Galloping invisibility

In both open and covert warfare, women and children are not only victims of the enemy, but also of their own menfolk.

Female repression has, despite high flying claims to the contrary, become more of a norm in this part of the world than the vast majority of people care to admit and, if one dares to look instead of treating this subject to the usual customary cursory glance, it is clear that, especially over the last 30 years, this is so on almost, perhaps all levels of sociocultural interactions. Actions which, particularly under the pressure of terrorism and outright war – scenarios which residents of Pakistan, Afghanistan and more recently, Syria, are all too familiar with – threaten to subjugate the feminine completely.

Patriarchy has long displaced historical matriarchy which, centuries ago, was fairly common throughout this region and across Central Asia as a whole where, a surprising legacy of Genghis Khan, women ruled the roost and led men on the battlefield as well as in the business arena. In the hundreds of years since then, a reasonable measure of respect for females endured in various ways and to be female was to be accorded a position that was automatically ‘guarded’ by dignity and honour. A woman was, except when used as a pawn or prize in tribal feuds, safe in her own home. Sadly and unforgivably, this is no longer the case and tragically, now applies equally to children as well.

In this increasingly brutalised world, it is always without fail, the innocents who pay the price of whatever evil erupts –– and an extremely high percentage of these innocents are defencless women and children along with a few good men –– attempting, often in vain, to balance the dreadfully unequal equation.

Furthermore, in both the open and covert warfare, such as is currently ongoing in various parts of the Muslim world, women and children are not only the victims of the enemy, but also of their own menfolk, who for a combination of perceived cultural, religious and purely personal reasons, pile one unbearable burden on top of another. Disguising their subjugation of the feminine behind what are, under terrible circumstances, necessary protective precautions which, once firmly placed, have a bad habit of remaining a ‘fixed’ part of future sociocultural conditions. In this way, women who have undergone horrendous physical and mental strain when, for instance, they have fled their bombed out or otherwise war ravaged homes and villages and have, along with other survivors, reached what is supposed to be the safe haven of a refugee camp if, that is they are ‘lucky’, are systematically forced to endure the well-intentioned deprivations forced on them by their men who, thoughtlessly or under the unavoidable influence of supposedly ‘pious’ elders, construct mental and physical boundaries which, come what may, females will never again be allowed to freely cross.

Throughout Pakistan and Afghanistan where –– although the vast majority of the population hide their heads from this truth –– civil war and terrorism are the twin evils of the times, the patriarchal trend is taking full advantage of the fraught situation and there are those who, unless they are stopped, will render the very existence of anything even remotely feminine to exactly the same shocking hell that women in refugee camps already endure. Shrouded in burqas of enforced invisibility, battling to survive the newly minted patriarchal rules by which their and their children’s lives are measured, could very well become the ‘feminine future’ for all of us unless education gallops rapidly to the rescue before any durable chance of salvation completely disappears.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 4^th, 2014.

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