Alumni Association Home > Minnesota Magazine > Past Issues > 2002 > July-August 2002

Fouzia Saeed, photograph by Mark Luinenburg

For me, my field of activity is not different from my life. It is all intertwined. I work on women’s issues as my job, but it’s also my life. It’s uphill mostly. I think for women all over it’s uphill. And it is for women in Pakistan.

I think it was asking questions that got me into activism. I live in Islamabad and work for ActionAid, an international nongovernmental organization. Our main mission is poverty eradication and fighting social injustice. Sometimes I question. I ask, Is the problem poverty? Or is the problem accumulation or greed? Poverty is a consequence. Maybe the problem is that some people have too much. It depends on how we define the problem. I ask questions about issues that people don’t want to talk about and I push the issues into the mainstream. Now I’m determined to do that with prostitution.

I first visited the Shahi Mohalla, the red light area of Lahore, Pakistan, for about eight months before deciding to write a book. I had questions about the relationship of the performing arts to prostitution and about the stigmatization of women who are in the performing arts. My training at the University of Minnesota taught me that when you have questions you design a research study and find the answers. It turned out to be so interesting that I studied the people in the Mohalla for seven years.

My book, Taboo: The Hidden Culture of a Red Light Area, came out in September 2001 (Oxford University Press). It was published in English and is being translated into Urdu and Hindi. It is kind of a risky topic, so my husband and I were prepared for backlash. But the book came out around September 11, and everybody got so absorbed with those incidents, especially the militant faction in our society. That gave space for the book to blurt out into society, and now I think I’m quite safe because it has taken root.

I’ve met a lot of pimps, prostitutes, musicians, customers, and shopkeepers. And what I’ve realized is prostitution is a very complete system. It’s a subculture with its own social norms. This kind of prostitution is a very common South Asian tradition through dynasty after dynasty. I have found references from 300 B.C.

It is very different from the Western concept of a red light area. The Shahi Mohalla is just like any residential area. It is in the old city of Lahore where the streets are very narrow and the houses are multistoried. You cannot see that it’s a red light area. It’s only after 11 o’clock when the lights turn on and the doors open and there are very decorated women sitting there. They’re very polite and they will invite you in. They start out with music and they dance and it goes on from there. One needs to understand this complexity of entertainment and not just sexual service. And it’s a family environment. The mother is the manager, and there is a formula for how the money is distributed. There is abuse that goes on, too, especially for those women who cannot secure younger girls and become a manager. They end up prostituting until they die. It is a miserable situation.

One of my goals is to demystify prostitutes. Unless we understand this phenomenon we cannot come up with a solution. We’ve got to move our attention from them to us because the problem may exist in us. Gradually I realized it was the male powerful elite that created the Kanjar, the occupational caste that takes up prostitution, for their own entertainment—and also the flip side, that they created the modest woman and the good wife. So my analysis took me in a direction where I started combating this good-woman, bad-woman idea.

The institution of prostitution is supported in one way or the other by the government, if not officially then unofficially, because the powerful elite is the customer or is protector of the culture. There are some people in the powerful elite or in the government who are saying, no, we have to curb prostitution, but there are very strong links between them.

I’m saying let’s open it up and see how our society created prostitutes. We told them what their life’s mission is and their occupation is. And we are so attuned to making sure they remain in their roles that we don’t even realize how we make sure they remain in their roles. So we need to question a lot of those things. I’m not saying I have a solution. I’m saying that we really need to look at ourselves and this society and see what we are doing.

It boils down to patriarchy and analysis of patriarchy which links to everything that I’m doing in my life, be it research on violence against women or human rights.

I am from a middle-class family. My father was an engineer and my mother was a homemaker. During the teenage years you realize a lot of freedoms that you have as a girl you don’t have anymore. As you grow up you can’t do this and you can’t do that, and that’s what starts defining a woman: what you can’t do. That’s where my exploration started.

My parents didn’t encourage me to question, but they didn’t say "don’t ask." I consider my family one of the more liberal ones, but still I had to bargain. When I was about 17, I wanted to learn how to play the sitar, but it was not a thing for "good" women to do. Because I pestered them, my parents got me an ustad, a music teacher, to instruct me at home. I got good enough to play at least one raga, a classical music piece, and my ustad said that maybe I could play this piece on a radio program. But there was no way my parents would give permission. There was a debate. The same thing happened when I wanted to dance. But I think it was an exploration for my parents also because they had this child who was not satisfied. They began to see that there was nothing wrong with what I wanted to do. They decided, so what if she does these things? So I created that space and they gave me that space.

I earned my bachelor’s degree and got first position in my university and so was offered an international scholarship from my government. I applied to some universities and the first acceptance letter I got was from the University of Minnesota, so that was my choice. I had no clue what or where Minnesota was. It was not a scrutinized choice. I was just so thrilled that I would be going to the United States to study.

In Pakistan we have 10 years of schooling; in the United States you have 12. So I had to do my bachelor’s again, then I got my master’s and Ph.D. there. I just fell in love with the University. I was amazed at the choices of courses and fields. I did my master’s in design, and then switched to education. It was like being in heaven. Every course was like a treat.

I got involved with the Pakistan Students Association, Minnesota International Students Association, and Minnesota Students Association. I also became involved in women’s organizations outside the University. I went through a lot of changes in those eight years. When I came from Pakistan I was a gung-ho leader type, but I gradually made a transformation to facilitation. I learned that to bring about change in a society or to question issues you don’t always have to be confrontational and have protests. There are many other healthy ways of doing it.

I did all that I could do in every 24 hours to pack up whatever information and skills I could inside me. I was very aware that this was my opportunity to learn as much as possible. I was always very clear that I would go back and work for women in my country. That was my flame.

In Islamabad I joined the Ministry of Culture and worked as deputy director of research in the Institute of Folk and Traditional Heritage. I wanted to study women’s roles and so developed projects such as on the role of women in a nomad culture. I was there four years, but one of my personal goals was to connect with all kinds of women in the country and know their issues and relate to them not as a middle-class, educated person but as a woman. When I would go to villages for research I would sometimes stay late and talk to the women. They started to trust me and tell me their experiences. Sometimes they would be very open about violence. Other times they would be closed but would give me clues. Sometimes they would tell me stories about other women and honor killings, rape, and domestic violence. And then I would go visit some of those women. It took me several years before I felt ready, when I was raising an issue, that I had the roots to talk about it.

That’s when I started Bedari, the very first crisis center in Pakistan, in 1991. Violence shapes women’s lives so much, and when they wanted to get out of such a relationship or do something to stop the violence, the family or the society would gently push them back into it—for their children, for their family’s honor, for this, for that. There was no independent place for these women to go.

Like-minded friends and I rented out a house in Islamabad, and in three years Bedari touched 3,000 women with crisis intervention and other programs, such as self-esteem building. Bedari means awakening. Whoever went through Bedari became a stronger person. We introduced women’s issues as a community issue in Pakistan, and we also dealt with men’s issues. Patriarchy doesn’t serve all men; it serves an elite. It’s even more difficult for men to feel pain. They cannot even cry because that is not part of the role assigned to them. Bedari was the first organization that formally started groups for men. After five years I got out of the management, which was a promise to myself.

I joined Aga Khan, an international development foundation, in Karachi, but there was almost civil war there, so after a year I came back to Islamabad where there was an opportunity at the United Nations. I was involved in Pakistan’s preparation for the Beijing conference on women, and then with the U.N. Development Program I developed a cutting-edge program on women’s mobility rights.

Women cannot move about in Pakistan because there are harassment issues and permission issues. There is harassment on the streets, at the bus stops, and on buses. And only the first two seats on buses are for women. So parents say forget it, my daughters are not going out. It was kind of an invisible problem, and there wasn’t a term for it. But I developed concrete projects on women’s mobility that people couldn’t conceive of in the beginning. I worked with traffic police and public transport and on awareness. Now in one city a woman owns a bus service, and in Lahore, the government approved buses that are half for women.

Another issue that I raised, sexual harassment, had not been raised before. I experienced it in a severe form at UNDP. I took it for a while, but then I had to question my commitment to myself. We had 16 women on our staff and we learned this man was harassing almost all of them. Eleven of us got together and complained against him. It was very difficult because the whole system turned against us. The bureaucracy did everything to suppress the case and it went on for two years. Finally the case went up to the highest level at the United Nations in New York where people from outside the UNDP held hearings.

We won and the man was fired, but we had severe repercussions. Some of the women were afraid for their lives and their children, and almost all of us left our jobs. But when we won the case, women’s groups in Pakistan declared the day we submitted our complaint, the 22nd of December, the day to mark the struggle against sexual harassment. Now the government is willing to look at a new law and new policy.

I was awarded a Distinguished Alumni Award from the College of Education in 1998 for my work over 10 years in Pakistan. It was beautiful to be honored. But the University and my Ph.D. adviser Jerry McClelland made great contributions to my work. She gave me a lot of professional ethics.

In 1998 I got married, left the U.N., and left Pakistan. I had been there twelve years. After that I was in the Philippines for three years doing international consultancy for the U.N., teaching part time, following up on the sexual harassment case, and finishing up Taboo. It was a nice part of my life. I learned scuba diving, I learned swimming, I traveled a lot with my husband. I had struggled all those years for Pakistani women to have more space to live, but I had forgotten to live.

My husband is now a consultant for the U.N. We decided that one time he’ll take a turn picking a job and one time I will take a turn picking a job. So this time he has followed me to Pakistan, and then after some years I will follow him. He is very supportive of my work, but I’m always in a risky position and sometimes when I have taken a stand I have created enemies, so he fears for me.

I have been with ActionAid for a year. It is based in the U.K. and is in 30 countries. I am country director for Pakistan and have a staff of 60 people with a presence in 12 rural settings and three urban offices. Our strategy is called challenging imbalanced power relations—in a family context, in a community context, in a national context, and in the international context, where we think power is concentrated in the hands of a few.

The path is uphill, but I am optimistic. I celebrate every little thing because it can be so tough. It is very beautiful for me when I see a woman’s face change. When women go through my training and I see their body posture change and their eyes change, it just gives me so much energy. I want Pakistani women to live fully. And any indication of that just gives me an enormous amount of hope.

Shelly Fling is editor of Minnesota.