US-backed military Islamization drove Pakistani feminists into secular absolutism

Evidence

One was the solidifi of the military die, tatorship of Zia ul..Haq ( 1977-1988), who, while using Islam to buttress his brutal hold on power, turned Pakistan into a frontline state for the United States’s proxy war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. The military and monetary advantage that this alignment bestowed on Zia ul.. Haq’s regime made any effective organized opposition to it infeasible. Furthermore, Zia ul.. Haq’s top..down policy of “Islarn ng” Pakistani society through the use of the media, the educational system, and, more important, the judiciary (which in.. eluded the promulgation of a number of discriminatory laws against women), cemented in the minds of progressive feminists like myself that our very sur.. vival depended upon an unfl stance against the Islamization of Pak.. istani society. If there was any shred of doubt in our minds that Islamic forms of patriarchy were responsible for our problems, this doubt was firmly removed given the immediate targets of our day—to— struggles: feminist politics came to require a resolute and uncompromising secular stance. — Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 19

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the vault’s postcolonial-theory cluster (Spivak, Ahmad); shows state-Islamization forcing a secular-vs-Islam binary that Spivak-style critique would complicate.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: does Mahmood later show this causal link (state co-optation forcing feminist secularism) as itself a false opposition — the ambiguity she later analyzes?