It is with great relief that I learnt that the Aurat March took place peacefully in several Pakistani cities. In Islamabad the Hafsa extremists attacked the marchers with sticks and stones but the ugly incident remained limited and no great harm was done.
In Islamabad, some 2000 people took part. In Lahore, the police say 6000 were in attendance. Leftist parties, NGOs and intellectuals took part besides some young people, mostly students.
I have also followed the barrage of criticism and in some cases wrath expressed by the idea of women having a sovereign right over their bodies.
As expected, Quranic verses and Hadith were quoted in the Pakistani Parliament and on social media against ideas of men and women having equal rights and equal right to social roles and choosing professions.
The refrain was that men and women have been allotted different roles by Allah and by his Word as preserved in the Quran.
Now, honestly speaking, there is no way you can ever demolish such a standpoint. That ideological stricture circumscribes the space within which one can make demands in Pakistan.
All the great and heroic examples that one can refer to from the international struggles of women elsewhere in the world become irrelevant in Pakistan if the basis for claiming rights has to be found in the Quran and Sunnah and possibly the praxis of the pristine State of Medina.
From my doctoral thesis to all subsequent research I have carried out over and over again confirms that in Pakistan chances of a change from within, which will help it cross the threshold from a medieval mindset into the 21st century, are very, very weak if not altogether absent.
Some stray statement of Jinnah is not going to help, though I must say that Jinnah was consistent on one subject: that in Pakistan women should have equal rights. However, all that was reduced to naught because Pakistan after its creation adopted a religious identity and espoused orthodox legal traditions.
In my forthcoming book on Jinnah, I demonstrate how the major argument advanced impacts all other arguments and how Islamists have made full capital of the major premise of the Pakistan movement.
Having said that, I think the struggle must go on and on. Maybe one day people realize that they need to step out of the Sharia-based argumentation about rights.
Until then, I wonder what else can be done except every year to express the hope that there is no way but to delink from the ideological foundations of Pakistan into perhaps a modern state and society.
Mustafa Kemal Ataturk went the farthest with the delinking but even there the forces of reaction are reversing the march of history: something neither Marx nor Mills could foresee but the Iranian revolution shows that revolutions can indeed reverse the historical process.
However, this is not the end of history. Perhaps Pakistan and the whole of South Asia will one day find a way out of their alarming tendency to go back to some imagined golden age.