This article argues that there has been a significant turn in the discourse of feminist politics in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. The author suggests that the rise of a new feminism – rooted in Islamic discourse, non-confrontational, privatized and personalized, whose objective is to ‘empower’ women within Islam – is not a post-9/11 development but rather a result of unresolved debates on the issue of religion within the progressive women's movement. It has been due to the accommodation of religion-based feminist arguments by the stronger secular feminist movement of the 1980s that paved the way for its own marginalization by giving feminist legitimacy to such voices. The author argues that the second wave of feminism may have become diluted in its effectiveness and support due to discriminatory religious laws, dictatorship, NGO-ization, fragmentation, co-option by the state and political parties in the same way as the global women's movement has. Yet it has been the internal inconsistency of the political strategies as well as the personal, Muslim identities of secular feminists that have allowed Islamic feminists to redefine the feminist agenda in Pakistan. This article voices the larger concern over the rise of a new generation of Islamic revivalist feminists who seek to rationalize all women's rights within the religious framework and render secular feminism irrelevant while framing the debate on women's rights exclusively around Islamic history, culture and tradition. The danger is that a debate such as this will be premised on a polarized ‘good’ vs ‘bad’ Muslim woman, such that women who abide by the liberal interpretation of theology will be pitted against those who follow a strict and literal interpretist mode and associate themselves with male religio-political discourse. This is only likely to produce a new, radicalized, religio-political feminism dominating Pakistan's political future.

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This article argues that the starting point for Marxist feminist praxis is not rooted in questions of identity, agency, authenticity, space, or body but in the oppression and the exploitation of women and men of the working class, peasants, urban poor, and national minorities. The analysis herein departs from the postmodernist study of language, representation, or culture and reaffirms how capitalization and modernization have bolstered traditional patriarchal gender relations. Tracing the limits of postmodernist, postcolonial, and transnational feminist theories, the authors scrutinize the renewed academic interest and treatment of Muslim women's "agency" after the events of September 2001.Using the case of the Lady Health Workers of Pakistan and retracing the collusive role of imperialism and Islamic politics in the Middle East, the authors argue for the need to return to a Marxist feminist analysis that is based on social materiality rather than on a trade between class and gender.