feminism essay in urdu

Today's Paper | April 13, 2024

Non-fiction: translating 'feminism' in urdu.

I was extremely excited when I heard that a book on feminism and feminist studies has finally been published in Urdu. Since the last five years, the word ‘feminism’ has very much become part of the everyday conversation and dialogue in Pakistan. This is basically because of the much-discussed, much-talked-about and much-criticised event known as ‘Aurat March’, which was initiated by a group of feminists in Karachi in 2018.

However, when I held the book in my hands and read the title — Aurat, Justujoo Aur Nisai Andaaz-i-Fikr [Woman, Struggle and the Female Style of Thinking] — I was, to be honest, taken aback. Was the book going to be about feminism, or about femininity? How does the word ‘feminism’ translate into the Urdu language? Will the book be able to explain feminist ideology to the reader and how the two concepts and ideas differ?

Even though many women — especially young women — are coming towards feminist ideas, not many are clear about what feminism actually stands for. There is much false propaganda against feminism and this is reinforced by fundamentalist groups and certain elements of the media that see women’s liberation and emancipation as a threat.

There is not enough awareness about feminism in Pakistan; the little that people do know about it is very biased and seen from the lens of a patriarchal society, therefore it is very essential and creditable that a book on feminism in Urdu is now available. This makes this book very welcome and one must congratulate the publishers, the printer and the editor. Readers owe a great debt to the book’s publishers — the Centre of Excellence for Women’s Studies (CEWS) at the University of Karachi (UoK) and the Anjuman Tarraqqee-i-Niswan — and Karachi Studies Society, which has served as consultant. It is wonderful that they have deemed it fit to publish a book in Urdu on feminism.

From the point of view of the contents, the book is interesting. Nasreen Aslam Shah, head of the department at CEWS, has compiled 10 papers written by herself, her faculty and her former students. There is much to inform readers about the history of the women’s movement in these essays.

A compilation of essays on feminism in Urdu is a welcome development, but could have been better thought through

There is no doubt that critical assumptions, historical circumstances and ideologies generally have been hostile towards women’s movements and there are not enough works to read about women’s contribution towards the development of societies. Shah’s book is an attempt to make available for Urdu-language readers a group of works that together bring various thoughts and approaches to feminist ideology and create a narrative on patriarchy and its contested margins.

The debates, on what constitutes ‘women’s work’ and what are women’s roles, have had to change over the years. As feminists, we do need to question words such as “izzat” [honour] and “zyadti” [excess] when it is used for the English word ‘rape’. Detailed feminist scholarship will offer new interpretations, new words, new vocabulary, new narratives, new norms and practices.

These are the kind of questions that must be raised in books on feminism. The women’s texts in this book document the many-faceted and often-challenged arguments within the women’s movement as crucial to an understanding of the feminist movement and the resistances it encounters and engenders.

In the preface, written by Shah, we are informed that, in 1989, Women’s Studies Centres were set up in five public universities of Pakistan, in the cities of Karachi, Lahore, Islamabad, Quetta and Peshawar. The library of the CEWS at the UoK holds many books on women’s studies, but since almost all of these are in English, it became imperative that a book on feminism in Urdu should be considered. Thus, the present volume emerged.

During the reading of the preface, the Urdu word “hawala” [reference] occurs repeatedly and I was dismayed to find that it has been used at least 15 times in the three-and-half pages of the preface. It is certainly not a word of literary value, and the constant repetition smacks of poor proofreading.

March 8 is the International Women’s Day and it gets mentioned as a rallying point for activities on women’s issues, but its significance, history or background is not explained. Since the book has been written keeping students and academic scholarship in mind, one feels more consideration should have been given to explaining how and why this particular day is celebrated around the world.

The first paper is by Dr Seema Manzoor, assistant professor at CEWS, UoK, and titled ‘Nisai Tehreek Ki Taareef-o-Adabi Tajziya’ [History of the Women’s Movement and Literary Analysis]. She chooses to begin with what I consider a cliché couplet by Allama Muhammad Iqbal:

“Vajood-i-zan se hai tasveer-i-kainaat main rang Issi ke saaz se hai zindagi ka soaz-i-daroon”

I would roughly translate this into English as: The image that this world presents derives its colours from woman/ She is the lyre that imparts pathos and warmth to the human heart.

One can question how appropriate this couplet is to begin a book on feminism. One would argue that the concept of woman as decorative goes against the very basis of feminism. Surely, the attributes of womanhood are more than softness, sweetness and love. However, Manzoor does give references and quotes from early feminists such as Mary Wollstonecraft as well as contemporary feminists such as Judith Evans. She argues that feminism helps women develop self-confidence, assert their independence and end discrimination. She concludes that, for women to become self-reliant and independent, it is essential that all subjects need to be rectified and gender and class discrimination must end; only then can an equal society be formed.

Dua Rehma, lecturer at CEWS, writes on the different phases of the women’s movement internationally and the ‘four waves’ of feminism. It is an informative essay and gives the reader data and names of international feminists who struggled as suffragettes for the vote, Black women who fought against slavery, the equal rights movements, Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan and Germaine Greer. There is also mention of the #MeToo movement.

Dr Shagufta Nasreen, assistant professor at CEWS, takes on a slightly more analytical approach as the title of her paper itself conveys — ‘Nisaiyat: Makaatib-i-Fikr’ [Feminism: Schools of Thought] — and describes the different approaches towards feminism as well as explaining the differing ideologies of liberal feminists, Marxist feminists and radical feminists.

An attempt to explain the difference between sex and gender and how to resolve this confusion is taken up in the essay by teaching associate Dr Shazia Sharafat. This is followed by assistant professor Dr Asma Manzoor’s paper on the history of the women’s movement in the Subcontinent. Other contributors include teaching associates Dr Shagufta Jahangir and Dr Rukhsana Siddiqui and assistant professor Dr Alia Ali. In the final essay, Shah concludes with the need and importance of feminism and for feminist research with a holistic approach.

A problematic aspect of the book is that it seems the papers have simply been compiled, rather than planned as a collection, and this leads to a lot of repetition of the same material or information, which is irksome.

I was also saddened to find that the Aurat March — a turning point and one of the most important landmarks for the women’s movement in Pakistan — is not mentioned in any of the papers, even though the book was published in May 2021, while the Aurat March began in Karachi in 2018. This event has shaken up the very structures of patriarchy in Pakistan and brought issues of the women’s movement into mainstream public debate, redefining sexual mores in a changing contemporary society.

In patriarchal ideology throughout the years, women have been depicted as stereotyped — they have not been accepted as researchers and it has mostly been men who have undertaken research studies. Male sexism has judged and decided women’s roles as researchers or writers. Therefore, a ‘feminist culture’ has not been allowed to develop. Tasks have to be assigned, themes located, areas of debate defined and feminist criticism and ideology has to be authoritatively established.

Once we have a better understanding of feminism, we can develop a theoretical and political critique of our patriarchal society, unpack the oppression of women and ensure their full citizenship in society.

Although there are far too many typing errors and proofreading faults running throughout the book — a sad situation, because one certainly expects a level of quality from a university publication — one hopes Aurat, Justujoo Aur Nisai Andaaz-i-Fikr will be the seed for further books on feminism in Urdu in the near future, so that feminist scholarship in Pakistan can develop further into an institution of humanistic discipline.

The reviewer is a performing artist and cultural activist. She tweets @tehrikeniswan

Aurat, Justujoo Aur Nisai Andaaz-i-Fikr Compiled and edited by Nasreen Aslam Shah Centre of Excellence for Women’s Studies, University of Karachi ISBN: 978-9699453113 252pp.

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, November 28th, 2021

FICTION: WOMEN ON THE VERGE

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اسرائیلی وزیراعظم غزہ میں ‘غلطی’ کا ارتکاب کررہے ہیں، امریکی صدر کا غیر متوقع بیان

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A New Year for Everyone

“With the advent of the new year / Old desires come back to life / The soul, worshipper of the Imagination, retires into solitude” —Omar Khayyam

Today, the afternoon—today, the afternoon of the first of January, I opened the door of my house and stepped outside, intending to go to the cemetery, when in front of me, amid the bellowing of the bells of St. Andrews, I saw a very well-dressed man. His face was an ocean of limitless waves—spontaneous joy and unfettered wishes for the New Year.

It was when I spotted the delicate violet flower placed in his buttonhole that I knew. This person had taken all of life’s despair and all the failures of the world and had bid farewell to them and to the stale, old year, and was now returning from the thundering bells.

I continued to stare wretchedly at his cheerful face—a long, cold breath reminded me, yes, this was the new year of one with no anxieties.

Shortly afterward, I found myself in front of the tall and terrifying black gate with which our temporary lives have an eternal bond and which a person who chooses to forget would not want to see on the first day of the new year.

The gate that holds within it my dear companion—ah, that same dearest one with whom speaking all so briefly was my raison d’être—today, completely lost to the eternal silence, weighed down by heavy stones, hapless he lies. The flood of memories of days gone by created a restlessness in me. Grief stole my sense of time, so I stayed awhile, having conversations with those who have been torn from me forever—but—

But today was not my lucky day. It seemed each and every one of them was rapt in an all-consuming raga. It seemed to me that this earth full of emotion that had hidden within it thousands of poets, world-renowned and courageous warriors, famous critics, selfless doctors, robbers and highwaymen, was softly singing a song woven of their benevolent and base deeds alike. The ears of my being were not, however, keen enough to ascertain the true meaning of the song.

Projections of memories played on my mind, showing the faces of those who had been present in my life many a day and night, whom Fate had decided that the dark curtain of Death be drawn over, obscured from vision forever.

Just once, I longed to lay eyes on them, just once—this longing has weakened my heart, beating itself toward stillness and yet in becoming silent, still beating too. My whole being was restless to hear their voices just once, and thus desirous my being was sulking like a child crying and crying like a child sulking.

The time came for my spirit’s exertions to cease. I heard not a voice, nor saw a face. I remained transfixed by the sight of the weighty gravestones defeated by the forceful hands of time.

Against the wide open blue of the sky, a kind of large, hot sun specific to the Eastern climes, the sun of Asia, was glittering fiercely. On the sorrowful old stones, the petals of a yellow rose were withering.

The words of Longfellow came to mind:

Life is real! Life is earnest! And the grave is not its goal; Dust thou art, to dust returnest, Was not spoken of the soul. (“A Psalm of Life,” 1839)

I walked off that part of the land, so triggering, and left the graveyard. Yes, this was the new year for the inhabitants of the world of Spirits.

At the Farber’s roundabout I could only see motorcars, trams, taxis, and vehicles of different widths and girths coming and going, making their journeys. They were like the fish in the oceans, restlessly seeking their food with each crashing wave.

In their cars people were going to the Farber’s horse tracks. They were getting in and getting out of the cars, pushing and shoving each other, seeing heaping golden piles of wealth dancing like sails in the wind. A lust for wealth creation—the ears of their souls familiar only with the clinking of coin.

Some of them were returning from Farber’s grounds. Others headed there. The fortunate ones kept their bags close—Fate had decided that their once-empty bags would be made heavy. But there were others who wept into their bags, which were initially weighty before Fate decided to lighten them.

I stood to one side, lost in a rapture of my own. Completely silent. Yes, I appeared completely mad observing this activity of the human race for a while. So this is what the new year of those who worship this life looks like!

I was able to extricate myself from the rushing waves of the ocean of people and arrive safely at Hashkal-O-Langton. There I was disturbed by the sounds of the military bugles both harmonious and depressing. A cavalcade of black horses pulled a black hearse carrying the body of a hopeful young soldier toward the cemetery. Mourners in funereal garb walked solemnly alongside the hearse, speaking of religious matters. It appeared they were all patiently trying to understand the ways of the Divine. Who is this object of such great jealousy, forced on the first new day of the new year to seek out a new world? I inquire of the vast skies: What soul would want such a thing?

Yes, this is what the new year of a brave warrior looks like.

Farther on, in a dark, tight passageway flanked by the street in front of the Harrison Hotel, I saw a fakir affected by leprosy, wrapped in dust and dirt. I observed how hundreds of cars, fine women and men, went by him. Not one person felt moved. Not one person thought to hold the hand of this wretched human.

Engrossed in the new delights of the first evening of a new year—was it not possible to pause for a few breaths and contemplate this human life rendered helpless, undeserving of such a fate—the moment they did give him was to nurse their own revulsion and express their scorn—this cursed world, treacherous world—what if it was me—what if I was to go to a friend in the same state as the fakir and my friend refused to hold my hand, moved away from me—

This, then, is the new year for a leper.

I walked on, finding again the ocean of people with its breaking waves near the Rapan Buildings—I saw young men and women on this evening of the new year, dressed in frocks and shawls, expensive coats, garish neckties, full of good cheer and worldly wishes. I questioned the Creator. Is this world of Adam and Eve really, truly brimming with delights and wonder? And if so, then what a grand thing this is.

I continued my observations. Some of their faces were radiant like the moon, blush and white like roses and sugar. But I could see their cores were hardened like the ground and blackened as the darkness of night. I sensed there was no compassion for their fellow humans in anyone’s heart. They sat in the grandest shops on the most expensive chairs with their friends—friends of great stature and untold wealth whose teacups and finest bottles of alcohol they were taking advantage of.

This, then, was their new year.

Thackeray came to mind:

“Such people do live and thrive in this world . . . those who are disloyal and treacherous and of whom you can have no expectation of goodness. . . . Come friend, let’s go on the offensive with all our strength, against these people.”

Evening had fallen and I returned to my house. In my library, on the table, an oil lamp was lit in a sky-blue magic lantern, flickering like the life of an ailing person. My emotions were unreliable and the events of the day had left me disturbed and restless.

This evening, Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale,” Milton’s Paradise Lost , and the philosophies of Aristotle alike filled me with ennui. Even the fine wine of Omar Khayyam was not compelling.

I moved away from the pile of books on the table. I felt repelled by these thick, fleshy stacks in which the waves of knowledge and application crashed—because there was nothing written in any of them that would teach humankind, hapless humankind, how to be compassionate. There were novels of romance and beauty, the latest innovations in the sciences, slender volumes of philosophy, all useless, meaningless—there was no prescription or way to make one person a true ally of another—

I dragged a chair over to the window and sat down. In the distance, behind the branches of the henna shrubs, the first sun of the new year was taking its last breath. I heard the spirit of Omar Khayyam speaking to me on the winds:

“The New Year brings memories of the past back to life and our spirit cannot help but fly toward those bygone days.”

This was my new year.

The translator acknowledges the vast contribution made to the Urdu language by the resource Rekhta. The manuscript Khalwat Ki Anjuman (The company of silence), one of the few copies available, is a rare text from 1936, digitized by Rekhta and published by Dar-al-Sha’at, Punjab, Lahore.

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HUM BHI DARIYA HAIN HUMEIN APNA HUNAR MAALUUM HAI

Five prominent feminist writers in urdu.

In the latter half of twentieth century, the world was hit by a Feminist storm; and rightly so. The female voices rose to break free of the four-walls behind which they had always remained unheard in a strongly patriarchal society. We mention here some names and their works that championed the cause of Feminism in Urdu literature.

FEHMIDA RIAZ (1946-2018)

The author and activist who wrote extensively and strongly over gender inequality, men and women struggling against the imposed morality of the bourgeois class and class conflict. She strongly believed in freedom of expression. Her works express female sentiments without any reluctance or discomfort. She had to face several social challenges for using erotica and sensuality in ‘Badan Dareeda’, a collection of her verse. Her magazine ‘Awaaz’ was banned for projecting a revolutionary vision which brought her an exile of seven years. Fahmida Riaz authored several books like Pathar ki Zaban, Godaavari, Khatt-e Marmuz, Khana e Aab O Gil, Dhoop, Badan Darida, Karachi, Adhoora Aadmi etc.

Ek zan-e-KHana-ba-dosh tum ne dekhi hai kabhi ek zan-e-khana-ba-dosh jis ke kheme se pare raat ki taareki mein gursana bhediye ghurrate hain duur se aati hai jab us ki lahu ki ḳhushbu sansanati hain darindon ki hansi aur danton men kasak hoti hai ki karen us ka badan sad-para apne ḳheme men simaT kar aurat raat aankhon mein bita deti hai kabhi karti hai alaao raushan bhediye duur bhagane ke liye kabhi karti hai khayal tez nukila jo auzar kahin mil jaae to bana le hathiyaar us ke kheme mein bhala kya hoga toote phoote hue bartan do-chaar dil ke bahlane ko shayad ye khayal aate hain us ko maaloom hai shayad na sahar ho paae sote bachchon pe jamae nazren kaan aahat pe dhare baithi hai haan dhyaan us ka jo bat jaae kabhi gungunati hai koi bisra giit kisi banjare ka

PARVEEN SHAKIR (1952-1994)

Starting at a very early age, Parveen Shakir managed to establish herself in Urdu literature like almost no other female ghazal poet. In her poetry, love and feminism are the most prominent amongst the various subjects she wrote on. Maintaining the classical fervor of Urdu Ghazal, she was the first poet who started using ‘feminine syntax’ in her poetry. Her free verses/nazms are very sharp in targeting at the ills of society and bold in thrashing the patriarchal structure. While the classicism in her ghazals is a luminous display of her excellent craftsmanship, the thunderous quietude in her nazms is the roar of her identity as a woman. Let’s hear:

Nick-name tum mujh ko gudiya kahte ho theek hi kahte ho! khelne vaale sab hathon ko main gudiya hi lagti huun jo pahna do mujh pe sajega mera koi rang nahin jis bachche ke haath thama do meri kisi se jang nahin sochti jagti aanhken meri jab chaahe binaai le lo kuuk bharo aur baaten sun lo ya meri goyaai le lo maang bharo sindoor lagao pyaar karo aankhon men basaao aur phir jab dil bhar jaae to dil se uthaa ke taaq pe rakh do tum mujh ko gudiya kahte ho theek hi kahte ho!

Poet and fiction writer, Azra Abbas is one of the most prominent women poets writing in Urdu. She was born in Karachi and obtained a master’s degree in Urdu from Karachi University itself. She wrote a long, feminist, stream-of-consciousness prose poem- ‘Neend ki Masaafaten’ which was published in 1981. She is one of the contemporary champions of the gender-inequality cause apparent in the five published volumes of her poetry and a memoir.

Hath khol diye jaen mere haath khol diye jaaen to main is duniya ki divaaron ko apne khwaabon ki lakiron se siyah kar duun aur qahr ki baarish barsaaun aur is duniya ko apni hatheli par rakh kar masal duun mera daaman Khwabon ke andhere men phailaa hua hai mere Khwab phaansi par chadhaa diye gae mera bachcha mere pet se chiin liya gaya mera ghar qahr-khanon ke astabal ke liye khol diya gaya mujhe be-zin ghode par andhere maidanon men utaar diya gaya hai meri zanjir ka sira kis ke paas hai? qayamat ke shor se pahle main apni dhajjiyon ko samet luun apne bachchon ko aakhiri baar ghiza faraham kar duun aur zahr ka piyala pi luun meri zanjir khol di jaae is ka sira kis ke haath men hai?

KISHWAR NAHEED

Kishwar Naheed is widely acclaimed for her fierce and uncompromising poetic expression against extremism, violence and atrocities faced by women in the male-dominated society. In her compositions, she celebrates the universal human struggle for equality, justice and freedom. She is also a proponent of peace and advocates global political order. Her voice has gained in gravity and determination over the period of time.

Hum gunah-gaar aurate.n hain ye ham gunahgar aurten hain jo ahl-e-jubba ki tamkanat se na raub khaen na jaan bechen na sar jhukaaen na haath joden ye ham gunahgar aurten hain ki jin ke jismon ki fasl bechen jo log vo sarfaraz thahren niyabat-e-imtiyaz thahren vo davar-e-ahl-e-saz thahren ye ham gunahgar aurten hain ki sach ka parcham utha ke niklen to jhuuT se shahrahen ati mile hain har ek dahliz pe sazaon ki dastanen rakhi mile hain jo bol sakti thiin vo zabanen kaTi mile hain ye ham gunahgar aurten hain ki ab taaqub men raat bhi aae to ye aankhen nahin bujhengi ki ab jo deewar gir chuki hai use uthane ki zid na karna! ye ham gunahgar aurten hain jo ahl-e-jubba ki tamkanat se na raub khaaen na jaan bechen na sar jhukaaen na haath joden!

ISMAT CHUGHTAI (1915-1991)

Famously known as the ‘Great Dame’ of Urdu literature, Ismat Chughtai was an Indian Urdu novelist, short story writer and filmmaker. She wrote extensively, exploring the themes of female sexuality and femininity, and became one of the grandest names in Urdu prose. Many of her works including Lihaaf were banned in South Asia due to resistance by conservatives. Here is an extract from her short story ‘Lihaaf’ depicting the life of ‘ Begum Jaan’, a neglected wife in ‘feudal Indian society’.

Tags: Ghazal , Poets , Urdu

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By Abbas Qamar

Essay on Women’s Rights in Urdu

Back to: Urdu Essays List 3

خواتین کے حقوق پر مضمون

اللہ تعالی نے ہمیں ایسے کامل اور اکمل دین سے نوازا ہے جس میں زندگی گزارنے کے ہر شعبہ سے متعلق پوری رہنمائی اور ہدایت موجود ہے۔اگر ہم اللہ تعالی کے بتائے ہوئے احکامات پر چلیں جس طرح اللہ اور اللہ کے رسولﷺ نے بتایا ہے تو انسان کی دنیا بھی اچھی رہے گی اور آخرت میں بھی اسے کسی طرح کی دشواری کا سامنا نہیں کرنا پڑے گا۔
سورہ نساء آیت نمبر 19 میں اللہ تعالی نے فرمایا ہے کہ اپنی بیویوں کے ساتھ اچھا سلوک کرو۔ آپ صلی اللہ علیہ وسلم فرماتے ہیں کہ تم میں سے بہترین انسان وہ ہے جو اپنے گھر والوں کے ساتھ حسن سلوک کرے اور میں بھی اپنے گھر والوں کے ساتھ بہترین سلوک کرنے والا ہوں۔
حضور صلی اللہ علیہ وسلم کے اس دنیا میں آنے سے پہلے عورتوں کے ساتھ بہت زیادہ ظلم ہوتا تھا۔ جب بیٹیاں پیدا ہوتی تھیں تو انہیں زندہ دفنا دینے کا رواج تھا۔ لیکن جب حضور اس دنیا میں تشریف لائے تو اس رواج کو ختم کردیا اور عورتوں کو اسلام میں اعلی درجہ دیا۔ اور لوگوں کو بھی ان کے حقوق کے بارے میں سمجھایا کہ بیٹی اللہ کی دی ہوئی وہ نعمت ہے جو اللہ اسی کے گھر میں دیتا ہے جس کا گھر اللہ کو پسند آتا ہے۔
حضور اکرم صلی اللہ علیہ وسلم فرماتے ہیں کہ جب اللہ کسی کے گھر میں بیٹے کو بھیجتا ہے تو اس بیٹے سے کہتا ہے کہ جاؤ اپنے ماں باپ کا سہارا بنو۔ لیکن اس کے برعکس جب اللہ ایک بیٹی کو بھیجتا ہے تو اس سے کہتا ہے کہ جاؤ تمہارے ماں باپ اور تمہارا سہارا میں خود بنوں گا۔ “سبحان اللہ” اگر اللہ خود کسی کا سہارا بن جائے اور اس کی ہر چیز اپنے ذمے لے لے تو پھر کس بات کی فکر ہے۔ یہ حقیقت ہے کہ بیٹی اپنے ساتھ اللہ کی رحمت لے کر آتی ہے اور بیٹیوں کی پرورش انسان کو جنت میں لے جائے گی۔
اللہ پاک نے بیٹیوں کو ایسا رتبہ اور ایسا مرتبہ دیا ہے کہ جو شخص اپنی بیٹی کی پرورش دل سے کرے گا اور اس کی شادی میں خرچ کرے گا تو اس کو اللہ تعالی ایک حج کا ثواب دے گا۔ ایک بیٹی کی شادی پر ایک حج کا ثواب اور اسی طرح دو بیٹیاں ہیں تو دو حج کا ثواب ملے گا۔ ماشاء اللہ۔
اللہ تبارک و تعالی نے عورتوں کا مقام اعلی درجہ پر رکھا ہے۔ لیکن آج کی اس دنیا میں انسان خواتین کو اہمیت نہیں دیتا اور ان کے حق کو ادا نہیں کرتا۔ پھر چاہے وہ ماں کا حق ہو٬ بیوی کا ہو یا پھر بہن کا ہو۔ انسان صرف اپنے فائدے کے بارے میں سوچ رہا ہے لیکن عورت کے حق کو مارنے والا آخرت میں اللہ تعالیٰ کو حساب دے گا۔
باپ کے دنیا سے رخصت ہوتے ہی اس کی ساری اولادوں میں سے جو بیٹے ہیں وہ پوری طرح سے جائیداد کے مالک بن جاتے ہیں اور عورت کو وراثت سے محروم رکھتے ہیں۔ جب کہ اللہ تبارک وتعالی سورہ نساء میں صاف صاف فرما رہا ہے کہ :”تمہاری اولادوں میں بیٹوں کا حصہ دو مردوں کے برابر ہے۔” اسی طرح اللہ نے بیٹیوں کا بھی حصہ مقرر کر دیا۔ بیٹے کا حق زیادہ اس لیے رکھا کیونکہ اسے حق محر کے ساتھ ساتھ اور بھی ذمہ داریاں پوری کرنی ہوتی ہیں۔
بخاری شریف میں آیا ہے کہ ایک شخص اپنی ماں کا فرمابردار اپنی کمزور ماں کو حج کروانے کے لیے یمن سے اپنے کندھے پر لے کر آیا اور اپنی ماں سے کہتا ہے کہ تجھے اس سے بہتر سواری نہیں مل سکتی تھی۔ یہ دیکھ کر حضرت عبداللہ بن عمر نے اس شخص کو بلایا اور پوچھا کہ تو یہ کیا کر رہا ہے؟ تو اس شخص نے کہا کہ میں اپنی بوڑھی ماں کو حج کرانے لایا ہوں۔ وہ اتنی کمزور ہے کہ کسی سواری پر نہیں بیٹھ سکتی۔ اس لیے میں اسے اپنے کندھے پر لے کر آیا ہوں۔ کیا میں نے اس کا حق ادا کر دیا؟ تو حضرت عبداللہ بن عمر رضی اللہ تعالیٰ عنہ نے فرمایا کہ جب تو پیدا ہوا اور تیری ماں کو جو اس وقت درد ہوا اس تکلیف کا تو نے ایک حصہ بھی نہیں ادا کیا۔
ماں کے کردار میں تو خدا نے عورت کا مقام اور بھی زیادہ اونچا رکھا کہ بیٹا اپنی پوری زندگی بھی اسکی خدمت میں لگا دے تو بھی ماں کا حق ادا نہیں کر سکتا۔
حضور صلی اللہ علیہ وسلم سے کسی شخص نے پوچھا کہ سب سے بہتر اخلاق کا حق دار سب سے پہلے کون ہے؟ حضور بولے تیری ماں۔ انہوں نے پوچھا کہ اس کے بعد؟ حضور نے کہا تیری ماں۔ اس نے تیسری بار پوچھا، اس کے بعدحضور نے پھر کہا تیری ماں ہے۔ اور اس کے بعد تیرا باپ ہے۔ گویا ماں کا درجہ اعلی مقام پر رکھا گیا ہے۔
خاوند اور بیوی کے برابر کے حقوق ہیں۔ صرف ایک حق ہے جو مرد کا ہے وہ ہے طلاق دینے کا۔ وہ اس لئے ہے کیونکہ مرد عورت کو حق مہر ادا کرتا ہے۔ اس لیے طلاق کا حق بھی مرد کو ہی دیا گیا۔ اگر عورت کو یہ حق دے دیا جاتا تو وہ حق مہر لینے کے بعد خاوند سے طلاق لے لیتی اور اسی کو اپنا پیشہ بنا لیتی۔
اسلام میں جو مرتبہ عورت کو دیا گیا ہے وہ شاید ہی کسی اور مذہب میں عورت کو دیا گیا ہو۔ اللہ نے عورت کو بہت ہی اونچا درجہ دیا ہے۔ اس لئے جو شخص اللہ سے محبت کرتا ہے وہ کبھی کسی عورت کو گری ہوئی نظروں سے نہیں دیکھے گا اور نہ ہی کسی بیٹی کو بوجھ سمجھے گا۔

Issue 10: Borders/Boundaries
Issue 9: Enduring Imperialisms
Issue 8: Language & Politics
Issue 7: Beyond Tremors & Terror
Issue 6: Mobs and Movements
Issue 5: Space
Issue 4: Onwards Pakistan
Issue 3: Solidarity Politics
Issue 2: After the Floods
Issue 1: Room for Debate
Conversation: Queerness & The Post-Colony
Conversation: Infrastructures & Politics
Conversation: Difference & the State
Invisible Cities
Feministaniat
Media Watch
Butcher’s Block

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Women in Urdu Literature

Issue 8 | شمارہ ۸

Summer Winds| Artist: Murad Khan Mumtaz

All of the stories that exist, in our knowledge, were written after the fall of the matriarchy. This is why tales found in the epic of Gilgamesh—or on scrolls of papyrus excavated in Egypt—are about men’s power, their sovereignty and the accomplishments of great princes. Meanwhile, women appear weak and submissive, unable to make decisions.

In these stories, while men are busy holding off enemies on the battle field, women stand by awaiting the outcome, perhaps in prison, or bickering with one another in the market. If it’s a love story, we can expect the man to be loyal while the woman is unfaithful.

Take, for instance, the first chapter of the Old Testament, “Creation,” in which we learn the story of Adam and Eve. In it, Eve is inferior to Adam, from the moment she is born from his rib. Adam’s complaint to God is the justification for Eve’s birth—he was unhappy in the solitude of Eden. In other words, Eve was made as an appendage to Adam.

Adam remained resilient against Satan’s temptation, whereas Eve not only fell but got Adam banished from heaven as well.

A cursory glance at world literature brings us to the Thousand and One Nights. The heroine, Sheharazad’s life is in King Shariyar’s hands. This king believes that it is his duty to murder his bride each night. For her part, Sheharezad uses her wit to invent a new but incomplete story each night, thus saving herself.

The stories that Sheharazad recounts in the Thousand and One Nights portray men wielding their power, while women use their cunning to overcome difficult patches. This is similar to the ideas about male and female gender roles found in Boccacio’s Decameron.

In our society, we can get an idea of male and female gender roles by considering two stories that most of us heard as children, from our mothers or maybe our grandmothers. One of these is the story of the Sparrow and his Wife, in which “the sparrow’s wife finds a grain of daal and the sparrow a grain of rice, and together they cook kichiri.” The female sparrow is punished by her husband, who drowns her in a well. The man’s authority is volatile.

Meanwhile, in another story, “The Pygmie and his Wife,” the king kidnaps the pygmie’s wife, challenging him in a fight to the death. For the sake of his honour and his sanctity, the pygmy doesn’t simply go to the king’s palace alone, but employs the power of all his community’s resources: from its insects to its river, the fire, and even the rains. After storming the kingdom, he reaches the palace, lays waste the king’s soldiers, and smashes the place to pieces.

These stories send children the signal that, in their seminary society, male and female roles are fixed, existing even in the world of birds. If a sparrow’s wife tells a lie, then he has the right to punish her by killing her. If a pygmy’s wife is kidnapped, then the pygmy, because he is a man, is responsible for her unquestionable purity, and so must not only personally attack the King’s palace, but must call his whole community to help him in the battle to bring back his wife.

If we want to discuss these issues in the context of modern Urdu literature, we begin in 1801, with Meer Aman’s Bhaag o Bahar. In 2002, Urdu literature was 200 years old. As we see these two centuries mirrored back at us in literature, it is clear that men remained dominant. Men make life decisions and women are compliant. Men satisfy themselves with foreign women and women silently endure the injustice, reflecting traditional gender roles in Urdu literature.

The Story of Amir Hamza is a notable deviation from this tradition. At 46 thousand pages, it is the longest story in Urdu literature or the world. The countless female characters in this story have made a new taste familiar in Urdu literature. These female characters make the kinds of decisions that men make. They fight wars and even kill men. In this tale, women have all kinds of authority. In the battlefield they race horses, and they control men with swords, arrows, magic and witchcraft. Men are their prisoners; they throw them on the backs of horses before making off with them. They gather to celebrate their triumphs with feasting and splendour, congratulating one another. In these pages, breathing men and women abdicate their gender roles.

In Urdu literature, The Story of Amir Hamaz retains an exceptional status. But it is also true that in the second half of the nineteenth century, the British Raj’s newly expanded administration, which preceded the introduction of Western education and of modern industry, had a huge influence.

This inspired Urdu writers to discuss women’s rights, education, and freedom from the veil. These writers rejected men and women’s prescribed gender roles.

Among these, two important names are Sajjad Haider Yaldram and Mirza Azeem Baig Chughtai. Sajjad Haider Yaldram was among the first Urdu writers whose goal was to bring equality to women. In his stories, women defy their prescribed gender roles and are seen shirking the veil, receiving modern education and participating in mixed gatherings. Perhaps he got these ideas from his wife, Nazar Sajjad Haider, who wrote novels with female characters who rejected their prescribed gender roles.

When it comes to rebelling against gender expectations, no name is more important than Azeem Baig Chughtai’s. He personified women in a new way. His women lived in a beautiful world based on gender equality, who were educated and had brilliant minds, who took in air side by side with men, as companions.

In his famous novel, Shahazoori, there is a female who is illiterate and lower class, but who is nonetheless fully conscious of her rights. The heroine of Shazhazoori defies ancestry, class status and male dominance with such vehemence that there is none like her in Urdu literature. Such characters—who disrupt the traditions of male and female gender roles and turn them on their heads—had never been created before, and this too from a man’s pen.

At the end of the nineteenth century, Rashida Alnasa’s novel showed men and women with slightly distorted gender roles, but from the beginning of the twentieth century, Saghara Humayun Mirza, Nazar Sajjad Haider, Walda Afzal Ali, Mrs. Hijaab Imtiaz Ali, and many other female writers came to the fore. Many of them defied prescribed gender roles in their creations and shocked readers.

With publication of Angare (embers) began the Urdu Progressive Writers movement, which gave us the work of Premchand, Krishan Chander, Doctor Rasheed Jahaan, Ismat Chughtai, Azeez Ahmed Baidi, Manto, Qara Alaiin Haider, Ahmed Nadeem Qasmi, Khadija Mastoor, Hajrah Maroor, Shaukat Siddiqui and other very important names.

While these writers portrayed traditional gender roles, they would also write rebellious male and female characters who deviated somehow or another from norms and traditions.

Among these writers, Sadaat Hasan Manto and Ismat Chughtai’s names are key. Both wrote stories that defied gender roles exposing society’s hypocrisy.

Ismat Chughtai’s stories, on one hand, include female characters who are financially independent, such as those in her novels Crooked Line and Innocence. These women move within the labyrinth of the film world, where old gender traditions are forgotten. Jeelani Bano and Wajida Tabussum also tore down gender roles in their work.

If Quratulain Hyder included some traditional gender roles in her stories, she also wrote modern, educated and independent women, like Sita Marchandaani in Sita Haran and Chumcha Ahmed in River of Fire, as well as the heroine of Autumn’s Voice. Rejecting tradition, she determines her own new gender roles.

In the last fifty years, new names have come to the fore in Urdu literature. In the wake of India’s partition, hundreds of thousands were uprooted, murdered and massacred, impoverished and without livelihood.. Women were violated. Western civilization had space to invade, and in its wake came sexual aggression. In cities there was sectarian violence, political repression and stringent ideological and religious prejudices. All this gave Urdu writers a wide variety of topics, which they each took on in their own style.

There were both men and women among these writers. Many have written stories about men and women that reflect traditional gender roles, but some of the stories and novels have examples of men and women deviating partially or entirely from tradition.

Literature illustrates the temporal and physical realities of its context: it is not possible that society’s traditional gender roles would change and literature would go on as though nothing had happened. In Urdu literature, a clear change is occurring, reflecting the changing relationships between men and women in our society.

Zaheda Hina is an Urdu writer, columnist, essayist, short story writer, novelist and dramatist. She is the recipient of numerous literary prizes. In 2006, she was nominated for Pakistan’s highest award, the Presidential Award for Pride of Performance. She turned it down in protest against Pakistan’s military government.

Tags: issue 8 , urdu , urdu issue , women , women literature , zaheda hina

This entry was posted on Feb 2015 at 11:00 PM and is filed under Essays , Essays & Criticism , Gender , Issue 8: Language and Politics , main bar . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

14 Responses to Women in Urdu Literature

JUST PUBLISHED! Read Zaheda Hina, one of the foremost Urdu writers today, on the transformation of female… http://t.co/VcJRpNmiav

Zaheda Hina on the changing and increasingly “deviant” women in Urdu lit! TQ translates leading Urdu writers! http://t.co/1qiCxHiNfW

RT @TanqeedOrg: Zaheda Hina on the changing and increasingly “deviant” women in Urdu lit! TQ translates leading Urdu writers! http://t.co/1…

Zaheda Hina on the changing and increasingly “deviant” roles of women in Urdu lit http://t.co/1qiCxHiNfW Translation by @write_noise

Women in Urdu Literature http://t.co/8bh9RHH71U

RT @TanqeedOrg: Zaheda Hina on the changing and increasingly “deviant” roles of women in Urdu lit http://t.co/1qiCxHiNfW Translation by @wr…

read Zahida Hina’s fantastic essay Women in Urdu Literature now in English! (the original Urdu is here:… http://t.co/fmJbub17Hb

Better find and read some of these writers! Women in Urdu Literature http://t.co/rahCWnBG78

#AuratJagi RT @TanqeedOrg: Zaheda Hina on the changing and increasingly “deviant” women in Urdu lit! http://t.co/EV9ZdwEqQn

RT @AwamiWorkers: #AuratJagi RT @TanqeedOrg: Zaheda Hina on the changing and increasingly “deviant” women in Urdu lit! http://t.co/EV9ZdwEq…

Gender, Sexuality and Feminism in Pakistani Urdu Writing

By Amina Yaqin

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Title: Gender, Sexuality and Feminism in Pakistani Urdu Writing

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FEMALE POETS’ SELF-REPRESENTATIONS IN URDU AUTOBIOGRAPHY: A COMPARISON OF ADA JAFRI AND KISHWAR NAHEED

This paper compares the feminist trends in Pakistan with reference to two eminent Pakistani Urdu women poets’ autobiographies: Jo Rahee So Bekhabari Rahee (What Lingered Was a Trance) by Ada Jafri and Buri Aurat Ki Katha (The Tale of a Bad Woman) by Kishwar Naheed. The two women have been participating in mushairas (mixed poetry-recitation gatherings) for several decades now, but their sharing of public space with men has had different social and psychological impacts on the two writers. Ada Jafri’s narrative is devoid of negativity, criticism, protest, or reference to sexuality. Kishwar Naheed focuses on these very things. Ada Jafri has no claim of being a feminist and is rather apologetic about her weak voice of protest against the denial of human status to women in Pakistan. Kishwar Naheed identifies her voice as an extension of the female voices all over the world and throughout history, blurring the boundaries of time and space in asserting her womanhood. However, some commonalities oblige us to re-examine their differences at a deeper level only to find out that in spite of the mental distance between them, at some level they are very similar. This also leads us to conjecture that the Pakistani feminism is probably a different kind of construct from what it can be perceived in the perspective of western feminism.

Related Papers

SMART M O V E S J O U R N A L IJELLH

The patriarchal structures of Pakistani society and its self-proclaimed identity as an Islamic state have necessarily and inevitably exercised a strong influence on Pakistani women poets. This paper examines how these poets negotiate with their religion and how this interface finds expression in their poetry. In order to engage with these issues, it would be pertinent to make a reference to Kishwar Naheed who, in her prose work Aurat Khwab aur Khaaq ke Darmiyan points out how traditional opinions concerning the role and position of women in Pakistani society have been conditioned by the injunctions of the Koran as interpreted and enforced by men:

Asma Mansoor

This paper explores the notions of " articulation, " " agency " and " embodiment " in Urdu poetry composed by Pakistani women. Although these terms have been taken from the First world feminist discourses, we aim to highlight how these three terms were not merely reflected in the contemporary poetry of Pakistani women, but rather were used to express their own modalities and associations as they countered the patriarchal system within which they were embedded. Our study does not simply apply these terms on selected poems by Kishwar Naheed (1940-), Fehmeeda Riaz (1946-) and Azra Abbas (1948-), but it also explores how these terms undergo a discursive diffraction as the Pakistani woman is no longer seen as a subaltern entity with a silenced subjectivity. We have taken on board the synonymic idea of writing as an agentive act of embodiment, as theorised by Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous. This is to show that while these terms were theorised by Western feminists, contemporary Pakistani women writers have, over the last few decades, been enacting these terms in ways which deny the stereotypical projection of the Third world woman in the Western gender discourses. For these women writers, writing enacts embodiment through articulation and thus agentively counters the objectifying gaze of the patriarchal order.

Baran Farooqi

Urdu literature prides itself on the presence of many significant female voices, both in fiction and poetry. I would like to investigate whether women’s writing in Urdu is merely one homogenous category, or are the women in the Urdu literary scene creative writers first and women writers afterwards? The case of Bilqees Zafirul Hasan would be an interesting one to explore, as she blossomed into a full-fledged writer only about the time when she was in her fifties, and had mothered six children. She gave up writing after marriage and devoted herself to the care of her husband and family. What were her possible concerns in turning to poetry? Bilqees Zafirul Hasan (b. 1938) has published two collections of poems in Urdu, Geela Eendhan (“Damp Fuel”), 1996, and Sholon Ke Darmiyan (“Amidst the Flames”) in 2004. A volume of short stories, Weerane Aabad Gharon Ke (“The Wildernesses of Flourishing Homes”), came out in 2008. She also writes plays. Very little of her work is available in translation, although her entire body of work deserves to be translated into English, and into Hindi and other Indian languages. This interview (conducted over several sessions in 2008) aims to present an introduction to the poetry of Bilqees Zafirul Hasan, who has not received the attention she deserves. It includes many excerpts from her beautiful poetry which may not necessarily dwell on a woman’s identity.

Huzaifa Pandit

The essay is an attempt to place the poetry of Kishwar Naheed within the modern feminist discourse by examining how it corresponds to various feminist theoretical constructs and displaces traditional phallocentric modes of writing and versification in her inimitable style of poetry. The essay will try to analyze the ideological moorings of the feminist poet and explore whether or not she borrows from the popular discourse of another transgressive school: The Progressive Writers Association. The objective is to read the selected poems closely and by an investigation of their syntactic and semantic transgressions observe the pragmatic shift in her poetry and analyze whether she is able to bring in a fresh perspective of the collective experience of the women in Post-Colonial Pakistan in specific and the sub continental women in general.

Orientalistica

Zayana Nasir

This essay aims at understanding the development and struggles of a ‘female voice’ within Urdu poetic tradition through the writings of women poets of the Nineteenth century in contrast to the women poets of the twentieth-century feminist movement. The women in traditional Urdu poetry have remained a silent cruel beloved, the image offered is that of a ‘feckless beloved, endowed with heavenly beauty, reigned: fair to face, doe-eyed, dark hair, tall and willowy, a woman who vacillated from indifference, shyness and modesty to wanton cruelty. The essay is an attempt to understand the level of autonomy of the female voice in the poems of women poets through the years. To portray the development of a feminine expression in Urdu poetry the paper will be ranging from the poems of tawaifs (courtesan) of the eighteenth century like Mah Laqa Chanda, their attempts to acquire a place within the patrilineal Urdu literary tradition; the rekhti tradition where men wrote poems in a female voice, ...

Muhammad Iqbal Chawla

This article attempts to explores, investigate and analyzes the postcolonial Urdu writings on the Pakistani women‟s participation in the socio-economic, religious and political arena. Urdu literature is spread all over the subcontinent and there are no borders in literature that can split it into two. This article would like to discuss literature mainly produced by Pakistani writers. However, while arguing that most literature has been written from a patriarchal viewpoint throughout the history, two main themes dominated the postcolonial literature firstly, role of women in the patriarchal society and other, the trauma of migration and its impact on the Muslim women in Pakistan. Islamic influence enforced purdah on Muslim women and purdahless women were regarded as infidel and shameless in literature. Nineteenth century Muslim writers advocated modern education for women not with the idea of emancipation but with a view to creating the modern wife, sister and mother. In this context...

Nukhbah Taj Langah

This paper applies textual analysis and ethnographic approach to explore the role of women within Siraiki cultural and literary domain. We contend that due to social taboos and patriarchal pressures, these women are experiencing suppression that results in their limited visibility within the mainstream literary circles. The lack of both, appreciation and mentorship for their creative outputs has resulted in the dearth of literature produced by Siraiki women writers. The objective of this study is to indicate how this oppression turns gender roles into enactment of power through creative writing. In order to substantiate our argument we rely on selected works by Iqbal Bano, Shabnam Awan and Mussarat Kalanchvi. In the process, we also attempt to theorize indigenous manifestation of feminist intent of these Siraiki writers as Trimti

Asian Journal of Multidisciplinary Studied

Arshad M Hashmi

Journal of Nusantara Studies (JONUS)

Zainab Basra

Background and Purpose: Fahmida Riaz was able to articulate precise feminist politics through her voice because she was audible to many women in the Pakistani context. The current study investigates how her writings about the female body were not merely a tool to celebrate or raise the sexual distance, but also influenced a political intervention and shifted the dominant patriarchal structures present in literary as well as other social and political levels. The purpose of the research is to shed light on how a specific poet's voice was able to reach a large audience of women and articulate explicitly feminist politics in Pakistan. Methodology: The Feminist Discourse Analysis (FCDA), another dimension of CDA, is employed in the analysis. The application of the FCDA model is adapted to examine how textual representations of gendered practices produce and sustain one gender power and dominance over the other. For the study, an operational method based on four models has been...

shazrah salam

‘Gender, Region, Orientalist Bias Marginalised Hyderabad’s Women Urdu Writers’

Hyderabad has had a 150-year-long history of women writing prose in Urdu, a longer one of poetry and other oral and creative expressions. But we know very little of these writers and the flourishing literary scene where they carved a prominent space despite varied challenges (read more about this here and here ). Urdu writing emerged more prolifically in the second half of the 19th century with social reform, greater push for girls’ education and later on, the growth of the Progressive Writers Movement in 1936. Women writers such as Tayyaba Bilgrami, Sughra Humayun Mirza, Wajida Tabassum, Jahanbano Naqvi , Zeenath Sajida, Rafia Sultana, Azeezunnisa Habibi, Brij Rani, Jamalunnisa Baji, Oudh Rani Bawa among others were writers, poets, journalists, travellers and founders of literary magazines.

Bibi’s Room: Hyderabadi Women and Twentieth-Century Urdu Prose documents a literary tradition that has not got the recognition it richly deserves. The book profiles three prolific writers from Hyderabad. Zeenat Sajida (1924-2009) whose fascinating essays in the tanz-o-mizah (humour and satire) genre and khaake (pen-portraits) depicted gendered perspectives on the society and a glimpse into the everyday lives of women in Hyderabad; Najma Nikhat who wrote about feudalism, class struggle and patriarchy; and Jeelani Bano who, during the Jadeediyat (modernism) phase in Urdu literature in 1960s, wrote on contemporary themes of state and society. In an interview with Behanbox , its author Nazia Akhtar , Assistant Professor (Human Sciences Research Group) at the International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT), tells us why we need to not only recognise but also delve deeper into the Urdu writings of Hyderabad’s women writers.

Given how rich this literature is, why do most of us know so little about Hyderabad’s women writers and their work in Urdu?

There is triple marginalisation at work here which I also talk about in the book. The first is gender. The second is region: Urdu isn’t associated with the Deccan, which is ironic, because it was patronised and nourished here between the 15th and 17th centuries before it moved to the north, as a full-fledged literary language in its own right to be taken seriously by northern poets and audiences. There is a north Indian bias in Urdu literature as well as its translation.

There is a third problem. There is very little research on the princely states in India. This stems from the Orientalist scholarship, a major issue in the scholarship on South Asia in general, which wanted to project an image of British India as a progressive place. It was in the interests of the British to promote the idea that women fared better in British India, as opposed to the princely states, and where society and culture thrived. The princely states were presented as this Orientalist fantasy, a timeless and changeless world, a perception that was accepted at face value.

But scholars who are working on different princely states have pointed out that they were not immune to social and political events taking place elsewhere. It is only now after Siobhan Lambert Hurley’s writing on Bhopal or Razak Khan on Rampur, Kavita S Datla on Hyderabad, Janaki Nair on Mysore or Tarana Hussain Khan on Rampur that we have begun to think differently about society and culture in the princely states.

On translation, we know about North Indian writers but there again, we only know of north Indian women writers in Urdu, such as Ismat Chughtai, Rasheed Jahan, and Qurratulain Hyder, who have been translated into English. Now Khadija Mastur has joined these three or four names because she has been translated by Daisy Rockwell. People will also know about the most radical poets from north India and Pakistan like Fahmida Riaz and Kishwar Naheed. But apart from them, we don’t really know anyone else. I think there are different invisibilities and marginalisations.

We shouldn’t underestimate the role of English language translations in all this given the hegemony of the language. This is also something that is bitter-sweet, for it is the hegemony of English that is pushing our literary traditions and languages into the margins. And yet, for the women writers I document, I want to harness that power of English, in order to give them the same kind of visibility and new readership, who will appreciate their contributions and perspectives.

Why did you pick these particular writers for the book?

I chose these three writers because, first, I liked them. I could have written about Rafia Manzurul Ameen , who’s also a great novelist and she’s written for television and has a profile similar to that of Jeelani Bano. Between them, they have enough similarities to merit being put together. And at the same time, there is enough diversity and divergence between them to showcase a range of writings, concerns, themes, manipulation of genres. For instance, motherhood runs as a strong, continuous thread through all three women’s writings. But unlike Nikhat or Bano, Zeenath Sajida does not respond as enthusiastically to motherhood as the others. At heart she is a committed but somewhat troubled mother, mulling over the unfairness of motherwork and the status of mothers in the world in a manner that is more radical than that of the others. These similarities and differences offer a good first glimpse into a range of Hyderabadi women’s writings around the mid-20th century.

How did you develop an interest to research into the history of women’s writing and creative expressions of Hyderabad?

I had over a number of years accumulated texts written by these women writers. I’m not from Hyderabad, but I’ve been coming here since I was a child. Over the years Hyderabadis – knowing my interest in the literature and the history of this region – have been giving me books. Someone would call up and say, ‘Oh, I’ve heard that this scholar is releasing a book on Hyderabadi women’s writings.’ Or, ‘Have you met that writer who used to write pen-portraits and essays in the 1950s and 1960s?’ So I just began to collect books, stories and context. And over a period of time, I realised that there is a whole tradition of prose here that we don’t know anything about, which goes back 150 years, except for those whose works have been translated into English.This includes two novels by Jeelani Bano, Baarish-e-Sang and Aiwan-e-Ghazal. The translation of the first is not very readable but her first novel, Aiwan-e-Ghazal, was translated brilliantly by Urdu writer Zakia Mashhadi and yet, we don’t know about it because it wasn’t promoted very well by the publisher. The same goes for Mashhadi’s translations of Jeelani Bano’s short stories, which languish unsung. Wajida Tabassum , an intrepid writer who wrote on caste patriarchy, sexual violence in feudal homes had only two short stories translated until Reema Abbasi’s book of translations which came out in 2022.

How little is translated into English, and how little most of us today – irrespective of language or location – know about these women! There were women who were journalists and travellers, who journeyed through Asia and Europe, who worked energetically on social reform and questions of national and political unity, who developed the discourse of education for girls and women, and so on and so forth. I was just blown away by the fact that we knew so little about it all.

What were some of the surprising and interesting insights from your research into the rich landscape of women’s writing in Hyderabad?

I was struck by the sheer depth of some of the texts, which I wasn’t expecting. For instance, in 1946 essay Agar Allah Miyan Aurat Hote (If Allah Miyan were a woman) Zeenath Sajida asks fundamental questions about God, Prophet and the believer in a way that, I think, represents generations and centuries of voices of Muslim women. She expands on this theme in her other work as well. In another essay Hum Hain Toh Abhi Raah Mein Hai Sang-e-Giraan Aur , she takes Virginia Woolf’s idea from A Room of One’s Own and extends it. Why is it that you cannot have a woman Prophet? Why cannot women have full writing careers along with everything else that they have to do? These are such fundamental questions.

The other interesting insight is the range of themes that these writers dealt with despite having little formal education. Jeelani Bano and Najma Nikhat were schooled entirely at home, only Zeenat Sajida had formal education. Bano’s education was very eclectic and she was criticised by a few male progressive writers who, when she began writing about the labourers and tillers of Telangana, said ‘What does this girl who has lived in semi-pardah know about the realities of the working class?’ But women in the domestic space interact with the working class, with people from different classes, they work with them. Her novel Barish-e-Sang, I think, is the finest novel written on the lives of Telangana’s tillers and agricultural labourers, which displays her depth of understanding of class and patriarchy in a way that very few texts I’ve read in any language have.It’s not as if someone who has not studied Marx or, indeed in a classroom, doesn’t know how class works.

A lot of this material comes from the lived experiences of the women. They explore all sorts of worlds in their work, including their own personal lives, the institution of marriage, what is called mother work, the running of the household, their professional and social lives, their relationships etc.

You talk about the family magazines run by these writers as teens and young adults. Tell us more about what prompted them to start their own magazines?

They were very enthusiastic about books and learning and frequently had parents who were supportive of their efforts. But they could either not afford to or were not allowed to go to the new women’s associations and their meetings. So these young girls and sometimes even their brothers and male cousins would get together and say, ‘Okay, so we can’t get a subscription to this magazine, or this newspaper, because they’re too expensive, or they’re simply not there. So, let’s make our own magazines.’ And so they produced these painstakingly handwritten monthly magazines, which would be circulated within their families.

Jeelani Bano came from an intellectually rich but financially poor family that had a lot of talented and creative children. The family couldn’t afford a lot of paper, and whatever paper was available was used for the boys’ school work. So she and her siblings used discarded office files and old papers that had one side filled and the other side plain for their magazine.

You write about institutions that encouraged humour writing among women. That seems to be a very unique situation. Tell us more about how they fostered this unique genre of writing.

Yes, these institutions include publications such as Shagoofa , Siasat , Munsif , Rehnuma-e-Dakkan , and Andhra Pradesh . There were also initiatives by organisations such as Zinda Dilaan-e-Hyderabad, which was formed in 1973 with the specific intention of promoting humour and satire, and the Mehfil-e-Khawateen, which is a monthly literary gathering of, by, and for women. The Mehfil-e-Khawateen was founded in 1971 and has been a fertile ground for women to get together and discuss their work and for new women writers to emerge. The women’s department of the Idara-e-Adabiyat-e-Urdu also played an important role in promoting women’s humour.

Progressive writing also provided a platform [for humour writing] because laughter is a great way to expose the hypocrisy of society and also to speak truth to power. But the Progressive Writers’ Association also became hegemonic and exerted restrictions on member and non-member writers on what and how to write. Manto was almost shunned by them after he wrote stories probing the issue of masculinity and violence. Similarly, Hyderabadis were very uncomfortable with Wajida Tabassum because she talks about female sexuality and caste, which is not something that the card-carrying faction of the progressive writers was very familiar with. At the same time, writers such as Zeenath Sajida, for instance, and many other women found a great platform in progressive writing.

What you see in women’s writing is also a very clever use of the humour genre. So, Zeenath Sajida in her irrepressibly cheeky way, uses the genre of the inshaiya , or “light sketch,” to say all kinds of things which have serious implications and which are radical and subversive and completely destructive of old norms. She also uses the pen portrait ( khaake ), a very popular form in Hyderabad. Another proponent of this particular genre is Fatima Alam Ali , who writes intimate and vulnerable portraits of all of the great male progressive writers, and we see them in a way that we’ve never seen in any of their biographies, where they are eulogised by their followers.

The final network that’s important to remember is that of students and teachers because so many of the women writers of Hyderabad have been teachers and professors. And they have trained and nurtured each other. Zeenath Sajida, for instance, had for a teacher Jahanbano Naqvi, who was a writer herself and encouraged Sajida and her other students to write. There was a bonding and a sisterhood between them which outlived courses and degrees.

There’s an anthology of humour writing by Habib Zia where so many of the women humorists represented in it are her friends, students, teachers or colleagues.

You maintain that in the context of contemporary feminist discourse the writings of these women may seem outdated, but they still deserve to be recognised and researched.

This writing merits investigation from the perspective of a history we have to restore. Of course, it’s going to be different from the kind of writing that you have today because it belongs to another period. I frequently come across this problem with my students: when they read [19 th century feminist activist] Tarabai Shinde’s essay ‘Stree Purush Tulana’, for example, they say, why is she saying that though marriage is unfair to women, it is still important for women to remain married? Why isn’t she speaking out against marriage? But it was too early in the day for that kind of radical intent to happen. Tarabai may have thought about it, but it was not the time to articulate the total rejection of marriage. Similarly, you cannot expect someone like Najma Nikhat to make an argument such as ‘Why is raising a daughter a bigger deal than raising a son? Why isn’t a father held responsible for raising a child, daughter or son?’ Najma Nikhat lived in a different world. We frequently forget that we have been able to reach this stage where our politics is so much more radical — and we can articulate positions that are so much more empowering — on the shoulders of these women. We can actually talk about how marriage and motherhood no longer define a woman.

Let’s take Jeelani Bano as another case in point. Bano is very critical of women working outside the home; they are always portrayed as somehow morally compromised in her writing. But you also have to remember that this is a home-schooled woman, who faced the snobbery of the intellectuals and those who were formally educated. It’s easy to understand why she would think of people in workspaces as somehow hostile to her and her world.

Najma Nikhat’s The Last Haveli is an incredibly evocative story of the place of working women in feudal establishments or deodi s.

What drew me to The Last Haveli is that it’s a brilliant, jewel of a story. From it you get a great sense of Najma Nikhat’s considerable power as a writer and what she could have done if she had an easier life. It is difficult in a short story to have well developed characters, and yet she manages to do that with great beauty and depth. But what drew me to it is that it conveys what life was like in the feudal deodi s for women of all classes, whether they were upper-class begums and ranis or their handmaidens and slaves. And while she depicts the problems that women of all classes face, Najma Nikhat’s sympathy is always with the working-class women. It’s through their eyes that we look at life in the deodi — the realities they face, the work they have to do, the sexual services that they have to provide, the beatings they take as slaves with no place else to go, while also not being allowed the right to express the fact that they exist or have feelings and thoughts. There’s another story in which Nikhat points out that the best attribute in a woman or a wife is “tonguelessness,” which is a searing reminder of how patriarchy demands that women must be seen to be working silently and are never heard.

Could you tell us something about Begumati Zubaan, the Urdu dialect spoken in the zanana, that is used profusely in Nikhat’s story?

This language that women spoke amongst themselves in the zananas was unique to them and reflected their circumstances, such as their lack of formal education. It was not the “polished” diction of the men in the family, who would have far more interactions with the outdoors and would have had more education than the women in their families. Begumati language developed in the zanana amongst women of different classes, because even the upper-class women probably had more interactions than the men in their families did with working class people, such as their domestic help as well as vendors, hawkers and traders, who went door to door selling their wares and exchanging news and views. So it developed during interactions between people of different classes, reflecting the influence of different languages and dialects and a unique, gendered worldview. A lot of the expressions of Begumati zubaan will seem sharp and very dramatic to us. This includes those that talk about women’s bodies, for example. There’s an expression that the narrator uses in The Last Haveli , which I’ve translated as “cast[ing] stones at her barren womb”. This is a direct translation from Begumati Zubaan: apni baanjh kokh par patthar marna . Begumati zubaan was replete with rich expressions that were not considered “polite” in their time, such as those that contained sexual innuendo or different kinds of euphemisms. And the fact that men were not a party to this language also contributed significantly to its development.

Gail Minault has done some work on this aspect of women’s language. There are Urdu books written in the early 1920s, and 30s, all by men, who were linguists interested in documenting this language. But even before that there were social reformers who documented it because they disapproved of it and wanted to do away with it. They said that this language of women was a sign of women’s ignorance and backwardness. Ironically, it is through these reformers who wanted Begumati Zubaan to vanish that we know a little bit about it.

Your book is largely about women who wrote in Urdu while Dakhni is believed to be the prevailing language in Hyderabad. So, do we see any influence of Dakhni in their work?

There are at least three languages here at play: one is Dakhini, the other is Hyderabadi, which is slightly different, and then there is Urdu. The historical context for these languages and the politics between them has to do with the Mughal subjugation of the Deccan in the 1680s. Over the course of the 18th century, Mughal governors and the Muslim and Hindu ethnic groups and communities that migrate with them bring standard Urdu, and this replaces the language of the defeated, Dakhini which begins to be seen as inferior. As a result, most prose, written in Urdu by Hyderabadis today, is standard Urdu. Dakhni was close to what is known as aam zubaan , the common tongue, and it was what the Dakhni poets, kings, courtiers, and Sufis used to connect with the people. The medieval Deccan was also a very cosmopolitan and diverse world, so Dakhni absorbs all kinds of words and structures — it derives a lot from Marathi, for example, because the Sufi saints had very close associations with the Bhakti saints of Maharashtra. It takes a lot from Telugu because there was a very strong Telugu presence at the courts of the Deccan.

But this idea that Dakhni is aam (common) zubaan and different from adabi (cultural) zubaan takes root slowly over the 18th and 19th centuries and Dakhni is ushered out. Zeenath Sajida, who was one of the most passionate proponents of Dakhni, never wrote in the language, because it had simply no status as a literary language anymore. Similarly, in the case of Jeelani Bano, who is also a passionate advocate of Dakhni, you will find that Dakhni is used by characters who are either less educated, which is frequently women, or by those who are naïve and not worldly wise. Such usage sends a message about the status of Urdu and demonstrates and embodies the historical marginalisation of Dakhni in the place of its flowering.

The 19th Century Woman Who Challenged the Image of Indian Coupledom

Uma Chakravarti

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Rashid Jahan: The Bad Girl Of Urdu Literature | #IndianWomenInHistory

Educated in Lucknow and New Delhi, Rashid Jahan was the first woman to write about the plight of the women with courage and forthrightness. She is an iconoclastic writer, associated with the Progressive Writers’ Movement , who dared to challenge oppressive societal structures. She goes by many names, like – the spark that lit the fire , the rebel with a cause, radical and controversial Urdu feminist of 20 th century, and the bad girl of Urdu literature .

Jahan was born in 1905 in Aligarh, to Sheikh Abdullah and his wife Begum Wahid Jahan. Her father, who established the Women’s College in Aligarh Muslim University , was the leading pioneer of women’s education in India. She was trained as a gynaecologist but is better known for her transparent, raw, ideologically oriented works of fiction she produced after becoming one of the founding members of the Progressive Writers’ Association . Ismat Chughtai’s work was highly inspired by Rashid Jahan – the only member from the left-wing oriented progressive writers’ movement.

“She spoilt me because she was very bold and used to speak all sorts of things openly and loudly, and I just wanted to copy her,” Chughtai would later write .

Jahan had so many sides to her personality – she was a doctor, a writer who was gravely engrossed in the issues of her times, an avowed communist, and a pioneering activist invested in social change. She was a woman ahead of her times in every respect; and continues to be a source of inspiration for women. Jahan was the personification of the nascent feminism which had begun to take roots in South Asian soil.

Rashid Jahan was one of the foremost feminists of the 20 th century – carving out a space for women to talk about issues that deeply shaped their life like religion, science, their bodies and sexuality, and modernity. All this created a new or alternative discourse about the women’s issues at the onset of modernity. She inherited this legacy from her father who was invested in several movements on reform and education. Her father founded a widely circulated Urdu journal by the name Khatun (Woman) in which her mother was a consistent contributor. With the influence of both her parents, it was evident that her leanings towards writing about the social and political situation were deeply rooted in her upbringing and the influence of the left ideology which furthered her on this path.

Jahan was one of the quartet that published a compendium of short stories called Angarey, published in 1932, which was followed by the storm of controversies making Rashid Jahan known as Angarewali in the vernacular space. She officially joined the Communist Party in 1933. She simultaneously became a symbol of emancipated women in progressive families and that of a brat, a bad girl in others.

Rashid Jahan’s bold writings were not to create scandal but to incite people to think and reflect about the times they were living in. She worked towards reforms necessary in domestic and social life. She boldly attacked the social set-up, patriarchy and Muslim culture through her writings; bringing in deeper questions of body, sexuality, public spaces, and women.

One of her most acclaimed short stories is “Dilli Ki Sair” (A Visit To Delhi) – an exceptional yet simple account of how women cannot occupy public spaces, and how the male gaze penetrates even through the confines of the burqa. The story questions male privilege in a simple and clear narration. Here is an excerpt which is emblematic of her direct style of tackling such sensitive issues

“Well, we sat in the train from here and reached Delhi. There ‘he’ met some wretched station master acquaintance of his. Leaving me near the luggage, ‘he’ vanished. And I, perched on the luggage, wrapped in a burqa, there I sat. First this damned burqa, then these cursed men. Men are anyway no good but when they see a woman sitting like this they just circle around her. There is no opportunity even to chew paan. One damn fellow coughs, another hurls a remark. And I… breathless with fear. And so hungry… that only God knows. And the Delhi station! Bua, even the Fort would not be as huge. Wherever one looked, one saw nothing but the station, the railway lines, engines, and goods trains. And what scared me the most were those blackened men who live in the engines!”

Angare (Burning Coals), released in 1932 was a compilation of groundbreaking short stories and Jahan’s best-remembered work. Rashid Jahan, along with Sajjad Zaheer, who edited it, Ahmed Ali, and Mahammudu Jafar were the young authors of Angare – an anthology of ten short stories which turned controversial. These writers who belonged to the upper strata of the Muslim community paved a way for a new literary space.

Rashid Jahan’s work is embedded in feminist concerns of the turbulent times she was witness to, in which the thrust towards radical social justice was gathering more importance than ever. Her motivation to write was a social one, one that ached to bring forth the issues faced by Muslim women into everyday discourse; and to influence the readers to reflect and question the society and begin to transform it in ways they can. She used literature as an instrument of social reform. She wrote extensively for magazines and literary journals which are unfortunately lost to today’s reader. But what remains of her short stories and plays is a rich account of oppression in the society, one that I would argue continues to ring true even today.

Her other well-known contribution to Angare was Parde Ke Peeche (Behind the Veil). In it, the wife’s illness and her husband’s indifference to it weaves together a narrative condemning patriarchal society and its seclusion of women, and its oppression through the domesticity of the woman. Her work is quite reflective of the gender relations present in the times she lived in. It is a sociological analysis of the spaces women occupy like the z enana (women’s quarters) and the skewed gender roles they reflect, with the materiality of the veil being the first barrier to inclusive spaces. She wrote about issues that were hitherto untouched by male or female writers and hence it becomes extremely important to look at the thin yet brilliant corpus she leaves behind.

Being a doctor, Jahan was highly concerned with women’s health, their relationship to their bodies, and how they are not really taken care of in the society that constantly sees women as caregivers and nurturers. Her work is often claimed to be a bit rough and unfinished but one has to remember that she wrote not to achieve literary finesse but to create a space to talk about the issues she thought mattered.

Her work and life can be said to personify the following Toni Morrison quote “ If there is a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, you must be the one to write it.” She wrote about things she thought weren’t being written about and needed ample attention.

Though the corpus of her work is slender and her life brief, she left a mark through her literary output which was illustrative of the world enclosed and oppressive, of the Muslim women in her times; which still continues to ring true in contemporary times. This so-called ‘ Bad Girl’ of Urdu Literature made an exceptional contribution towards building the South Asian women’s movement and towards modern literature.

Bano, Shadab. “Rashid Jahan’s Writings Resistance and Challenging Boundaries, Angaare and Onwards.” Indian Journal of Gender Studies 19.1 (2012): 57-71.
Jalil, Rakhshanda. A rebel and her cause: the life and work of Rashid Jahan . Oxford University Press, 2015.

Vaishnavi Mahurkar has Masters in Development at Azim Premji University, Bangalore. Her personal interests include literature, poetry, and cinema. She likes to ask difficult questions about the everyday social and is captivated by conversations on the anthropology of politics, resistance movements, art, and society.

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Islamic Feminism: What You Need To Know (Essay in 1900 words)

Islam and feminism are heavily discussed topics, especially with the current social conditions that are affecting a diverse amount of people all over the world. The two words put together might seem like an oxymoron, however, the more one looks into it, the more the movement and its importance makes sense. One might ask how Islamic feminism differs from the western movement of feminism, and the answer is that it looks to extend the ideas of gender equality by showing the people of the Islamic faith that feminism or gender equality is not a western concept but actually propagated by their own religion. Islamic feminism is feminism that accepts Islamic doctrine through text and canonical traditions, rather than feminism created out of Muslim culture. At its core, uniquely Muslim feminism is based on the Quranic concept of human equality and is concerned with applying this theology to daily life. Moreover, it aims to show people that Islam doesn’t want their women to suffer, it doesn’t believe men are inherently superior to women.While serious concerns such as domestic violence are hotly debated, the essential topic of what equality involves and how it is communicated is usually disregarded.

In Islam, metaphorization is a common practice; it is the process of interpreting the Quran’s phrases and due to this, it plays a big part in the religion and helps them understand what it requires from its believers. The issue that has led to the rise of Islamic feminist women in the Middle East is that select women have started to believe that the interpretations of the law by hadiths are not always right or flawed. Carla Powers who is a Middle East Correspondent studied the Quran with an Islamic scholar and learned how the Quran in actuality does not advocate the oppression of women and that it contains a history of a major amount of forgotten female figures. Islam says that, before Him, men and women are equal. Based on the Quran, women are also granted inheritance, fundamental rights such as marriage, social and property rights, and mainly are allowed to reject proposals and instigate divorce. Even forming a prenuptial agreement before marriage for safety that is widely acceptable in American societies is also something that’s supported by the Quran. In the early period of Islam, as many today are, women were practitioners and property owners. Although it is well known that women of the Islamic religion have more difficulties compared to women from the western culture, it should be noted that this is solely due to the function of generations of patriarchy intertwined with the governmental institutions and laws and does not originate from the Islamic values. Muhammad himself often repeats importance of taking care of wives and daughters. He mentions how “you have rights over your women and your women have rights over you.”

Several exceptionally strong and intelligent women-headed this feminist movement in Islam. One of them is Asma Lamrabet, a well-known Moroccan feminist, who was forced to retire recently because of her support for women who wanted an equal share of a man’s property. Inheritance laws are a major problem in Islam based countries. They have been picking up steam in several countries and Ms. Lambert is one of the activists trying to overthrow patriarchy in relation to these laws. She explains that the main reason why patriarchy is still prevalent is due to the fact that they are not allowed to have authority over religious texts. This causes them to divert the verses of the Quran to be more from a man’s point of view which is the originating cause of deep inequality. The women who are fighting for authority over religious texts demand that women’s readings of religious texts should be accepted and that women should be allowed to have religious authorities. When Habib Bourguiba, president of Tunisia, raised the issue of inheritance and inequality in 1974, it was considered blasphemous and was forced to backtrack. Even though the laws of Islamic countries are obtained from the Quran’s verses, the domination of men causes the discrimination between men and women and their laws. Men continue to receive double the amount of shares women get. Even distant male relatives can override wives or sisters, so women are usually left with no financial independence.

Asma Lambert defends a progressive, contextual interpretation of the Quran. She does not assert, as do Islamists, that Islam already grants women full equality. She claims that it might if centuries of misogynist interpretation by male historians were removed. Her rejection of behaviors like polygamy, uneven access to divorce, and a husband’s dominance over his wife demonstrates that these practices have no textual basis in the Quran. She claims that while reading what the text means, the historical context must be considered. Islamic feminists understand the inequities that Muslim women suffer today under Islamic law, and in most regions of the Muslim world, they refer to family law or personal status law. According to Suad Joseph, family law has become “a symbol for feminist resistance” throughout the Islamic world. Islamic feminists, on the other hand, do not advocate for the repeal of Islamic law in terms of personal status; rather, they say that the solution to women’s empowerment lies in a reinterpretation of Islamic principles.

The primary argument of Islamic feminists is that the Quran upholds the principle of equality and justice for all human beings, but patriarchal attitudes, rituals, and practices have distorted women’s and men’s equality in today’s Muslim societies. Muslim feminists did not come up with this idea. Islamic groups, including those in Sudan, backed it as well. Hasan al-Turabi published Women between Religion Teachings and Society Customs in 1973, advocating a revision of women’s rights under Islamic jurisprudence –fiqh. In it, he stated that many components of Islamic law were implemented in order to accommodate Sharia to traditional norms. Male Islamic attorneys view the rules that give men control in a liberal and expansive way, while reading the rules that limit women literally and severely. As a result, women’s basic rights and the basics of justice, as defined in the Sharia, have been abandoned in Muslim culture.

Turabi says that women played an important role in public life throughout the Prophet’s lifetime, and they were instrumental in the election of the third Caliph. Women were only later denied their rightful place in public life, but history had strayed from the ideal.

Nonetheless, Islamic feminism can be seen in a variety of settings. As a result, many people talk about Islamic feminisms or Islamic feminism in its various forms. Some, especially Islamic feminists, have contended that it has become too wide to characterize local women’s action and too politically loaded. Which bases its reinterpretations of the Quran and perceives the idea of patriarchy as flawed in relation to the islamic values and belief in god. Islamic feminists are employing the concept of ijtihad to create Quranic interpretations that highlight the Quran’s gender-egalitarian urge. These new interpretations therefore serve as the foundation for pursuing gender equality in Islamic law in today’s Muslim governments. The project encapsulates the concept of an Islam free of patriarchy, in which women have equal legal and social rights to males. In her book Quran and Women: Re-reading the Sacred Texts, Amina Wadud, an African-American scholar, advocates for female equality and female empowerment, specifically in relation to sanctity, or taqwa. According to Riffat Hassan, a single Arabic word can have a variety of meanings. However, because the interpreters were all men, the readings were skewed toward men. Take, for example, Surah an-nisa 4:34, which is always mentioned when the subject of equality arises. The word qawwamun is used by the Quran to describe the man in this verse. It has been translated to the term ‘male guardian,’ which indirectly gave men the power to undermine and control women in all aspects of society. But Hassan believes that the word might simply just mean breadwinner, so this explains how the verses were so distorted and so misread that it gave men an immense amount of control over the lives of women. The efforts made to produce new interpretations of Islam take time and necessitate a great deal of specialized knowledge, both in Arabic and in Islamic law. Although every Muslim has the freedom to interpret the Quran in theory, it is not accessible to everyone on a local level for a variety of reasons, including the political environment, exposure to Islamic feminist literature, financing, time, and resources. Reinterpreting a source material may also elicit a lot of vociferous criticism, especially in circumstances when Salafist actors are prominent.

As Ziba Mir-Hosseini points out, the interpretation of Islam that is represented in modern state laws is largely determined by the power balance between those players whose view of Islamic law is literal and restrictive of women’s equal rights. She refers to them as “traditionalists.” And there are many who believe there is no conflict between Islam and women’s equality as defined by international human rights accords. It also largely is determined based on women’s political affairs and their abilities with consideration to all discourses. According to her, Islamic law reform is not simply a theological or religious issue, but also a very political one. When campaigning for legislative reform to improve the position of women, Islamic feminists and other self-declared feminists and activists are sometimes accused of doing the errands of the West. As a result, they are accused of compromising religious and cultural ideals as well as posing a threat to society’s order.

This isn’t to say that Islam doesn’t have a role in national debates over women’s rights and legal change, whether from the standpoint of Islamists or women activists. On the contrary, most current discussions of the muslim based family laws and their reforms are direvtly framed through the lens of their religion, which again shows how the movement differs from the western movement. However, the most typical technique for Islamic law reform in national contexts is to choose use existing interpretations, including minority views and lesser-known hadiths, rather than inventing new or feminist readings of the Quran and the Sunna in their entirety. People part of the Islamic feminist movement have alreay made an immense amount of progress pushing for women to be part of all aspects of the society and to have equal amount of rights as men do. In Saudi Arabia, women were able to fight for their right to vote and women in 2015. Their push for driving without a male guardian also was a huge win for the movement in 2018. Around the same time the National Parliament of Syria contained 12% of women officials, which is definitely a huge change from the generations of domination of men in the government. Overall, the movement has gained international attention, aiding muslim women to attain the independece and equality that they deserve.

Badran, M. (2005). Between Secular and Islamic Feminism/s: Reflections on the Middle East and Beyond. Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, 1 (1), 6-28. Retrieved July 29, 2021, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/40326847
Seedat, F. (2013). Islam, Feminism, and Islamic Feminism: Between Inadequacy and Inevitability. Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, 29 (2), 25-45. doi:10.2979/jfemistudreli.29.2.25
Grami, A. (2013). Islamic Feminism: A new feminist movement or a strategy by women for acquiring rights? Contemporary Arab Affairs, 6 (1), 102-113. Retrieved July 29, 2021, from https://www.jstor.org/stable/48600673
Gashtili, P. (2013). Is an “Islamic Feminism” Possible?: Gender Politics in the Contemporary Islamic Republic of Iran. Philosophical Topics, 41 (2), 121-140. Retrieved July 29, 2021, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/43932739
Orr, T. (2020). Gender Justice in Islam. Middlesex University.
Tonnessen, L. (2014). Islamic Feminism. Retrieved from https://www.cmi.no/publications/file/5289-islamic-feminism-a-public-lecture-by.pdf

Neha is currently pursuing a degree in Sociology paired with International Relations and Media Studies. She aspires for a global career as an academic researcher and advocate of humanitarian action. She is deeply passionate about human rights and social justice, and she profoundly researches socio-economics, politics, and public policy to better understand the society and its institutions. One of her biggest accomplishments would be starting a free school in her backyard for kids with no access to education during the pandemic.

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Rekhti: The Feminist Movement in Urdu Literature Initiated by Men
In Urdu literature, the theme of love, separation, praising the beloved and living in agony found more recognition than the rest. But this does not denounce the reality that the horizons of Urdu literature have always been progressive enough to accommodate ideas of atheism, anti-patriarchy, Feminism, sexuality and various other themes considered salacious.
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Essay on Vegetables in Urdu. Essay on Women's Rights in Urdu- In this article we are going to read Essay on Women's Rights in Urdu | خواتین کے حقوق پر مضمون, womens rights in quran in urdu, womens rights college essays, women's fight for equal rights essay, women's rights then and now essay in urdu, اسلام میں ...
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Gender, Sexuality and Feminism in Pakistani Urdu Writing
It underlines Urdu's linguistic hybridities, the context of the zenana , reform, and rekhti . This book sets out an unconventional literary history of progressive Urdu poetry by Pakistani women in the twentieth century. ... voices of poets who tread a fine line between the secular and sacred in an Islamic society to articulate a new feminist ...
Gender, Sexuality and Feminism in Pakistani Urdu Writing
As the first study of its kind, this book offers a new understanding of progressive women's poetry in Urdu and the legacy of postcolonial politics. It underlines Urdu's linguistic hybridities, the context of the zenana, reform and rekhti to illustrate how the modernising impulse under colonial rule impacted women as subjects in textual form.
Conclusion
In my argument I have demonstrated that there is a strong connection between Progressive poetry and the women's movement committed to social justice. Type. Chapter. Information. Gender, Sexuality and Feminism in Pakistani Urdu Writing , pp. 253 - 258. Publisher: Anthem Press.
Gender, Sexuality and Feminism in Pakistani Urdu Writing on JSTOR
In doing so they offer a new aesthetic that is inspired by activism and influenced by feminist philosophy. 978-1-78527-756-6. Language & Literature, Religion, Sociology. As the first study of its kind, this book offers a new understanding of progressive women's poetry in Urdu and the legacy of postcolonial politics.
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Chapter 1
Gender, Sexuality and Feminism in Pakistani Urdu Writing, pp. 1 - 38. Publisher: Anthem Press. Print publication year: 2022. Access options Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)
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Islamic Feminism: What You Need To Know (Essay in 1900 words)
Islam and feminism are heavily discussed topics, especially with the current social conditions that are affecting a diverse amount of people all over the world. The two words put together might seem like an oxymoron, ... Islamic Feminism: What You Need To Know (Essay in 1900 words) August 5, 2021 by Neha Ankam.