If men can’t get paternity leave, for instance, women who are mothers will rarely make it to the corridors of power. In that case, a man’s willingness to care for his baby full-time is moot. So if the possibilities of domesticity and full(er)-time parenting are closed to men, or are accompanied by financial risks and a workplace inhospitable to men more involved in parenting, then bringing women within sight of the boardroom, or tenure, or a sports career, or even the Kroger checkout counter, is pointless.

While men and women bear responsibility for the construction of egalitarian and whole lives, te responsibility is shared by politicians, the designers and implementers of public policy, intellectual workers,  social analysts and critics, cultural agents such as people in the media, and by those who wield the power of Big Money.

But gender equity is also an integral part of human wholeness and integrity. We seek equity that human beings may be whole, that they may not feel like they are being drawn and quartered to fit the demands of their lives.

This also means that the freezing up of professional roles must give way to a fluidity that permits shifts, so that individuals may respond to life-changes and seek wholeness in their intellectual and work lives, without risking their livelihood and the integrity of work profiles. A professor or physician should be able to work in the Congo without losing currency; she should be able to care for aging parents without losing her livelihood; she should be able to bear and raise children while she is of child-bearing age without appearing to be “not competitive.” None of this is new. Yet this remains a dream, and in our worsening economic climate, it seems more out of reach than it has been recently.

By and large, while women parade their professional careers in the day-time, they remain full-time parents, and by and large, fathers remain relatively part-time parents. For childcare: women are organizers, researchers, supervisors and employers of any child-care arrangement that they can find. For most social classes, such childcare is poor to mediocre in the US if you happen to be one of the unfortunate multitudes who do not have grandparents, relatives, stay-at-home fathers/mothers, etc. that you can rely on. It entails the time-consuming labor that ensures such childcare is effective and nurturing (as a parent who used a few daycares, I know of what I speak). It entails, too, the edge-of-your-seat manuevers that are necessitated by sudden babysitter emergencies – the slack for which is usually picked up by mothers (women still make less money than men, overall, so it costs the family less when women lose wages or jobs.) By and large, the default parent in charge is still the mother. By and large, the individual who takes it for the team is still the mother. By and large, it is the mother who ensures that the home is clean and livable, that the children’s education is supervised, that laundry and dishes are done, and that children’s emotional needs are met.

This is why I say again: Until we raise boys and men who want to and know how to be full-time caregivers and parents – rather than mere aides and assistants – gender equity at home/work remains both a dream and a joke – in the form of women doing double duty.

Women do not need ‘help’ in the kitchen and with the children. Women need mature co-parents and domestic co-workers who can work unsupervised to ensure quality of life for the family. Women’s caregiving remains time-consuming in comparison to men’s. Women do not need someone who can microwave mac-and-cheese if she is not there: they need someone who can prepare healthy dinners, check if a bath is needed and administer that bath, while ensuring that homework is completed and garbage taken out.

Are you raising a boy to be that parent/husband? Or are you raising a part-time family member who is incapable of being centered around care for others? I do not say, one who can love. Wild animals can love and provide for their offspring. Caregiving is not love + paying bills. Caregiving is not buying gifts on amazon.com. Caregiving is time-consuming, sometimes draining, often boring.

Caregiving is a full-time job. Which brings us around to the capitalist economy which seeks to own the individual, whether parent or son/daughter, who has personal needs and relationships that work threatens more than ever to attack from their central positions. The American workplace as it is now threatens equity of any form (including gender), personal centeredness, and connectedness with others. There is an urgent need to contemplate the basis of our economy, and to reflect on the competitive urge that seeks to be bigger yet the expansion of the economy fails to benefit (I’ll say it) the 99%.

Where people in general are dehumanized to mere workers and spenders/buyers, happiness and harmony remain out of reach – for men AND women. And until men and women can all learn to nurture, give, and transcend the self, men and women remain in a tug-of-war that cannot conclude. You can bring the woman into the boardroom, but until you can bring the man into the diaper-changing bathroom – and the diaper-changing setup into the men’s bathroom – you will not truly succeed in achieving gender equity.

PS: This post refers to the majority of American families, not to exceptions for which anyone may provide anecdotal evidence.

Many Muslims’ desire to have good Muslims (not in Mahmood Mamdani’s sense of moderate, palatable, liberal Westerners who eat falafel) represented on TV was frustrated. Many like myself simply desired a diversity of images; in the case of minority groups, images are few and far between, and most such images are politicized.

Representation is fraught with complexity. Who represents? The bellydancer or the hijabi physician? The Pakistani college student or the Somali taxi-driver? The beer-drinking football fan or the mosque imam? And who is the audience? Liberal secular America, with its fears of all forms of religiosity? For such, their fears might be assuaged by Muslims who behave almost entirely like them.

Perhaps the audience is the right-wing person who donates to Church missions to Muslim lands, fervently believing that the presence of Muslims in America (rather than among the audience of international missions) is a cancer, an offense to the Christian character of the American nation. For such, neither positive nor neutral form of representation or visibility will be either acceptable or palatable. Representation of religious Muslims (whatever that is) will be infuriating, and representation of irreligious Muslims (whatever that is) will be perceived as an insidious attempt at normalizing Muslims.

Then the Facebook page calling for a boycott of TLC was born. And now, under pressure of such organizations as the Florida Family Association, Lowes has pulled its advertising from the show. “All-American Muslim is propaganda that riskily hides the Islamic agenda’s clear and present danger to American liberties and traditional values,” the Florida Family Association claimed, also saying “The show profiles only Muslims that appear to be ordinary folks while excluding many Islamic believers whose agenda poses a clear and present danger to liberties and traditional values that the majority of Americans cherish.”

Essentializing, it appears, is a desire shared by both Islamophobes who want bad Muslims in the show and some religious Muslims who want only good, observant Muslims represented. Both sides wish to represent Muslims in a specific way. Since there is no such thing as ‘reality’ in Reality TV, the choices are important. The Florida Family Association would prefer TLC to feature Muslim hijackers in training, or Muslims on death row for rape and murder (preferably for honor killing) – extraordinary rather than ‘ordinary folks,’ Muslims who threaten American values of liberty. Perhaps the opposition of ‘All-American Muslim’ would like to feature a dark, bearded Muslim father with a strong accent, who mandates black veils for his wife (wives?) and daughters, and will not permit his family to drink or to date.

But I wonder where the right-wing Christian organizations would ally themselves on the issue of sexual freedom. Perhaps a Muslim father who forbade his wife from getting an abortion on her seventh pregnancy? Would that help or hinder the cause of representing really bad Muslims? Or would it unnecessarily complicate the picture and cause confusion?

Images are inherently confusing. They never really do what we want them to do.

The ubiquity of visual technologies and our ability to share images globally has rendered the gaze central to our religious and political lives and identities. How people are represented in entertainment media galvanizes individuals, organizations, churches, mosques, corporations, and large quantities of monies. At the heart of most religion, however, is the Divine – the human being alone with God. This aloneness is an uneasy bedfellow, embroiled in an unwilling orgy with our anxieties – indeed, our obsessions – with showing, representing, seeing, preventing-from-showing, adamantly-not-seeing or preventing-from-seeing in the media.

What would we do if we hadn’t figured out how to create safe spaces of meaningless-communication around weather-talk and other impersonal contextual events? What if we actually conversed about what really lies within?

A: I need to see the doctor for my pancreatic cancer.
Receptionist: Sure. [Can't say 'and how are you feeling today?'] … So how is your spiritual constitution today?
Patient: I’m fine. I’m still agnostic and fearful about impending death due to the uncertainty of what may or may not happen e.g. eternal damnation, total obliteration. What about you?
R: I’m snug in my confidence that I will be in a culturally comprehensible Heaven only when I am quite prepared to depart from this rather enjoyable earthly realm in search of an improved set of pleasures.
P: My own humble meta-awareness of my ignorance compares quite well with your complacency, despite the fact that your inward tranquility is better than my own. Still, the latter is simply owing to the fact that I am dying and you appear to be in relatively good health, despite your obesity which may be related to diabetes and poor cardiac health.
R: The nurse will call you in a few minutes. In the meantime, may I attempt to salvage your soul prior to its imminent departure from your body?
P: I’m fine, thanks. I’ll just wait for the doctor. I’d rather speak about spiritual matters to an individual with a more well-rounded liberal education and stronger critical awareness of their own flaws.
R: As you wish. I’ll let the nurse know, and when you’re calling from the flames, I’ll be smiling with the angels. Insurance card, please.

Restaurant customer: Table for 2 please.
Waiter: Certainly, sir. It’ll be 10 minutes. … And what are your political inclinations at this time?
C: Oh, I’m leaning left of center, and highly critical of those who buy into the myth that working harder will improve the economy.
W: Ah, I’m glad to hear that. Personally, I’m a graduate student working to pay my bills, and working harder is not an option but a necessity. The more of your kind that come to dine at this ridiculously expensive restaurant, the harder I have to work.
C: Though inclined to be generous in spirit to service staff, I find I feel kinder toward those in poverty in distant lands since they whine and talk back much less than people like you do.
W: Dealing with whiners is one of the hazards faced by those who live lives of relative luxury, sir. I believe we have your table and I am definitely brimming over with disgust for your hypocritical politics, so please follow me.
C: A corner table would be best, thanks, and I certainly won’t need to interact with you outside of this restaurant, since, hard as you may work, you won’t make it beyond academe and about $50K for the foreseeable future.

Feel free to contribute your own big-talk scenarios.

The corpse of Gaddafi and the London riots are cautionary notes that force us to consider, coolly, the implications of popular movements. For the conservative with vested interests, these are perfect illustrations of the need to keep Gaddafis in power. Many’s the time I’ve heard, growing up in Pakistan, people proclaim with a sigh, “Well, at least under Martial Law, you know you can go to work in peace – or stay at home under the curfew.” The power of the people is an amazing and terrible thing. The thing about the power of the people is that it contains within it, concealed, the power of the mob. How can leaders and activists in justified causes restrain and control the mob – the mob which seeks thrills and blood? The mob whose main goals are to fire weapons, slash, burn, beat and ease the burning of the soul? We struggle with the facy that, even at the Holy Pilgrimage, a site of intense spirituality, there are souls trapped in the carnal, who take the opportunity to grope pilgrim women in the throng circumambulating the Kaa’ba.

I watched the horrific video of the toddler in China who was run over by vehicles twice, and lay in the road as passers-by simply – passed by. Watching something like that does a terrible violence to one’s soul so I refrained from watching the grainy video about Gaddafi’s death. One’s assumptions about humanity suffer a kind of death when you see people passing by a bleeding and mangled toddler. It is an event that simply does not fit within my meta-narrative of humanity. It demands a revision of who we are, what this world is, what the nature of human life is, what a collective of human beings is. We know what happens in gangs of kidnappers and criminals, but this is not what is supposed to happen with “normal” people in the street. Who are these normal people? What is in their minds and hearts? What can we predict when we step out in the street? What do people do if they are not being watched by law enforcement, by authorities, by powerful individuals – and if they are unaware of surveillance cameras? And what happens when we are subjected, constantly, to the power of authority, to the power of the gaze, to the power of surveillance, and rarely to the power of reflexivity?

Though I didn’t watch the Gaddafi video, I did read the narration – the cries of “We need him alive” alongside the beating and gunshots. Once power has been shaken loose, the euphoria can barely be restrained. William Golding in “Lord of the Flies” depicts just such a terrible spiral downwards into savagery in a group of schoolboys who are stranded on an island.

For some, the brutality of the mob represents the true nature of humanity. For others, it represents the brutalized who have been crushed and restrained in their manacles so long that their natural impulses are almost irretrievably distorted and mangled. The answer, we hear, is to KEEP them crushed and structured. The answer, we also hear, is to liberate them and to allow the true nature of humanity to emerge freely.

I don’t pretend to have any answers. But neither First World powers, nor the IMF, nor the dictatorships of Egypt, Libya and China, nor Wall Street can escape the responsibility for their bloodsucking clamp on most of the world’s human beings by pointing fingers of accusation at protestors. Must we choose between lives of dehumanized penury under the power of a few or dehumanized terror under the power of many? Surely the choice cannot be so stark. Surely, with centuries of experience, reflection and soul-searching humanity can come up with better options. Surely we can look to the sources of altruism, inspiration, generosity, and wisdom among us, as we have done in all ages before. The power of the people is more than mere brute power – more than the power to snatch, grasp and overthrow. The power of the people lies, too, in the strength to build, the wisdom to grow, and the power to give. Let us, as individuals and collectives, draw upon ALL of our power.

I don’t complain about work per se. I have been working since I was 6, truly. The only thing I have to come to dream of is work which arrives in the form of manageable, reasonable chunks. Not small ones. That would be wimpy. Big, impressive chunks that generate adrenaline and allow you to appear busy enough to escape long conversations in the hallway. But still big chunks that can be completed before the next avalanche arrives.

As I slowly, very slowly, inch closer to my mid-40s, I dream of occasionally savoring a single moment of transition. I yearn to hold half a second in my hands, so that I may dust my hands in a satisfying manner, and exclaim to no one in particular: “Done! Grant proposal / article/ chapter/ grades/ service/ committee work/etc. – Check!” or any such triumphant remark of self-congratulation. Nothing excessive. That would smack of joy and complacency. But, in this era of speed, multiple roles, information explosion, and so on, is a moment of accomplishment and satisfaction far too much to request?

Dr Farhat Hashmi (the very same) was then coordinator of the قسم البنات (Women’s Section), and was keen to hire me, one of the few niqabi, religious English MAs she’d met so far (things have changed in Pakistan, now). I interviewed with the crusty, blunt Brigadier who was then Head of the English Department, and he took me on as a part-time hire until a position opened up. (I made a lot more money as a part-time hire).

It was the first time in my life that I had even imagined living away from home. The night before I left Lahore and my parents’ home (MY home), my heart was gripped in an ice-cold fist, as I realized I was moving away from home, family, and parents, into the unknown. None of my siblings had ever moved away for work, and I was a single young woman. But my parents, and especially my father, though conservative religiously and culturally, believed in women’s independence. “You should have something in your hands,” they said. “Men are bastards,” said my father with his characteristic bluntness. “You can’t trust them.”

I still remember that that night, I got a static-filled phone call that asked for me, mentioned the job I’d applied for at Lahore College for Women, and then became inaudible (phone lines in Pakistan …). It left me with a sense of indecision: should I stay in Lahore? Should I wait for work at a college in Lahore? Should I drop the IIU now? But it was an opportunity, and who knew what would happen if I let it go? And then, I was a lonely religious young woman in a social circle that was not heavily religious. Being at the Islamic University could mean I would find my home. Or would it?

I begged my mother to get an intercom system installed, so that she would be safe, in the absence of her protective daughter. (It stopped working, of course.) I felt guilty for leaving her. It was incredibly hard. The car speeding towards cold, green Islamabad was driving me into a cold embrace. We ate in a desolate restaurant in Blue Area, and by then, everyone realized I was depressed and fighting tears.

By the time I arrived at the Women’s Hostel, where the students lived, I had been vomiting. The ‘warden’ (yes) was coolly welcoming, but was clearly working to ensure boundaries. I was to share a room with her and use a bathroom that was shared by a bunch of students. I hadn’t shared a bedroom or a bathroom in years. The social class difference was traumatic.

It was destined to become a home, a community, where I found sisterhood and Divine Love. I still yearn to return, but it isn’t what it used to be, and I am not that green (in more ways than one), 22-year old niqabi, wiping vomit from my lips, clinging to my mother and nervously peering up at the women in the hostel, wondering how to put my lipstick and eye make-up in the noisy grey steel freestanding locker. It was a new world.

Everything that is emotional must become verbal and physical. Hauntingly, in such works of art as “Baraan,” the emotional is bottled in its intensity, untranslated, sublimated. My shaikh urged me, at times, to avoid writing poetry about the spiritual, but to bottle it in:  in that state of pressure within – without contamination from the public eye and our attempts at translating the inward for that public eye – that is where things happen that are impossible to translate.

Our educated lives sever us increasingly from our elemental roots, forcing us into the brain, which is only part of our toolkit of processing experience.

And the body. On such days as today – an early autumn day in September – I am struck by my entire being’s attempt to simply be. It is the first week after an intense 4-month summer in Oklahoma, and Oklahomans are reeling from the first sweet taste of good weather. Air-conditioners are not running. We can enjoy the sensation of being outdoors without consequences. With my Muslim friends, I have also completed Ramadan. Suddenly, I am aware that I am unaware of my body even while my body is most at ease. Nerve endings are not constantly aware of heat and discomfort, and I am almost numb for pleasure in the mild sunshine. How much of our lives is spent in awareness of pain, discomfort, heat and cold, hunger and thirst, the sensation of clothing? How many of us do not have the option of freedom from those sensations?

Even on a day like this, you can see, my mind and my words disrupt the tranquil yet productive silence, and force their way through like weeds.