The writer is an Islamabad-based TV journalist and tweets @FarrukhKPitafi
Seven years ago as I held my tiny first-born, a beautiful girl, in my hands, I made a promise to myself — that I will stop rationalising actions of any group that wants women to be second-class citizens in this society. That my daughter(s) will be proud members of a society that protects their rights as ferociously as that of any other member. And heavens are my witness that I have almost died trying. Sadly, many fathers have not. Gradually, silently, reluctantly, everyone is preparing to feed the daughters of this nation to the wolves.
As we jump with joy at the prospect of singing duets with those we called terrorists only weeks ago, and our interior minister congratulates himself for things that are bound to undermine his image, do we even have time to see what we have compromised? Forget about conquering foreign lands, the virtuous in the land of the pure now need to conquer the women of their own society.
Very cleverly, these wise men chose to split between pro- and anti-Constitution groups. That in essence meant that one group came on air vociferously criticising the Constitution, dismissing it as un-Islamic; the other group tried to assuage these fears by telling us that the Constitution was not un-Islamic, it only had a few weaknesses that can easily be remedied. And pray, what are those weaknesses? Thanks to the Council for Islamic Ideology, now we know. Ironically, they all are concerned with women’s rights.
If truth be told, this never was about changing laws. The actual target for long has been the public discourse. Most people are only too lethargic to undertake independent research and end up outsourcing the job of interpreting the faith to the class of religious scholars. That has sadly given birth to a monopoly of clergy in a religion that otherwise boasts about total absence of it. And this patriarchal, nay misogynist, class just wants to rob women of about a millennium worth of societal evolution, as it conveniently continues to enjoy the unrestrained use of evolved technological products like high-powered cars, cell phones, helicopters and electricity.
Every time this discussion returns to the idiot box, it ends up winning over at least a few gullible souls to this patriarchal class. If you want to summarise this entire exercise, it can be done in one sentence: our religion rescued women from a tribal society that buried its daughters alive and today, this very tribalism vies to exact revenge by forcing its followers to start burying them again.
Sadly, those who claim to interpret our faith for us today have grown so inflexible that they don’t even realise that what they are defending is not religion. Our religion acknowledged a woman’s right on her body and property 1,400 years ago. By those standards, had the process of thought evolution continued in our faith, by now, she should have been given equal rights as men. Tragically, the very same clergy slammed the doors of religious interpretation or Ijtihad shut on us a millennium ago for the purpose that it served them. Here is an excerpt from Iqbal’s sixth lecture for the clergy that is so fond of quoting his poetry and never want to read the small collection of his lectures called The reconstruction of religious thought in Islam: “Did the founders of our schools (of thought) ever claim finality for their reasonings and interpretations? Never. The claim of the present generation of Muslim liberals to reinterpret the foundational legal principles, in the light of their own altered conditions of modern life is, in my opinion, perfectly justified. The teaching of the Holy Quran that life is a process of progressive creation necessitates that each generation, guided but unhampered by the work of its predecessors, should be permitted to solve its own problems.”
Today, our society is being taught to treat women as inferiors. Some of these women have also started inhaling this propaganda as silent witnesses to this shameful surrender. If they don’t realise that with their rights goes the very essence of our great faith, this country and this society will have no future.
Published in The Express Tribune, March 15th, 2014.
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Religion has to be interpreted in a manner that is progressive, not regressive. The Mullahs are only creatures of their environment and conditioning, will therefore interpret scriptures and tenets in a way that suits their mental conditioning. To expect different from them is to be disappointed. This has been their way of thinking always and will continue to be so. No one is going to give up their power voluntarily.
Let Faith be what it's spiritually suppose to be. Any relgion ought to be for the protection of others, all inclusive, rather than a reason to threat and deprivation of rights and liberties and even lives of one or other in a society, any society. Separation of theocracy from the affairs of the State is the only solution for evolving a just and fair system for everyone, minorities and women, in our country. Your assertion about our religion ensuring autonomy of women on their body and property is anything but exaggeration, at best, and misleading at the worst. It's just not true and you know this as well as most of those who are reasonably well versed in where our religion stands on matters relating to the women folks. That's why it's imperative that we as people must insist on keeping State & the people's legal rights & duties completely separate and independent of religion.
Truly it is hard to believe that the world is striving, working hard, to give women equal rights. While this country is regressing back. What kind of medieval mind set is this. Total ignorance.
Farukh, I appreciate for writing on this very important topic. May I add, a couple more things to your well researched and narrated article. First: The personal laws (including family and inhertance laws) were actually never part of the Shariah but became a part of the Islamic jurisprudence around three hundred years after the advent of Islam during Abbasids period.No such body of laws existed before and philosophical explanations were different from all four schools of thought. So no consensual formula exists that CII can or should adopt. Second, I have serious questions about the qualifications of the members of the Islamic Ideology Council.They may be persons of knowledge but certainly not Fukahas in any sense of the term. Third most of the jurisprudential explanations are based on inductive logic and not on deductive mechanism. Fourth, the laws, customs, or values our uneducated Mullahs adhere to are pre-Islamic and based on the traditions of the bedouin tribes of Arabian desert. May almighty give us us the wisdom, knowledge, and courage to counter idiotic interpretations, be these religious or otherwise.