Peshawar's Women Lead the Way to Recovery

PESHAWAR, Pakistan (July 23) -- A late Sunday morning in Peshawar's main shopping district used to be a place reserved only for the brave or the suicidal.

A year ago, when this roiling frontier city was gripped by the savagery of near daily bomb blasts, few people dared to risk their lives for the sake of a new outfit or a new toy for their child or a leisurely stroll through the dense maze of the bazaar's frenetic alleyways. Back then, Peshawar was in lockdown, its old city grinding to a surreal standstill amid an atmosphere charged with fear and foreboding.

A year later, the bazaar is teeming with life again. The bomb blasts have stopped, for now, and the creeping threat of Talibanization pushed back again into the unsolved enigma of the tribal areas. Leading the charge are the city's women, the guardians of the domestic in this fiercely male-dominated society. The women suffered most during Peshawar's days of darkness, but now the bazaar is full of them, as it used to be, women who have stripped off their burkas and re-entered life.

Is Peshawar on the road to recovery?


The first signs are there, though it is a tentative journey. The sight of women walking the streets with their faces exposed, emerging from the phantom-like shells of the all-encompassing burka, is a strong indication that the influence of the fundamentalists is on the wane. It was inevitable, they say -- the burka was never a requirement in Peshawar -- and the end to the violence removed the necessity to don one.

"It was forced on us by men from the villages in the tribal areas," says 17-year old Ayesha Khan, referring to the violent fundamentalist movements emanating from Pakistan's ungoverned tribal belt. "I put on the burka after the bomb blast in Khyber bazaar. There were a lot of women who were killed in that blast who weren't wearing the burka. A lot of people thought that's why the bazaar was targeted. So to be safe, I decided to put it on."

The attack on the Khyber Bazaar in October killed 18 and wounded 60, almost all civilians out shopping in Peshawar's old city. Other attacks, on the Mina bazaar and Kisa Khwani bazaar, killed dozens more, sending Peshawar spiraling into chaos and fear.

An ongoing Pakistani military operation in the Khyber Tribal Agency, which surrounds Peshawar to the north, west and south, has apparently driven its militants, led by Mangal Bagh -- one of Pakistan's most wanted militant commanders -- into hiding.

Bagh remains on the loose, protected, according to military sources, by Pakistan's intelligence agencies, which consider him a future asset because of the influence he wields over jihadists linked to the Taliban. But for Peshawar's women, Bagh represents the worst kind of Islam.

"The way he tried to change society -- by force and violence -- this is not right," says Fiza Gul, an 18-year old medical student. "He wanted to take away our freedoms, but now we're finally getting them back."


Still, uncertainty remains over whether the influence of the militants is gone for good. "The fear is gone," says Khan, "but the tension is still there. How long will the peace last? Will the bombing start again?"

Suspicion has seeped its way into the psyche of Peshawaris like a virus, clinging to their wavering sense of safety and security despite the relative calm over the past few months. Anti-Americanism is still rife. Many blame the CIA for the bomb blasts that have plagued the city and fear that if the Americans fail to achieve their goals in Pakistan -- ranging from controlling Pakistan's nuclear arsenal to tearing apart the country into smaller, more manageable pieces -- the violence will start again.

This week's visit to Islamabad by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton sought to address that trust gap, promising hundreds of millions of dollars to improve the lives of everyday Pakistanis. The projects she announced were telling: dam projects in the tribal areas and medical facilities for southern Punjab, both areas where the kind of fundamentalism that forces women into burkas is on the rise.

But winning over Pakistanis will not be easy. The women who spoke to AOL News in Peshawar all feel Western influence on their society is as bad as Taliban influence. For them, the debate in France over banning the veil is the other side of the story: The extremes are trying to force Muslims to conform to their ways.

"The Pakistani government threatened to do the same thing," says Rabia Siddiqui, a 25-year-old mother of two. "They wanted to ban the burka in Pakistan, but I tell you, if they had done that it would have had the opposite effect in Peshawar; more women would have put it on. We women may not like the burka, but the government can't force us to take it off. We have to choose to do it ourselves."

Sayeeda Warsi, Britain's first female Muslim Cabinet minister, agrees. "The veil is not an Islamic issue," she said on a recent Pakistani talk show. "It is a women's rights issue. It's an issue of choice."

In Peshawar, some measure of peace has opened up a space where women are able to make that choice. Still, Gul points out that not all women have the freedom to decide for themselves. "If my husband tells me I must wear the burka, then I will put it on," she says. "That's our culture." What's not part of Peshawar's culture, she adds, is the kind of violent militancy that tried to impose its version of Islam on the people. That obstacle has been removed, for now. Others may be much more difficult to dislodge.