Postcolonial feminist lefts across Muslim countries shared a critical Marxist inheritance

Evidence

By the time my generation of Pakistanis carn to political consciousness during the 1970s and 1980s, the high moment of postcolonial nationalism had passed and there was considerable disillusion.. rn with what the now “not,so.. new” nation could provide for its citizens. There was, however, still a sense among the feminist left in Pakistan that some form of critical Marxism, combined with a judicious stance toward issues of gender inequality, could provide a means of thinking through our predica.. ment and organizing our pragmatic efforts at changing the situation in which we lived. In this we were perhaps not so different from our counterparts in countries like Algeria, Egypt, and Tunisia, where the postcolonial condition had generated a similar sense of disappointment but also a continued sense of nourishment, borne out of the promises that the twin ideologies of critical Marxism and feminism held out for us. — Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 17