GENDER AND SUFISM: REFLECTION OF WOMEN’S EMPOWERMENT IN SHAH ABDUL LATIF BHITTAI’S POETRY

Abstract

Women empowerment and gender inequality have been dominant issues in academia for the last three decades. Empowerment is about the process by which those who have been denied the ability to make strategic life choices acquire such ability; they can freely analyze, develop and voice needs and their interests. Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai has emphasized the issue of women empowerment and wanted to see the women of Sindh free from the cage of machismo. The main purpose of this article is to analyze the role of Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai as empowering women in Sind Society. It mainly focused to find out the overall condition of women in the time of Shah Abdul Latif and the factors that persuaded him to consider the women from entirely the different
perspective thereby throwing away the existing social norms and mores of that time. It also tried to see on what basis he assigned the diverse roles to women in his poetry, what was the impact of Latif’s stance of promotional poetry for empowering women of Sindh thereby checking if it left some impacts on the men too or not and whether his notion of empowering women could appeal other contemporary poets to tread his path of building a society based on gender equality.