Perween Rahman remembered

Women Action Forum holds seminar to mark International Women's Day

KARACHI: When it comes to resilient women, social worker Perween Rahman is the foremost personality who worked against all odds for this city.

"We will die but we will die happily," the slain social worker had told a colleague in Bangkok a few days before she was shot to death.  The same colleague, Anwar Rashid, who is now a director at the Orangi Pilot Project (OPP), remembered her as someone who wanted to live for the poor.

The former director of the OPP, Rahman was remembered in a seminar, 'Narratives of Resistance and Resilience: Celebrating International Women's Day and Perween Rahman,' organised by the Women Action Forum (WAF) in collaboration with Szabist at their college campus.

Architect and OPP chairperson Tasneem Ahmed Siddiqui recalled how Rahman joined a private architect firm, designing houses for the rich after she graduated from Dawood College. "She grew dissatisfied and wondered if this will be the work she would be doing all her life," he remembered.

Rahman's anxiousness took her to Arif Hasan, who guided her to OPP's Akhtar Hameed Khan. The people at OPP thought that, like many young people, she would leave in a day or two.  "She started working and kept on working in the same place for 30 years."

Women rights activist Anis Haroon pointed out that Rahman’s most important work was saving land records of 2,000 goths and attracting the wrath of the land mafia.

Other speakers shed light on the history of the women's movement. Shahnaz Wazir Ali went all the way back to Zia's era in which anti-women laws, the laws of evidence and Hudood Ordinance were introduced. There were notices issued telling women not to work in places with men, directing them to stay indoors and forbidding them from driving, she said.

Ali showed pictures of the 1983 demonstration of women in Lahore, where they were tear-gassed, beaten and then moved to the police stations. Thus, the foundation of the movement of Pakistani women's was laid, she said.

Human Rights Commission of Pakistan chairperson Zohra Yusuf felt that, for women's rights to succeed and become a reality, it is important that the society is secular. Apprehensions with secularism must be removed and people should proclaim themselves as feminists, she said, suggesting that words should be coined for 'feminism' in Urdu and other languages.

Yusuf pointed out that the most vulnerable groups of women were the ones displaced in North Waziristan. "They were prevented by tribal elders from standing in lines for ration and food, and had to beg," she said.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 10^th, 2015.