The ‘liberal extremist’ is the right-wing’s brilliant attempt at tapping into the powerful global constituency against violence and extremism in a post 9/11 world. Someone recently said that ‘when you are accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression’. In the case of Pakistan, when you have political leaders defending ‘honour’
killings as part of our cultural heritage, radical ideas like actually not hitting women at all are experienced as ‘liberal extremism’ threatening our moral values. Combine that with some good old ‘we must represent both sides’ and you have a veritable circus of religious political parties which cannot win an election but stay relevant by highlighting the various ways in which the masculinity of the Pakistani man is under threat by these out of control women.
To my knowledge, ‘liberal extremism’ hasn’t caused mass murder, nor do liberal extremists go around declaring individuals ‘wajibul qatl’ (punishable by death)which has become something of a national hobby. But don’t let such details bog you down.
Pakistanis, in general (and the clerics in particular), spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about women and how to protect men from them. So much so that we allocate an annual Rs100 million to the Council of Islamic Ideology (CII) to produce cutting edge research on what it means to be a woman.
