Holier than thou

The Americans claim that a lot of state-of-the-art pornography was unearthed by their raiding party in OBL’s hideout (or rather at his not so state-of-the-art low profile command and control center). Apparently, this is not all that surprising; US intelligence had earlier discovered that watching hard-core pornography is widespread among extremist groups. Of course, some will say this is not true and the Americans are publicising this as a counter-propaganda tool. Perhaps, nevertheless, it actually does highlight a malaise which afflicts many of our violent self-righteous believers.

But it is more pervasive than just that. Here in Pakistan, women’s freestyle wrestling shown on cable TV, though by no means pornography, is extensively and intensely watched by males of whatever ideological persuasion, even when some of them are playing bridge (of all games) in some of our sedate city clubs.

Another example of such fixation among our men folk is their gaping and groping, and the look in their eyes when they quickly survey their object before it moves out of sight. Although, some men are too shy to express their needs in any manner except over mobile phones to people they do not know, as many a housewife has complained. If all this happens in Pakistan, imagine what goes on in Saudi Arabia, which is the spiritual provenance of our fundos.

More seriously though, the hypocrisy shown towards women and a woman’s place in their thoughts can be scary. It explains why it is so easy for fundos to be in denial about so many things and why women are treated as an inferior subspecies. It’s an embedded part of a cultural tradition that they haven’t challenged because it enables them to do things they couldn’t do otherwise and also because it would open up a Pandora’s box of all the ugly truths that lie beyond the façade of piety and selective, self-serving interpretation on which their religious beliefs, laced with overt political ambition, are based.

Intellectually, there are no signs of anything like the spirit of renaissance in Europe several centuries ago that got the Christians out of the stinking mess created by the Vatican and its perversions wrapped in religiosity. There is as yet no Erasmus or his ilk in our part of the world. There is no one with the spunk to say that as far as the rights of, say, women are concerned, neither history nor their theology has any relation, at least, none to speak of, with the true predicament women face in society.

Even the enlightened moderates among our contemporary religious scholars haven’t gone far enough with the quality of their scholarship and insights. Among the few that attempted to do so, most have fled or are in hiding or keeping a low profile. Sadly to its lasting shame, no one in government asked them to stay or offered to protect them.

The countries where this rot began several decades ago, are now fast losing their political virility, despite their oil and gas which sustained them in their fanatical enterprise for so long. The Arab Spring offers some hope.

The fact is that if Muslim civilisation is to advance at all in the future, it can only do so through the help of women, women freed of their political shackles; women free to work their will in society. Women have always fought for their men and their children, they should be ready now to carry forward their fight for their own rights. As our religion tells us, women and men are created equal and if that is conceded, they cannot now be discriminated against. Denying such a patent right would be a fundamental infringement and, therefore, surely unacceptable in an Islamic republic in the truest sense.

As for what got me started on this piece, I can do no better than to recall what the British writer Malcolm Muggeridge had to say of pornography: “Its avowed purpose is to excite sexual desire, which I should have thought, is unnecessary in the case of the young, inconvenient in the case of the middle agreed, and unseemly in the case of the old.”

Clearly fundos do not share that view.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 23^rd, 2011.