Sovereign Attachments by Shenila Khoja-Moolji

Author:Shenila Khoja-Moolji [Khoja-Moolji, Shenila]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520336797
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2021-06-15T07:00:00+00:00

FIVE

Kinship Metaphors

THE BETI AND BEHAN

IN 2017, THE ARREST OF NINETEEN-YEAR-OLD NAUREEN LAGHARI became a national news sensation in Pakistan. She had left home on the morning of February 10 to attend classes at the Liaquat Medical College in Hyderabad but did not return. Her parents filed a missing persons report with the police. A few months later, four militants were arrested in Lahore for planning to bomb a church on Easter; one of them was a woman later identified as Laghari.

It was found that Laghari had travelled to Lahore with the hope of eventually migrating to “the land of Khilafah,” as she explained to her brother in a text message.1 She had married a militant, Ali Tariq, joined his network, and at the time of her arrest was expected to blow up a church in a few days.2 During the military raid, Tariq was killed, and while Laghari engaged in a shootout with the police for about an hour, she was eventually captured.3 Surprisingly, she was released a few days later. The representative of the Pakistani army disarticulated her from terrorism and rearticulated her as a “quam-ki-beti” (nation’s daughter) who had been duped by the terrorists. Laghari therefore deserved protection and not punishment; she was ultimately forgiven.

This chapter surveys a number of cases to illustrate how the state, the Taliban, as well as “the people,” draw on kinship feelings to create and expand the scope for sovereignty. In particular, threats to the beti (daughter) and behan (sister)—who are imagined as proxies for the honor of men, the ummah, and the nation—stir up feelings of care and humiliation, providing the affective environment for the sovereign functions of violence, rescue, rebuke, and forgiveness. I begin with a consideration of Laghari’s case to point to how, through the metaphor of beti, she is cast as the daughter of not only her parents but the entire nation. The ISPR utilizes this figuration to furnish itself as the patriarch, binding the nation into a paternal public. This public then legitimizes state violence in the name of protecting the beti. This kinship feeling is so powerful that even women who attack or plan to attack the state but then decide to reform their ways, such as Laghari, are forgiven and folded back into the national family.4 Women who critique the state, however, are not offered such possibilities; they are disciplined. The case of gang-rape victim Mukhtar Mai illustrates how women who do not abide by patriarchal scripts of compliance, which are interlinked with ideal styles of political attachment, are reprimanded. These women become what I am calling the “unruly daughters.”

The Taliban also articulate women through kinship metaphors to cultivate a public that legitimizes their violence. Here, the feminine subject of rescue and protection is the behan, and sometimes the beti, who has been violated, often sexually, by the kuffar—a category that includes both national and imperial Others. Her violation recruits the magazines’ readership as a fraternal public that views it as a breach of the ummah’s honor and therefore coheres together as a humiliated collectivity.

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