When the Avenger trumped Jiya

A Couple of recent storms in the social media teacup serve to remind one about the decreased capacity for critical thinking in certain quarters.

A cartoon series called Burqa Avenger has been generating hectic controversy. It is about a young female schoolteacher called Jiya who, when circumstances demand, is a masked vigilante for justice. Her goal is education for girls.

Jiya’s pen is literally mightier than the sword and the black burqa she wears as her costume allows her to glide from tree to tree, while also masking her identity. She’s been trained in the ninja-esque art of Takht Karate.

The outcry has been against the use of the burqa, that all-enveloping covering that is amongst the most readily visible symbols of women’s oppression, as the costume for our desi superhero.

Many feel that using the garment quietly reinforces the wearing of it — that the cartoons might induce young girls to adopt the burqa, or entrench even more deeply in the societal subconscious the conviction that ‘good’ women must wear them. Meanwhile, religiosity and conservatism are already on the increase in Pakistan.

On the surface, there is a point to this argument. The battle for winning equal rights for Pakistani women — in the case of many women, any rights at all — includes ceding to them full ownership over their bodies.

It includes the push to evolve the societal landscape to the point that the public arena is accessible to and safe for women, where they are not harassed, judged or leered at.

And, personally, I would appreciate fewer burqas, niqabs, hijabs and what-not (and, for the record, beards) around me; they didn’t use to be as ubiquitous as they are now.

Yet I’m left a little mystified by the need for all this controversy. It is also possible to argue that having Jiya wearing a burqa while in superhero mode could actually be rather subversive.

A very important component of the Jiya character is being missed by the naysayers, which is that the burqa is her superhero disguise. As a schoolteacher, she wears regular clothes with no head-covering, and most importantly, she works for a living. She fights for justice, she promotes girls’ education, she is a good person. These are the messages also being imparted to young audiences.

In a society where many girls face a future in which the burqa may be unavoidable, the Burka Avenger may equally communicate to them that it is an optional garment, there for the sake of convenience.

Every superhero wears a costume that hides his or her identity, and as a blog by Mahvesh Murad pointed out, in Pakistan if a woman wants to be able to hide in plain sight, what better way to do it but don a burqa?

The garment is imbued with religious connotations but also, perhaps more deeply, cultural ones. (The new middle-class religiosity of Pakistan tends to veer towards hijabs and niqabs rather than burqas.) As Murad pointed out, Superman fans did not grow into adults that wore their underpants on the outside.

What other messages could a burqa-clad avenger be sending out? Despite being dressed so, a woman remains in control of herself and her life; is not powerless and it might not be a good idea to pick on her; and, to every woman who must wear the garment, it could whisper “a bit of the ninja resides within you; take control”.

The debate generated by Burqa Avenger is, I feel, based on what I think of as ‘reactionary liberalism’ rather than careful consideration.

For every action there is an opposite and equal reaction, and as some elements in Pakistan have hardened their rightwards stance, so have those leaning in the opposite direction (but, crucially, without the threats, guns, violence or coercion the hardline right often employs). In this tussle, clarity is sometimes lost.

A similar predicament can be read into the response elicited from many people here by the court order in Bangladesh last week, which barred the Jamaat-i-Islami — the main Islamist party in that country — from contesting in January’s elections because its charter breaches the country’s secular constitution.

The argument is that since it is in contravention of the constitution, it should never have been allowed to register itself as a political party.

The social media here in Pakistan have been echoing with applause and no small degree of envy.

We are all too familiar with the mischief that can be done by playing the religion card in politics. The instinct of many is to argue for any means of keeping the religious right contained, to prevent the seed from growing into an ever-encroaching, ever-spreading poison-ivy.

Once anything that is based on religion becomes mainstream or normalised, it becomes virtually impossible to reverse it because religion trumps any other argument.

But all those who are offering Bangladesh hearty pats on the back are guilty of a superficiality of thought. Leaving the politics of Bangladesh aside, if a person considers himself liberal, then this demands a tolerance of pluralism, in whatever shape or form it occurs, including one which the liberal may personally find abhorrent.

I might be disturbed by growing religiosity and its outward manifestations, for example, but if I consider myself liberal in my views then I must not just tolerate it but even defend it.

(Courtesy demands that such elements show similar accommodation for my views; the growing absence of this in Pakistan, unfortunately, is what leads to ‘reflexive liberalism’.)

The landscape of Pakistan is such that clarity of analysis takes on a significance that is, so to speak, greater than the sum of its parts. Reflexive and reductionist analysis is part of the clay of which this landscape was created. Can one still make a plea for some mature examination?

The writer is a member of staff. hajrahmumtaz@gmail.com