Safeguarding women’s rights

This is what you call an oxymoron: two Oscars and one Nobel do not a woman’s empowerment make. Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy’s two Oscars and Malala Yusufzai’s Nobel Prize as the youngest-ever laureate should have catapulted Pakistan as the guardian of women’s rights. Instead, the world laughs when the old warhorse Maulana Sheerani and his dwarfed 10-member band of religious dogmatists at the Council of Islamic Ideology (CII) declare that it’s okay for husbands to beat up their wives “lightly.” Why? If their dress is un-Islamic (whatever that means) or refuse their husbands conjugal rights? What happens in the bedroom is none of CII’s business; what women wear is not their concern.

Choking women’s freedom is a trespass on human rights! So, will Nawaz Sharif government have the moral courage to rid us of these meddlesome CII clerics as recommended by the Senate’s Committee on Human Rights? Or will it just be another deformed joke like the anti-honour killing bill, pending since April? The bill is aimed at banning use of Qisas and Diyat in honour killing cases.

Nawaz Sharif celebrated Sharmeen Obaid’s victory by holding a grand viewing of her Oscar-winning documentary A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness at the PM House. He vowed to eradicate the “evil” of honour killings in Pakistan. But unless his government makes honour killing a first degree murder, the punishment for which is death by hanging, the killers who kill their mothers, sisters, nieces and female relatives in the name of honour will continue to roam scot-free due to the presence of Qisas and Diyat. Removing these two blood-money laws from the anti-honour killing bill is un-Islamic, insists Maulana Fazlur Rehman’s JUI-F.



Remember Maulana Fazlur Rehman taunting the Punjab legislators as ‘zun murid’ when the Punjab Assembly passed a women’s protection bill. He termed the pro-women bill to be anti-constitution and anti-Shariah. He described it as an NGO-driven legislation, saying “NGOs follow the West for their pecuniary interests.” The law, in his blinkered view, was against the male rights: “Husband and wife are considered partners in the West, but it is not the case in Pakistan… this law makes a man insecure.” His party man Maulana Sheerani followed his leader by declaring the law anti-Islamic. The Punjab government has timidly put the bill on the back burner.

The religious right is winning its war against women by upending the two bills floated by the government escalating incidences of honour killings and domestic violence in recent months. The CII in its 55 years of existence has made the most ludicrous recommendations in the name of Islam. For example, banning women from receptions for foreign dignitaries; prohibiting female nurses from attending to male patients; lowering the marriageable age to 12 and nine for males and females respectively, “provided there are visible signs of puberty”; preventing the amendment to the controversial blasphemy law; and wanting the national flag to carry the letters ‘Allahu Akbar.’

I think, the educated Pakistani woman has entered the 21^st century, while the Maulana and the CII still live in the 14^th century also known as the ‘Age of Jehalia.’ In today’s world, men and women are equals and it is about time our ultra-religious, semi-literate and hide-bound obscurantists came to grips with reality.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 17^th, 2016.

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