Death and Celebration among Muslim Women: A Case Study from Pakistan

After September 11 2001 questions about the nature and society of Islam were asked all over the world. Unfortunately in the rush to provide answers inadequate and even distorted explanations were provided. Muslim groups like the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan with their brutal ways came to symbolise Islam. The need to understand society through a diachronic and in-depth study was thus even more urgent. The following work is an attempt to explain how Muslims organise their lives through an examination of rituals conducted by women. This particularistic account has far-reaching ramifications for the study of Muslim society.This article seeks to contribute to the general debate on Islamic societies. In particular it contributes to the ethnographic discussion on the Pukhtun. First, it seeks to establish the distinctive sociality of Pukhtun wealthy women or Bibiane in terms of their participation, within and beyond the household, in gham-khadi festivities, joining them with hundreds of individuals from different families and social backgrounds. Second, the article makes a case for documenting the lives of this grouping of elite South Asian women, contesting their conventional representation as idle by illustrating their commitment to various forms of work within familial and social contexts. Third, it describes the segregated zones of gham-khadi as a space of female agency. Reconstructing the terms of this agency helps us to revise previous anthropological accounts of Pukhtun society, which project Pukhtunwali in predominantly masculine terms, while depicting gham-khadi as an entirely feminine category. Bibiane's gham-khadi performances allow a reflection upon Pukhtunwali and wider Pukhtun society as currently undergoing transformation. Fourth, as a contribution to Frontier ethnography, the arguments in this article lay especial emphasis on gham-khadi as a transregional phenomenon, given the relocation of most Pukhtun families to the cosmopolitan capital Islamabad. Since gham-khadi is held at families' ancestral homes (kille-koroona), new variations and interpretations of conventional practices penetrate to the village context of Swat and Mardan. Ceremonies are especially subject to negotiation as relatively young convent-educated married Bibiane take issue with their ‘customs’ (rewaj) from a scriptural Islamic perspective. These contradictions are being increasingly articulated by the female graduates of an Islamabad-based reformist religious school, Al-Huda. Al-Huda, part of a broader regional and arguably national movement of purist Islamization, attempts to apply Quranic and hadith prophetic teaching to everyday life. This reform involves educated elite and middle-class women. These women actively impart Islamic ways of living to family members across metropolitan–rural boundaries. The school's lectures (dars, classes) provide a basis for questioning ‘customary’ or Pukhtun life-cycle practices, authorizing some Bibiane to amend visiting patterns in conformity to the Quran. The manipulation of life-cycle commemorations by elite and middle-class women as a vehicle of change, Islamization and a particular mode of modernity furthermore becomes significant in the light of recent socio-political Islamic movements in post-Taliban Frontier Province. More broadly, the article contributes to various sociological and anthropological topics, notably the nature and expression of elite cultures and issues of sociality, funerals and marriage, custom and religion, space and gender, morality and reason, and social role and personhood within the contexts of Middle-Eastern and South Asian Islam.