Panel: INTERFAITH DIALOGUE AND COMBATTING INEQUALITY



227_2.7 - WOMEN IN THE MOSQUE, THE MANDIR, AND THE MEETING ROOM: GENDER INEQUALITY ACROSS PAKISTANI INTERFAITH INSTITUTIONAL SPACES

AUTHORS:
Azam Z. (Forman Christian College University Lahore Pakistan ~ Lahore ~ Pakistan)
Text:
Interfaith dialogue in Pakistan is laden with unique complex religious landscape one shaped by Muslim majority dominance, constitutionally vulnerable minority communities, and a long history of both violent conflict and frictional coexistence. This landscape is impregnated with silent systematic marginalization of women from interfaith institutional spaces. This paper argues that gender inequality in Pakistani interfaith dialogue is not incidental but structural, reproduced simultaneously within Muslim, Hindu, and Christian institutional frameworks and compounded at precisely the point where those frameworks meet. Drawing on institutional ethnography and analysis of existing interfaith initiatives in Pakistan, the paper explores how women are excluded, tokenized, or consigned to auxiliary roles across three distinct but interconnected spaces the mosque, the mandir, and the formal meeting room of organized dialogue. Each space carries its own internal logic of exclusion, yet together they yield a cumulative marginalization that formal interfaith dialogue institutions have largely failed to name, let alone address. The paper pays particular attention to the experiences of women navigating minority Christian and Hindu institutional spaces within a Muslim-majority state, where gender inequality intersects with the vulnerabilities of religious minority status creating hybridity of marginalization. The paper draws on the author's position at Forman Christian College one of Pakistan's oldest minority Christian institutions to ground its analysis in the lived realities of interreligious educational spaces where gender, faith, and institutional power are negotiated daily. It concludes by arguing that genuine interfaith dialogue in Pakistan cannot be achieved without dismantling the gendered gatekeeping, women's inclusivity is precondition to any institutionalized interfaith engagement.