Riaz was also a human rights activist and the author of more than 15 books on fiction and poetry.

When “Badan Dareeda”, her second collection of verse, appeared in 1973, she was accused of using erotic and sensual expressions in her poetry. The themes prevalent in her verse were, until then, were considered taboo for women writers.

Born into a literary family of Meerut (India) on July 28, 1946, her family settled in Hyderabad after her father’s transfer to Sindh. She was four when her father passed away and was brought up by her mother. After completing her education she began working as a newscaster for Radio Pakistan. She had started writing at a very young age, managed her own Urdu publication named Aawaz.

Aawaz was later banned for its revolutionary vision and publishing articles containing a liberal view on the then ruling government.

Riaz, in addition to her literary pursuits, always played an active role in social and political activities.

She lived in self-exile for over six years in India when former military dictator Gen Zia-ul-Haq ruled over Pakistan. She worked as a poet-in-Residence at Jamia Millia University in this period.

She was appointed managing director of what was then the National Book Council of Pakistan during the first Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) government (1988-90).

In Benazir Bhutto’s second tenure as Prime Minister, she became associated with the Ministry of Culture.

In 2009, she was appointed the chief editor of the Urdu Dictionary Board in Karachi.

Famous Pakistani writer Kamila Shamsie condoled Riaz’s death and termed her “one of the brightest of lights in the dark days” of dictatorship.

Senior journalist Raza Rumi called her the “finest of our poets, writer, and translator, activist” on Twitter.

Noted Pakistani author Ayesha Siddiqa, said : “Sad to lose another very lovely Khala the dynamic @fahmidaRiaz she was brave, daring and a great person – rest in peace Khala you will be missed in a land where people can no longer disagree and still live.”

Central committee member of CPI-M  tweeted Renowned Pakistani Poet Fahmida Riaz passes away in Lahore. She had fled General Zia-ul Haq’s tyranny, sought refuge & spent 7 years in exile in India. Her warning to Indians on religious fundamentalists remains and will keep ringing forever.

Her works have been digitised by the Rekhta Foundation and available on their site: Fahmida authored of several books like Godaavari, Khatt-e Marmuz, Khana e Aab O Gil, Pathar ki Zaban, Dhoop, Badan Darida, Karachi, Adhoora Aadmi, Khule Dareeche Se, Qafle Parindon Ke, Gulabi Kabootar, etc. Apart from this she also translated the masnavi of Maulana Jalaluddin Rumi from Persian to Urdu, Shah Abdul Latif Bhitai and Shaikh Ayaz from Sindhi to Urdu and Rumi’s shayari into Urdu.

One of her famous poems presented here:
Woh ik Zan-e-Napaak Hai (She is a woman impure) which talks volumes about her courage
She is a woman impure
imprisoned by her flowing blood
in a cycle of months and years.
Consumed by her fiery lust,
in search of her own desire,
this mistress of the devil
followed his footsteps
into a destination obscure
unmarked, unmapped before,
that union of light and fire
impossible to find.
In the heat of her simmering passion
her breasts have ripped
By each thorn on the wayside
every membrane of her body ripped.
No veil of shame conceals her body
No trace it bears of sanctity
But, O Ruler of land and oceans,
who has seen this before?
Everywhere your command is supreme
Except over this woman impure
No prayer crosses her lips
No humility touches her brow.

Source: We Sinful women, contemporary Urdu feminist poetry by Ruksana Ahmad

(With inputs from IANS)

Courtesy: Two Circles
 

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Women’s march to denounce Donald Trump in Toronto, January 21 2017. Credit: Wikimedia/By booledozer. CC BY-SA 2.0.

There is no fiercer political weapon than laughter. The controversy around Michelle Wolf’s brilliant, uncomfortable, and brutally honest roast at the 2018 White House Correspondents Dinner is the latest in a long line of examples that reveal the threatening power of feminist jokes. As the author Margaret Atwood puts it, “Men are afraid women will laugh at them; women are afraid men will kill them.” This is why the Patriarchy has always tried to stereotype feminists as humorless killjoys, the anti-pleasure police, or shrill sticks in the mud.

In reality, nothing could be farther from the truth. From Samantha Bee’s satirical TV show Full Frontal; to the stand-up comedy of Wanda Sykes, Margaret Cho and Tig Notaro; to the explosion of playful memes and witty protest signs that forcefully satirize patriarchal predation, feminism is, and has always been, mobilized and strengthened through collective joyful laughter.

As I show in my new book, Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes, insightful satire and exuberant comedy were important forces in the early years of the feminist movement. The biggest myth of anti-feminist propaganda—both in the present moment and in the history of the struggle—is that wanting equal rights and having a sense of humor are somehow mutually exclusive.

In fact, when women laugh too loudly or pointedly they’re often disregarded as ‘hysterical’—not in the positive sense or as a figure of speech but as pathology: ‘maybe we should send you to a mental institution and poke at your uterus to figure out what’s wrong with you.’

Comedy, though delirious and light-hearted, is often extremely violent and vividly obscene. There’s a fine line between edgy and insulting, and it’s long been the role of the clown to test the boundaries of that line as they change over time, particularly during moments of escalating social and political activism. Wolf exemplifies this tension between the timely and the taboo in her roast with jokes like these: “Sarah Huckabee Sanders, I loved you as Aunt Lydia in The Handmaid’s Tale;”  “I know a lot of you are very anti-abortion, unless it’s the one you got for your secret mistress.”

Women, LGBQT+, people of color, and other oppressed minorities have long used satirical comedy effectively to ‘punch up’ against authority and speak truth to power. For example, as Lindy West puts it in “How to Make a Rape Joke,” there’s a difference between “a joke about women getting raped” and “a joke about the way that rape culture—which includes rape jokes, makes women feel.” Nothing is off-limits for progressive comedy, not even rape; what matters is whether the victim or assaulter becomes the butt of the punch line. Regardless of the comedian’s identity—even if you have to live in the aftermath of your own mockery—a joke that goes too far, or that risks exploiting its topic rather than exposing it, will typically fall on deaf ears.

The refusal to laugh is not always intentional. After all, laughter is supposed to be involuntary: it erupts in spite of ourselves, often in response to images and ideas that actively confuse us. This is neither good nor bad: we laugh when we’re not completely sure how we want to feel about something, and are still thinking it through. In other words, we are not always in control of the social consequences of our laughter, even though we would like to be.

Comedy is often a matrix for processing social change, as much as an active force that directly provokes it. As an example, take Mary Jane’s Mishap, a slapstick comedy from 1903 starring Laura Bayley about a housemaid who spontaneously combusts out of the chimney while trying to light a fire. Mary Jane erupts out of the roof and her dismembered limbs and torso rain down over the village skyline. Finally she returns as a ghost to haunt her own gravestone, which has the epitaph, “Here Lies Mary Jane. Rest in Pieces.”
Mary Jane’s explosion out the chimney is an absurd representation of how women desire to break free from the domestic sphere and the drudgery of everyday housework. I’m really attracted to these types of films in which gendered oppression is rendered ridiculous. That’s what slapstick is all about: the exaggerated representation of make-believe violence, but violence that strikes us as somehow too zany or cartoonish to be threatening in reality.

Women have always had a marginal position in physical comedy because audiences often feel uncomfortable laughing at comical images of violence against female characters. As with West’s distinction between rape jokes and jokes about rape culture, Mary Jane’s Mishap took aim at the tyranny of women’s domestic enslavement and the brutal mockery of violence against women in the home by presenting these things in slapstick form—and through that medium connecting with its audience.  

The comedian Amy Schumer takes a page out of Mary Jane’s Mishap in her sketch show Inside Amy Schumer, which frequently features skits about women who spontaneously combust, self-decapitate, or commit absurd ritual suicide when their ability to derive meaning from their everyday lives stands in vivid contradiction to their own utopian gender ideals. Skits like “Trouble Accepting a Compliment,” “I’m So Bad,” and “Allergic to Nuts” all exemplify Schumer’s slapstick feminism ad absurdum.

This isn’t new. From the early 1900s, female slapstick comedy in the popular media has been an  avenue for feminist activism and social protest. For example, the only way for Mary Jane to break out of the home is through the chimney. In another film released in 1914 called Daisy Doodad’s Dial, a bored housewife trains to compete in an amateur face-making competition so avidly that she is arrested for public indecency after she grimaces at random men on a street car.

She then shuts herself up in her bedroom and has nightmares in which she’s haunted by spectral superimpositions of her own disembodied face-making. Or take Laughing Gas (made in 1907), in which a black woman is given nitrous oxide by her white male dentist, and then spreads her laughter contagiously through the streets, including to several police officers who can’t arrest her because they’re all laughing too uproariously.

Social satire in these films arises from the jarring clash between how women and minorities are traditionally expected to behave and how they actually want to live, exemplified in suffragette protest comedies, trick films in which women metamorphose into giant spiders or man-eating dolls, and domestic disaster comedies where women ‘blow up’ or bust loose from their normative gender roles and domestic duties in a variety of astonishing ways.

It’s also important to remember that cinema, like Twitter or YouTube today, was the most popular form of new media in the 1890s and early 1900s. There was something about the power of cinema to display movement as never before—housemaids exploding, automobiles crashing, miniature nicotine fairies melting—that provided fertile terrain for social protest and cultural experimentation.

Women’s bodies were ideal for these ends, because they were believed to be physically malleable and less resistant to external manipulation—just look, for example, at the corsets women were expected to wear in the early 1900s that contorted their bodies into crazy human hourglasses. New media images, like gendered bodies, have always been celebrated for their limitless capacity for physical manipulation and visual invention.

People have been drawn to ‘new’ media throughout history because they believe in the transformative power of radical images to influence social and political breakthroughs. Female-identified and gender fluid bodies—the clothes they wear, the positions they assume, and the way their bodies occupy public spaces—are markers of how much social norms and cultural ideals can change over time.

I see so many parallels between the feminist protest culture of the early 1900s and our present-day moment in 2018, when satirical laughter and new media experimentation are again such vibrant parts of our collective imagination and activist resistance. One of my favorite protest signs at the Global Women’s March in 2017 was proudly raised by a group of women dressed as suffragettes: “Same Shit, Different Century,” it said.

Though the issues have changed—from voting rights to abortion rights to #MeToo—some things remain the same: feminist laughter is a forceful political weapon. Some will continue to repeat the old lie that “Women Aren’t Funny,” but that’s ok—it shows that they’re still terrified by the revolutionary power of collective laughter. 

Maggie Hennefeld’s new book is Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes, published by Columbia University Press.

Maggie Hennefeld is an Assistant Professor of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities and author of Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes, published by Columbia University Press.
 

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Academic Life
She specialized in Sociocultural Anthropology and was a scholar of modern Egypt. She was born in Lahore, Pakistan in 1962 and went to the United States in 1981 to study architecture and urban planning at the University of Washington in Seattle. She received her PhD in Anthropology from Stanford University in 1998 and taught at the University of Chicago. After this she joined the University of California at Berkeley in 2004, where she offered her last seminar in fall 2017.  She was also affiliated with the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Berkeley in the Program in Critical Theory and the Institute for South Asia Studied. She was instrumental in creating the Berkeley Pakistan Studied Initiative, a unique initiative in the United States.

Of everything, Mahmood is best known for her path breaking contributions to formulations on secularism and feminist theory. Mahmood brought careful and nuanced debates in the context of an increasingly shrill and dichotomous academic and political context, mostly dismissive of Muslim societies.
She offered keen analyses of colonial and capitalist power in her account of secularism’s modernity, and formulated ways of understanding feminism, relational subjectivity, religious freedom, religious injury, rights of religious minorities, and comparative legal analysis of religious and secular family law and sexual regulations.

Secularism, producing differences as opposed to regulating Religions
Saba, along with other anthropologists like Talal Asad and Charles Hirschkind showed secularism to be a complex political formation that, in the process of regulating religion, actually, tends to produce differences.

Bringing an understanding that secularism never escapes its own religious histories and also that many a times secularism in itself is influenced by the formations of religions that it seeks to regulate, she said, “Political secularism is the modern state’s sovereign power to reorganize substantive features of religious life, stipulating what religion is or ought to be, assigning its proper content, and disseminating concomitant subjectivities, ethical frameworks, and quotidian practices.” 

Demarcating the distinctions between the essence of Christianity and Islam, she brought a nuanced understanding to the concept of secularism itself. She said that the concept of distinction between public and private that is central to secular reason, in fact draws its bearing from a modern Christian emphasis on private worship. She contrasted the framework of Christianity which focused on belief, vis a vis the framework of Islam which strongly emphasised on the role of embodied practices within religious life. Hence, she concluded that the supposedly secular epistemologies can’t grasp the articulation of Islamic religious values misconstruing both the Islamic subject and the public meanings of its religious practices.

The Feminist Subject in Islam
Saba Mahmood, also established a ground breaking credential for establishing the agency of the Muslim women, especially the so called pious and devout ones as not merely the objects of gaze of Western feminists and obedient subjects but mainly as subjects with their own thinking minds and agency. Mahmood gave the Western world a new way of seeing the Muslim feminist especially through her observations of Egyptian women, where they were getting educated in the mosques. Explaining this phenomenon, she said, “We have to take seriously the concept of a deep sense of love of God without living in a monastery or convent. But I think it’s difficult in our Western mind-set to imagine a religiously devout woman living in a modern and secular world. They are also getting practical advice to difficult social problems. For example, if you are on public transportation and you are sexually harassed, how do you handle that as a devout person? Often, one of the things women would bring up with other Dai’as is- what does it mean to have a sexual dream? How do I police my desires? What kinds of relationships can I have with my betrothed? Questions like, I found out my daughter has had extra-marital affairs, what do I do about it? Obviously I’m not going to turn her into the state, so what do I do? Women used to be able to write these questions in to a sheikh or call in. But now, women are raising these issues with other women and it’s a very different type of discussion, a much more frank discussion”
Thus, she explained from her observations that how mosques were actually becoming spaces where women were coming up with their social problems. Hence, she opened up possibilities that demanded that in order to understand pious women within Islam one had to conceive of a subject defined in its relations to the textual and imagistic representations of the divine.

How Secular regimes helped in exacerbating Religious differences
In her last work, she brought in contrarian viewpoints to the understanding that tribal and religious differences are evidence of the incomplete process of secularization. Instead she showed that how religious differences and conflicts have been exacerbated under secular regimes of power. In the context of the discrimination against Coptic Orthodox Christians in contemporary Egypt’s secular regimes, she argued that the discrimination and violence suffered by them have increased as the modern state more fully regulated and managed religious life, imposing its own rationales and debated about religion and its practice. She held an important argument that, “Far from realizing ideals of civic and political equality, the secular state facilitated religious inequalities and inter-faith violence.”

An Ocean of Academic work
Mahmood was the author of Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report and Politics of Piety: the Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. The Feminist Subject won the Victoria Schuck Award from the American Political Science Association. She co-authored a Is Critique Secular? (Fordham University Press, 2011) and co-edited Politics of Religious Freedom (University of Chicago, 2015).  Her work has been translated into Arabic, French, Persian, Portuguese, Spanish, Turkish, and Polish.  She published numerous articles in the fields of anthropology, history, religious studies, political science, critical theory, feminist theory, and art criticism and served on several journal boards and read for many presses.  Professor Mahmood was the recipient of several honors and awards, including the Axel Springer Fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin, and fellowships at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University and the University of California Humanities Research Institute. She was the recipient of a major grant from the Henry Luce Foundation’s Initiative on Religion and International Affairs as well as the Harvard Academy of International and Area Studies. She also received the Frederick Burkhardt Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies, as well as the Andrew Carnegie Scholars’ program as a young scholar. She was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Uppsala in Sweden in 2013.

The Personal
Not only was she a brilliant scholar and a dedicated teacher, she loved wilderness and the poetry of Ghalib. She cooked wonderful food. She was a source of inspiration for many scholars who found face to face with Western notions of feminism and secularism. In their obituary, the Berkeley university site said, “She mentored her students with remarkable care and intensity, demanding their best work, listening, responding with a sharp generosity, coming alive in thought, and soliciting others to do the same. In her final months, she affirmed the values of thought and love, leaving now a vibrant legacy that will persist and flourish among all whose lives were touched by her life and work.  She is survived by her husband, Charles Hirschkind, her son, Nameer Hirschkind.”

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From the failed project of Islamisation of knowledge to Islamic banking most Muslim men of knowledge do adhere to these redundant terms. But would like to term Islamic feminism as a Western extension, conspiracy and project aimed at opening the doors of moral laxity and destroy the structure and institution of family in the Muslim world that is already under strain more because of modernity, globalization and forces of change rather than a grand conspiracy of west. It has become an innocent excuse for Muslims that instead of introspection they brand everything vice as Western and Jewish conspiracy. This conspiracy theory mindset has led Muslims towards self aggrandizement putting a pace on their progress and intellectual development.

The question of women is a tricky one for Muslims as they believe that Islam has bestowed complete set of rights on women hence they do not need salvation in Feminism. Also they may be visionary about this project of Islamic feminism unlike the failed projects of Islamic banking and Islamisation of knowledge that they can surmise about its death, even when it has not matured. Muslim women do not need to be rescued through a legal recourse or a male chauvinist like Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi does not need to come to their rescue. What they need is to reclaim their rights that Islam, Quran and Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) have already bestowed on them. But over the centuries patriarchy, misogyny and interpretation of Holy scriptures at the hands of men have snatched away these revolutionary rights from Muslim women. Now this patriarchy needs to be fought and Muslim women need to reclaim their rights.

Islamic feminism is a movement to restore those rights and interpret Islam in a gender just manner. Let’s leave the label Islamic feminism or Gender Justice in Islam as they aim for the same goals. I associate myself with the gender justice movement in Islam. It is easy for a woman to be associated as a feminist. But man as a feminist? Nay what are you talking about? How can a male be a feminist? No, he must be gay that is camouflaging his sexuality in the garb of feminism. Your make friends tag you as gay or a womanizer. For some male friends, claiming to be a feminist is the best way to reach out to women, make friends and exploit. Most males think that male-female friendship is not possible but with some sexual angle associated with it. Some clever male friends who are aware of your acquaintance with females want you to act as intermediary who is a ladder to their love tangles, affairs and flirts.

To your female friends, colleagues and acquaintances most of the times you are too effeminate as you are emotional like any human being should be. But patriarchy has reinforced this belief among them that men should not sob or display any emotions or they can’t afford to because they are brave and need to protect women. Most of them do not see gentle and gender just men as future husbands but men who are best suited to act as shoulders, thus friend zoned. Also if you afford to have a girlfriend or a fiancé and she ditches you or is unfaithful and you leave her without punishment, whether physical or psychological then you certainly don’t deserve the right to be called a man. Not to talk of your male friends as for them you are a spineless scoundrel, even the female friends tag you as jackass because you don’t believe in revenge.

I remember a fellow male feminist friend, who hosted two female friends for a week. When they were about to leave one of them intimated him that they guess he was impotent because having every chance for a week to take physical advantage atleast with one of them, he missed the opportunity of exploring gorgeous girls. As if getting physical is the only trait of being a man. Feminist or Gender Just men are not impotent or without physical desires but they cherish the fact that before getting physical love must be there, instead of just animal instincts ruling roost. They cherish the value of being loyal to their girlfriends or wives instead of satiating their sexual hunger whenever they find an opportunity.

To the religious minded patriarchal friends and colleagues you are just opening the flood gates of promiscuity, breaking families and granting limitless freedom to women who already have been condemned to be deficient in reason and religion. Further granting them decision making power that too as wives will create a havoc, as the wives are supposed to be subservient to their husbands because marriage as an institution can run only when there is one head. Marriage according to them is not based on mutual love, respect and understanding but on power relations that they camouflage in the disguise of religion and social norms.

The biggest shock you receive is when your female feminist friends would assign themselves the job of a mullah and begin issuing Fatwas when they seem to disagree with you. The best whip to lash at you is to brand you as patriarchal because you may not be on the same page with them about any issue. I had not encountered this bitter experience from fellow female feminists until recently when in a divorce case after listening to both the parties, I happened to reach out at a solution that for me was pragmatic one. But the feminists had made up the mind to punish the husband as he was male and the wife had rattled that he abused her which was admitted prima facie without authentication. Feminism for me does not stand for male bashing, but gender justice in which both sexes are equal stakeholders. I tried to further my efforts in resolving the vexed problem and tried to enquire about the next steps of the feminist group about which I had the illusion that they considered me a part of it. But to my utter surprise and shock the ‘feminist friend’ rebuked me by saying that they cannot disclose their cards as I am a male and its is difficult for me to be a feminist though I tried to be one, as if her ratification and certificate for me was essential for me to be a gender justice activist or a feminist. So the dilemma and dichotomy is always prevalent about your activism and stance towards gender justice even among feminists.

But if your core beliefs are strong and one believes with head and heart in gender justice then these perils are no threat to your cause. Further one needs to remind oneself that there is little good in the world and it certainly is worth fighting for. Gender Justice is one such cause and you don’t need to be a woman to be a soldier for gender jihad. All you need is a burning desire to smash patriarchy and being different to what patriarchs or feminists say about you. You are there for justice and that is all you need to remind yourself.

M.H.A.Sikander is Writer-Activist based in Srinagar, Kashmir

Courtesy: NewAgeIslam
 

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