Prologue

Summary

This book is based on my two research studies conducted in my native province, Khyber Pukhtunkhwa (hereafter Pukhtunkhwa), Pakistan. Both studies deal with women's struggle for empowerment and emancipation in the field of education in traditionalist Pukhtun society. The studies found that, given the prevailing patriarchal culture, Pukhtun women consider education a means of women's liberation and a tool of women empowerment. Higher education affords Pukhtun women a unique position in a male-dominated society. While higher education is accessible only to those who belong to the elite and upper socio-economic strata, women also face problems due to the particularly traditional mindset of the Pukhtuns. In the province, culture dominates the people's decision-making rather than the original teachings of Islam. A dominant argument in this book is that the strong roots of patriarchy reinforced religious misinterpretation that ‘culturalised’ Islam instead of Islamising the culture.

In Pukhtunkhwa, co-education and the institution of purdah (veiling and segregation) are defined in cultural terms despite being couched in religious terminology. This has further marginalised women's access to higher education. Both studies found that the patriarchal culture present in the region not only serves as a barrier preventing women from accessing higher education but also has provided a fertile ground for the Taliban's efforts to completely ban women's education in Swat Valley in the name of their extremist version of Islam. However, the Taliban's plans in the education sector have failed to fully materialise. The book argues that patriarchy and militarisation have been used as tools of cultural governance of identity and maintenance of gender stratification (Sjoberg et al., 2010). Thus, the main argument in the first story evolved around gender dynamics and women's epistemology under liberal, radical Marxist/socialist and Islamic feminism; and structured-functionalism/functionalism and feminist peace and conflict theories of women security in the second one. All these feminist approaches are concerned with unequal opportunities in higher education that challenge the propagation of male experience and knowledge. For instance, Marxists/socialists struggled for equal power relations for both genders in the Pukhtun society. At the same time, my studies rejected the liberal feminists’ stance to remove inequality by political, social and economic movement under the state law because law cannot bring equality in Pakistan in general and in the Pukhtun society in particular.