Who Is The She Ninja?

Noor Fatima is a lower class alumnus of Jamia Hafsa who now teaches here. When the security agencies surrounded the complex, her family of seven brothers came to visit her. Noor told them that they should be proud of their sister's willingness to wield the stick. "When the state threatens us with thousands of police, what option do we have but to defend ourselves?" asks Noor. What agitates her is the sharply stratified Pakistani society. "How wealth rotates in a certain group is deeply worrisome. There is so much poverty that it does trouble us. Again, when we see so much un-Islamic activity around us, how can we keep quiet?"

Disquiet over morality, the dislocating processes of modernity, abject poverty, Islamic radicalism—all these combine to create the mind that is Noor Fatima, who spawns more Noors, in numbing multiples, susceptible to the manipulation of their teachers. Noor turns to the three-year-old, prompting her to recite what she has been taught. "Allah-o-Akbar (God is great)," the child says. Back in my covent, to a visitor, a child would have recited, "ABC." A cultural, and class, divide—a strange equivalence too.

The girls are supposed to wear black gloves and the burqa when they step out of the complex. TV is banned, but recently the girls were allowed to watch a programme on interviews with teachers and students on computers. The gates are locked at 10 pm, otherwise there is no restriction on their movement.

Amina is a senior student who hails from Swat. She confesses she was nervous during the encounter with the police. But her mother told her, "How will you be able to face your Maker if you leave at the time of jehad?" The older teachers say the Musharraf regime isn't the first to threaten them, that the only time they felt safe was under President Zia-ul-Haq. "Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto both have royal temperaments," says Umme, turning around to ask those around us who have been beaten by the police to raise their hands. Many do.

Umme points to Zahida Parveen whose daughters have been recently abducted, and says, "When the PML(Q) head Chowdhury Shujjat Hussain came for negotiations, Maulana Aziz brought her case up. But nothing has happened as yet. Can you imagine that even the Chowdhury is unable to help the wretched? Where is the state?" She goes on to narrate the story of a pregnant woman who found refuge in a seminary in interior Punjab. The girl's father had 'gifted' her to a local pir (saint), whose son raped her. "I asked the seminary to send the girl to us. Maulana Aziz had DNA tests done on the child to prove that the pir's son was the father. Can you now understand why we become so motivated when such cases are brought before us?" Do I? Do you?