In the summer of 1981, a teenage girl in a silver lamé dress sang Disco Deewane behind a screen, and the country never recovered. Nazia Hassan was just fifteen, born in Karachi and raised in London, with feathered hair and a voice harbingering a new era in Pakistani pop music. The song became an anthem. But more than that, it became a problem.
General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, who had seized power four years earlier, was in the middle of remaking Pakistan in the image of his own self-assumed piety. He had already prohibited alcohol and enacted draconian blasphemy laws and the Hudood Ordinances — a series of Islamic criminal codes which, among other things, rendered it almost impossible for women to prove rape. The ideal woman in the state was nonexistent, silent and covered in yards of opaque material.
Muneeza Shamsie, in her seminal essay “Pop Idols,” observes that Nazia’s Disco Deewane video exemplified female bodily autonomy, presenting a visual antithesis to the “heavy-lidded, oily-haired, pencil-moustached” caricature of Zia (both literal and metaphorical) that dominated public life. Through dancing, singing, and acting joyfully, Nazia defied the moral grammar of the state and claimed that women could occupy their space in the world independently. The song, however, was promptly banned by the regime, clearly signalling that even modes of joy, embodiment, or sartorial expression could be weaponised against women
Four decades later, the pencil moustache has mostly vanished, but the policing gaze remains.
In order to comprehend the present, it is necessary to sit down in a court in Sahiwal in 1983. Safia Bibi is a blind teenager who is raped by her landlord and his son. She requires four male witnesses in order to prove the assault under the Hudood Ordinances. She has none. Her pregnancy, rather than a crime, is made evidence of zina-illicit sex. She has been sentenced to fifteen lashes and three years of imprisonment. The rapists are free to walk, violate, rape and impregnate other women.
That case was not an exception. It was one of the many strikes of the regime in a corporeal war against women. The message was clear and cold: your body is never your own. You are in the wrong, should you be violated. If you are in sight, you are tempting to be seen. When you live in the open air, you need to apologise for it — with cloth, with silence, with shame. As one of the great leaders once said in an HBO broadcast interview:
“If a woman is wearing very few clothes, it will have an impact on the men, unless they are robots.”
This pronouncement erases generations of ideological labour — it shrinks women into vehicles of male desire, eliminates the culpability of men, and institutionalises moral vigilance as a social obligation. It further implicitly states that morality is spatial and performative in that it is not placed in behaviour but in appearance.
That same logic extended into cultural and literary spaces. When Kishwar Naheed translated Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949), it was banned in the country on the pretext of its openness in discussing sexuality, objectification of the female body, and marriage, which did not fit into the socially conservative and religious climate and had to be published in India in 1994.
Today, public universities have issued multiple dress-code notifications between 2023 and 2026. Virtually all targeting women. These notifications urge women to dress modestly. While modesty is inherently subjective, none of these notifications defines what “modesty” means. They don’t have to. The weapon of choice is vagueness. It is up to the guards, the proctors, and the random man in the corridor to know whether or not a girl has a kurta that is too short, whether or not her dupatta has slipped, whether or not she is wearing a loose shalwar or a fitted pair of trousers.
The spectrum between the courts of Zia and the modern dress codes reveals how the vestiges of moral authoritarianism transform instead of vanishing. What changes is not the underlying logic but its packaging, shifting from theocratic decrees to bureaucratic diktats, from overt coercion to subtler forms of discipline. Both are based on the same assumption that the body of a woman is a place of struggle, a book where social morality is written. Recognising this nuance is critical because resistance, whether in disco beats, courtroom testimony, or subtle acts of self-expression, is equally layered. It is not commonly heroic in the Romantic sense and is usually small, chaotic and nearly invisible. Yet it must persist, perpetually defying the gaze that would otherwise render women silent.