Summary
The gendered nature of the commentary about the Jamia Hafsa students cuts across many sections of society - from the radio DJ who, tongue firmly in cheek, declared the theme of his show "girl power - in honour of the lathes of Jamia Hafsa", to the highly respected journalist deploying the phrase "chicks with sticks", to the head of Jamaat-ud-Dawa (the offshoot of the banned militant party Lashkar-e-Toiba) opposing the students' actions on the grounds diat it is un-Islamic for women to take a leadership position, to General Musharraf dismissing the vigilantes as "misguided women" - which seems to suggest that they wouldn't or couldn't behave as they were doing if not for someone else (presumably male) guiding their actions. Newspapers have taken to juxtaposing "oppositional" photographs in support of this thesis: a tracksuit-wearing female athlete with a javelin beside stick-wielding women in black; a bareheaded, short-sleeved female protester holding up a sign saying "No to Extremism, Yes to Music" taking the front-page space given the previous day to more stick-wielding women in black (the photographs of the JH students are taken from different angles, in different places, but are ultimately always the same photograph).
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Extract
'Misguided Women'
The ninjas. The burqa brigade. The women in black. For some years now I've been hearing such terms thrown around with disdain by "burqa-unfriendly" sections of Pakistani society to describe the women who swathe themselves entirely in black. The terms are disparaging, but until recently they were a...
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