There is a ghost haunting Pakistan's discourse on women's rights — and it is not the ghost of oppression alone, but the ghost of misunderstanding. Across drawing rooms and social media timelines, in offices granting NOCs to conduct feminist women's gatherings, in madrasas and university corridors alike, the word feminism has become either a battle cry or a curse word, depending on which side of the room you sit on. But in both cases, it is being terribly, perhaps wilfully, misread.

Ask a man in the bazaar of Peshawar what feminism means, and he will likely tell you it means women who refuse to cook, who dress like men, who smoke in public, and who seek to dominate. Ask an activist who has recently participated in Karachi’s Aurat March what it means, and she may describe a liberation that measures itself entirely by how far it can depart from anything traditionally feminine. Both answers are wrong. And both, in their wrongness, conspire to keep the real conversation about dignity, justice, and structural equality permanently off the table. Pakistan's public conversation on women's rights has been hijacked by a caricature — one that mistakes performance for liberation, boldness for justice, and imitation of men for equality. True feminism asks a far more profound question.

The confusion about feminism is not a single mistake — it is a double one. The first error belongs to the conservatives: a genuine, if irrational, terror that granting women equal rights means dismantling the family, unseating male authority, and unravelling the social fabric. Under this reading, every woman who demands access to education, to inheritance, to safety on the street, is understood as a rebel who wishes to become a man rather than simply be respected as a woman. The second error, more quietly destructive, belongs to a section of those who call themselves feminists. In their anxiety to prove that women are not........

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