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Politics : Idea Of The Day -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: BubbaFred who wrote (41477)	11/7/2001 8:12:15 PM
From: BubbaFred	Respond to of 50167

The plight of women By Hafizur Rahman dawn.com A report says the Islamabad chapter of the women's Action Forum (WAF) is being resuscitated. No mention has been made, however, of why and how it was allowed to die in the first place. Maybe the bureaucratic atmosphere of the capital was stifling. WAF is an almost militant organisation, ready to take on the police if the need arises, as it demonstrated in Lahore some years ago. It is not like APWA, the goody-goody body which is dependent on government goodwill for its welfare work. WAF knows how to fight. One of our misfortunes is that in normal civilian times political issues tend to overshadow everything else. We forget that when we talk of women's problems we are talking about half the population. An even greater misfortune is the general outlook towards the female half of Pakistan. Women who try to bring to the fore the question of women's rights and privileges are roundly condemned by the powerful orthodox religious circles as immoral and un-Islamic. The trouble with Pakistan's aware and educated women (who are in a majority in WAF) is that their enlightened minds do not accept the traditional interpretation of the Shariat on matters concerning women. They would like a revival of ijtihad (as advocated by Allama Iqbal) to re-examine such issues in the light of modern needs. But they can't be openly critical for fear of being labelled as heretics. Like men they too have been influenced by the liberal and egalitarian concept of justice coming from the West. While men too feel the same way about tradition, but since they are not affected they don't have to speak out their thoughts. In the case of women, though, the dilemma persists. But apart from what the religious orthodoxy prescribes by way of women's rights as compared to those of men, and by way of punishments under the Hudood laws, we certainly cannot claim even by half that, as a nation, we are seriously concerned about the treatment of women in Pakistan. It's almost like our attitude towards the minorities. An occasional Nawabpur shakes the entire country. The nation's conscience is smitten and the press goes overboard in condemning the incident (though not PTV which is smug in the thought that unless the act of publicly shaming a woman in the nude is presided over by a federal minister, it doesn't have to cover it). But then we find that Nawabpur was no solitary aberration. Since then, more Nawabpurs have followed - just as there have been Shantinagars and Bahawalpurs in the case of Christians - but we just shrug them off as "another of those nude women things". A popular Urdu daily reported recently that (and I translate) "in various prisons in the country nearly a thousand innocent women, falsely implicated increase under the Hudood Ordinance, are incarcerated. This was stated by a reliable authority in the Women's Division who said that all these women belonged to the lower strata of society, from backward rural areas mostly. Their contact with the world outside the jail gets completely broken, and then the prison officials consider it their prerogative to submit them to all sorts of indignities, even fornication and rape". These women find themselves imprisoned because, in most cases of unlawful sex under the Hudood Ordinance, the male culprits go scot free but the women are prosecuted - I don't know by what strange process of law. And the height of cruelty and insensitivity is that if a women becomes pregnant after being raped, her crime is proved by the fact that she has become pregnant, while the rapist escapes indictment because the required number of witnesses is often found wanting. What a terrible situation to prevail in the much-trumpeted "Islamized" Pakistan. And yet we go out of our way to show how women in the highly advanced and civilized countries are exploited and insultingly treated, and how Islam gives Muslim women a place of honour and a far better deal in day-to-day life. I am not being emotional when I say that the men of this country, Muslims most of them, should hang themselves with shame at this state of affairs, not merely hang down their heads. What a fine way to prove the superiority of Islamic law to the outside world! There is only a difference of degrees between us and the universally condemned Taliban? This is one of the outcomes of the so-called eleven-year golden Islamic era in Pakistan. There was another report about women's affairs from another Urdu daily, though not so grim and heart-rending. It says that out of the total of more than 190,000 federal government employees in the country the number of women is a little over 9,000, of whom half are working in education. The paper avers that the male colleagues of these women put up various kinds of hurdles in the way of promotion of female officials, and the latter are sort of obliged to retire after reaching Grade 20. I know it is not easy to accelerate the absorption of more and more women in government jobs. The feeding process is not adequate, since most women who are academically qualified often get married and settle down for reasons of domestic security, and do not look for a job. I also know that for a long, long time the percentage of women government servants is not going to be anywhere near the optimum fifty per cent, perhaps never. But what the government and the male public servants can do is to shed their prejudices and make a conscious and determined effort to let women employees feel more comfortable. My point is that there is no cause for self-satisfaction, what to say of self-congratulation, in our public and private treatment of women, despite tall talk about honouring mothers, sisters and daughters. We may flaunt our sophisticated foreign education; we may take pride in our individual positions in enlightened society; but unless we bring about a radical change in our entire thinking on the subject of women, we shall continue to carry the stigma of a backward nation. It is no crime to be backward in material progress and technological advancement. But it is certainly both a crime and a sin to be intellectually retrogressive. That is true backwardness.