Encyclopedia of Women & Islamic Cultures

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Secularism: Pakistan
(1,493 words)

As in other parts of South Asia, the Woman Question in Pakistan has long been mired in a communitarian mode of analysis that privileges religion over other forms of collective identity. This is in no small part the legacy of a colonial sociology of knowledge that treated Indian society as an aggregation of religious communities, and created notions of majority and minority communities that ignored internal differentiations along lines of gender as well as class, caste, region, and language. Beca…

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Jalal, Ayesha, “Secularism: Pakistan”, in: Encyclopedia of Women & Islamic Cultures, General Editor Suad Joseph. Consulted online on 04 December 2023 <http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/1872-5309_ewic_EWICCOM_0144d>
First published online: 2009



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