Between Faith and Aspiration: Religion, Patriarchy, and the Educational Aspirations of Young Women in Pakistan
Muhammad Bilal Aslam
ABSTRACT
Scholarly and policy debates on women’s education in Muslim-majority societies have long been structured by a binary in which religion functions either as a structural barrier to girls’ schooling or, in post-secular counter-narratives, as an enabling resource for women’s self-cultivation. This conceptual paper argues that both framings are analytically inadequate: the first reproduces a secularist developmentalism that misreads the role of Islamic discourse in women’s lives; the second risks a form of piety romanticism that brackets the material structures of patriarchal authority within which religious practice occurs. Drawing on postcolonial feminist theory, the capability approach, and intersectionality, the paper develops an integrated conceptual framework — the Religious Negotiation of Educational Aspiration (RNEA) Framework — that theorises religion as simultaneously a structural field of constraint, a legitimising resource, a repertoire of agentic strategy, and a contested discursive terrain within which educational aspirations are formed, sustained, and sometimes foreclosed. The paper’s central theoretical contribution is the concept of interpretive conversion: the process through which specific readings of Islamic texts are deployed to transform the social meaning of girls’ schooling, functioning either to reduce educational resources to something practically unavailable to women or to amplify access by embedding educational aspiration within a framework of religious obligation. The paper situates this argument
in the specific conditions of Pakistan — postcolonial governance, sectarian plurality, economic inequality, and rapid social change — while maintaining comparative generativity for Muslim-majority contexts in the Global South. It concludes with a testable theoretical proposition: that the direction and magnitude of religion’s effect on young women’s educational aspirations is mediated primarily by the interpretive tradition operative in the household, rather than by level of religiosity as such.
