People have confused culture and religion: Yashma Gill on women’s rights in Pakistan

The actor recently explained that the culture of placing all the blame on the victim must stop

Actor Yashma Gill, known for her roles in Phaans and Pyaar Ke Sadqay recently opened up about women’s rights in Islam, speaking about the attack on a TikToker in Lahore during Independence Day celebrations and how the several reactions to the incident bent religion to suit people's personal opinions. 

Talking to a local publication, Yashma elaborated on the victim-blaming narrative that she has witnessed, and how blaming the woman alone is essentially not Islamic. Speaking about the incident in Lahore, Yashma shared, “If for the sake of the argument, we believe that she supposedly planted those 400 men, which I think is a lot more unbelievable than it being an actual harassment case, even if I say that she supposedly planted three or four men, and the rest of the men just followed suit, then sure, she planted them, but don’t those men have free will? They had the power to choose right from wrong, and they chose wrong. So they are to be blamed as well. You can’t keep victim-blaming only.” 

She continued further, “Some female actors actually said to me, ‘Look, we know that if we’re going to Saddar, we have to dress a certain way’, and I tell them to stop right there because that’s their opinion but even if someone shows up dressed a certain way, we need to remember that while Islam teaches women to do to pardah, it also teaches men to do pardah of the eyes. Why aren’t men doing so? You can’t say that the other person provoked them and so it’s not their fault. If the other person provoked them, why were they so easily provoked?”   

The actor shared how religion is often conflated with culture, saying, “I don’t think women are saying give us the exact same rights as men, we’re saying at least give us what is rightfully ours. To tell us that we don’t have a right over our bodies, marriages or work, it needs to be understood that there are a lot of rights that our society doesn’t accept and that people have confused culture and religion. The things that aren’t culturally acceptable have been deemed religiously unacceptable as well.”