’m going to call myself a worm,” the reporter said. “I’m going to call myself a worm. Here, I have called myself a worm. I have asked you one question: Should they dress like this?”

“Yes, absolutely,” Muhammad Ali said. “Who has taken their clothes off?” he asked the reporter. “Show me. Show me. No one.”

“Some of them are here half-clothed. I have a clip,” the reporter responded.

“Today is Women’s Day,” Muhammad Ali retorted. “Let them have their day.”

“I respect women from my heart,” the reporter insisted. “I have a sister and a mother.”

“Right. That’s why you called them worms.”

And it went on until Muhammad Ali insisted that he hadn’t seen any women immodestly dressed, that today was Women’s Day, and no man can ruin Women’s Day. I was so struck by Muhammad Ali’s equanimity, the way in which he stood his ground in the face of the reporter’s aggression, that a few days later, when I was in Lahore, I looked him up on Twitter—where he goes by the more enigmatic Syed Aly—and asked whether I could see him.

Muhammad’s Ali’s progressive thoughts are at odds with those of many in his demographic—the urban, middle-class youth in Pakistan is, by and large, right of center on social issues. But Muhammad Ali’s allyship made sense as soon as I walked through the door and met his mother, in their home in Rehmanpura Colony, a middle-class neighborhood.

“I used to share everything with my children,” Amna told me, as a desi mother might well do. “The emotional troubles I was going through. I’m not a quiet woman. I’m an Aries, so I’m quite irrepressible. A fighter, basically.” Her ex-husband, she told me, wanted her to wear a burqa. She refused, but compromised that she would wear it only during the walk from her house to her in-laws’. They lived on the next street.

“While my mother was going to the court to try to get a divorce from my father—my ex-father—she was also doing a job,” Muhammad Ali said. “So I saw her struggling. All the time. She’d called her mother and said, ‘I want to leave my husband.’ My grandmother said, ‘It’s because your firstborn is a girl. When you have a boy, everything will sort itself out.’ ”