ABSTRACT

Asma Jahangir, the internationally acclaimed lawyer and activist, was a central figure in the debates, challenges, and achievements for women’s and human rights in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. She served as a UN Special Rapporteur on three occasions and won an array of international awards, yet at home, she was a controversial figure. She stood at the center of conflicts and debates concerning international women’s rights norms on the one hand and the complex, fragmented local gender regimes in Pakistan on the other. This essay discusses debates on gender roles and the rights of religious minorities in Pakistan. Liberal, individualized, secular, democratic, and rational norms that are considered key to Western notions of human rights have been pitted against the values of collectivity, honor, complementarity of gender relations, and religious legal reasonings believed to characterize Islamic worldviews. Human rights activism faced a sharp backlash in post-9/11 Pakistan. The source of this hostility was not limited to conservatives and Islamists; it also emanated from several diasporic scholar-activists who taxonomized rights-based activism as “Western” and “Islamophobic” and cast feminists and human rights activists as imperialists, collaborators, and native informants. In this essay, these contestations are framed by the person of Asma Jahangir, who personified the struggle for human rights in Pakistan and was a principal target of nationalist, religious, majoritarian, and masculinist anxieties.