"There goes the Ninja brigade again," was a familiar refrain among Anglophile folks during the six-month-long Lal Masjid/Jamia Hafsa crisis in Islamabad. For the vast majority of the Urdu-Hindi-Bangla-Punjabi-speaking population of Southasia, the term burqa posh – or the more recent expressions imported from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, hijabi and niqabi – denotes a Muslim woman in an all-encompassing veil, generally black, leaving only the eyes visible. In the case of Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, from the 1990s until the US-led invasion of December 2001, the infamous blue "shuttlecock" burqa became de rigueur.
This is in marked contrast to the centuries-old practice of a large section of Southasian urban women of only partially covering their heads with various chunnis, dupattas, chaddars, shawls, sari palloos or plain-old scarves – some opaque, others gauzy net or chiffon. Both of my non-segregated, non-secluded Muslim grandmothers covered their heads, and both were considered relatively progressive, liberal and 'modern'. This dress code was more a part of a common regional cultural heritage than an Islamist or religious statement. For that matter, my Hindu aunt, who lives in an ashram near Delhi, still sometimes covers her head, and I have Baha'i, Buddhist, Sikh and Parsi friends who do the same on occasion.
The burqa-clad mobs of women on the rampage are only the more obvious, and more recent, face of militant Islam. Of greater importance is the quiet, increasing penetration of an extremist brand of militant Islam into political and secular institutions, the bureaucracy and the public education system, by women who see themselves as representing the 'true' faith.
Islamists, of course, come in various hues, ranging from devout observers of a very personal faith, to those who reprimand, sermonise and preach in an intrusive fashion against those they perceive as being 'errant'. Then, there is the third category, which has taken upon itself the salvation of not just Muslims in the ummah, but of the entire human race. This fanatic trend is in direct conflict with, and in serious contravention of, the several Koranic injunctions against compulsion in religion, applicable to both women and men. These extremists include the transnationalist militant suicide bombers of al-Qaeda; the Jamia Hafsa/Lal Masjid state-within-a-state renegades; Pakistan's Muttahida-Majlis-e-Amal (MMA) political coalition; as well as the well-educated, UK-born and -raised radicals, such as those who kidnapped and murdered the American journalist Daniel Pearl in Karachi. These self-proclaimed custodians of the faith, whose sole objective is to gain political power in order to enforce Sharia as the law of the land, are commonly referred to in pejorative Urdu as thekedars, contractors.