The Taliban's ladies auxiliary
A revival of conservative Islam among educated Pakistani women has many doing whatever they can to support the war against America.
By Asra Q. Nomani
Oct. 25, 2001 | ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- Thabasum Mufti sits in her tidy sitting room in a middle-class neighborhood and pulls out a neatly folded jersey velvet fabric in rich red and black colors from a black leather suitcase labeled "Carlton International." A tag is stuck into the green velvet fabric with a straight pin: "1,000 rupees" ($15.87).
With her collection of fancy fabrics for sale, Mufti is a sitting-room soldier in the cause to raise rupees for the mujahedin fighting in Afghanistan. Beside her is another suitcase filled with fabric, donated by a friend from her "jahaze," a trousseau of sorts meant to keep a new bride in high fashion for many days.
It's a picture-perfect middle-class home. On a sofa nearby, one of her two children, Anum, has left behind a copy of the children's book series "Goosebumps." Visiting women feel the cotton of a black fabric with big white polka dots ("2 single bed sheets, 200 rupees"), a shocking pink fabric with little flowers ("suit piece, 200 rupees"), a green fabric with shocking pink flowers ("suit piece, 200 rupees") and a fuchsia fabric ("suit piece, 200 rupees"). Mufti's young son, Mustafa, pulls out a CD from his collection to sell for the mujahid cause.
Housewives and grandmothers as well as doctors and women of the educated urban elite are becoming soldiers of the jihad from their sitting rooms, as living rooms are called here, using prayer and tag sales in their artillery of weapons. They consider themselves each a mujahida, the female version of a mujahid, a freedom fighter, part of an Islamic revival over the last 15 years that has even converted thoroughly modern women -- women who used to flash bright shades of Revlon lipstick, their slick, highlighted hair flowing over their shoulders, chic hand-embroidered shalwar kameez suits with sleeveless kurtas (risqui in Islam, which requires women to cover their arms down to their wrists with long sleeves)To be modern was to be called "Mod Squad."
To fight in a jihad, these women believe, doesn't mean simply running to the front lines with submachine guns and anti-artillery weapons. That's a specific type of jihad, jihad bil qital, fighting with actual combat. Strictly speaking, jihad means "a struggle for Islam" and can be waged on many fronts. The mujahida here is part of a battalion of women quietly maneuvering around town in shapeless navy gowns, headscarves tightly pinned at their chins and, often, partial veils (niqab) drawn up over the bridge of their nose as their battle armor. They wield Nokia mobile handsets while driving mostly shiny white Honda Preludes through the quiet streets of Islamabad's F and G sectors, the middle-class through upper-class neighborhoods where they live with servants, microwaves and Paknet Internet connections. And in their own way, they definitely feel they are waging their own unique jihad.
Some take the gold bangles off their arms to donate to the cause, a jihad bil mal, with money, using wealth to fund the fight, they believe, for the cause of Islam. And, like the American women who rallied behind the soldiers during World War II, donating their silk stockings to the armed forces to make parachutes, these women see their activities as simply the ordinary, obvious way to support the war effort.
To them, the U.S.-led coalition attacks on Afghanistan is truly an attack on Islam, and these fundamentalist Pakistani cricket moms' sympathies lie mostly with the Taliban and even Osama bin Laden.
These mujahida come from the generations of women from their 20s through their 60s who have rediscovered Islam. In "Clash of Civilizations," a much quoted book here in these times, author Samuel Huntington chronicles the "Islamic Resurgence" in countries from Algeria to Afghanistan over the last three decades. Students and intellectuals made up the militant "shock troops," he says, but urban middle class people composed the bulk of the movement. Here in Pakistan, that includes the housewife mujahida.
From her sitting room in a cozy Islamabad neighborhood, with wide gates that swing open into driveways, Amira Ahsaan, a veteran political leader, has a special vantage point from which to observe this activity. A mother of four children, she chose not to work after earning her master's degree in biology from Qaid-e-azam University, studied Western society during several years living in New York and now spearheads education about Islam among women. She watches the jihad work now being done by housewives and women professionals and says it's modeled after the historical story of Hazrat Khansa, a mother and poet at the time of the Prophet Mohammed, who urged her four boys to fight for Islam in jihad. She extolled them: "Go into the midst of the thickest of the battle, encounter the boldest enemy and if necessary embrace martyrdom." They died "shaheeds," martyrs.
"Our maternal expression is for Islam. It's not just for men. This is our special role in jihad," she says. "In Islam, women are not prophets. They are the mothers of prophets. This is the role of women. She prepares men for jihad. She is not Jesus. She is Mary." The hadiths, the sayings of the Prophet Mohammed and a guide for Muslims, she says, assigns the reward of jihad to a mother from conception to weaning. She is considered a ribat, one who guards the frontier of Islam. A woman who dies in childbirth gets the reward of a shaheed, a martyr.