Pure naked crime.<\/p>\n
Those three words, in powerful tandem, are from Humaira Awais Shahid<\/a>, a Radcliffe<\/a> Fellow this year. She is a Pakistani human rights activist, journalist, and former member of Parliament.<\/p>\n The phrase, she said, describes how women are often treated by customary practices in Pakistani Islam and in its tribal cultures.<\/p>\n From 70 to 90 percent of women in Pakistan are subjected to some kind of domestic violence, said Shahid, a consequence of what she called the \u201cmale dominance and commodification\u201d of females.<\/p>\n \u201cGender-based violence is most of the time pure naked crime \u2026 justified through heinous customary practices or cultural norms,\u201d said Shahid. Often, crimes are perpetrated against a woman to \u201cusurp her inheritance\u201d as well as simply to punish, she said.<\/p>\n The associated crimes are horrible, and they rang strange in sedate Radcliffe Gymnasium during an April 14 lecture: gang rape, marital rape, acid attacks, dowry killings, stove-burn killings, honor killings, forced marriage, and using women as objects of barter.<\/p>\n As a journalist, she got \u201cvery close exposure to such stories,\u201d said Shahid, whose talk was punctuated by more than one picture hard to look at. \u201cI held the hands of so many women who were victims of acid crimes and stove burnings \u2026 who took their last breaths in front of me.\u201d<\/p>\n Such abuses affect men and children as well as women, she said, since they extend to usury, forced beggary, and prostitution. All the victims, regardless of gender, share the reality that they are poor. And they share something else: feudal systems that dominate both agriculture and civil governance in Pakistan \u2014 systems that are wielded like weapons to \u201cassert control and violence,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n The agricultural sector is controlled \u201cby a few thousand feudal families,\u201d said Shahid. When members of the same families take positions in civil service, business, industry, and politics, she added, \u201ctheir influence is multiplied in all directions.\u201d<\/p>\n Such are the \u201cfacts and realities of Pakistan today,\u201d she said. \u201cI want to take you to the world inside.\u201d<\/p>\n That world includes government, state, tribal, and religious mechanisms that are arrayed against women, children, and the poor, said Shahid. \u201cPoverty overrides all kinds of mortality.\u201d<\/p>\n Religion as presently interpreted is not the only bulwark blocking reform, she said. There is the government itself. \u201cI entered a Parliament that was traditional, feudalistic, notoriously corrupt, and literalist with dogmatic religious leaders and tribal chiefs,\u201d said Shahid.<\/p>\n But there is hope for change, and it comes from Islam itself, she said. \u201cThe humanistic ethics of Islam and the true essence of its teaching will emerge.\u201d<\/p>\n Paradoxically, \u201cthe only way to improve the condition of women \u2026 is to enforce Islamic rights,\u201d said Shahid.<\/p>\n She talked of the \u201ccriminal silence\u201d on the part of authorities who ignore the women\u2019s rights provisions already contained in Islamic law. \u201cMost of the violence revolves around those issues,\u201d said Shahid.<\/p>\n They include a woman\u2019s right to chose whom to marry, to divorce without evidence, to remarry without the consent of family, and to manage her own finances.<\/p>\n The West cannot really help, nor will its wars help, she said, quoting an unnamed French thinker: \u201cNothing worthwhile can be done in Muslim countries except in the name of Islam.\u201d<\/p>\n Meanwhile, the deck remains stacked against Pakistan\u2019s poor, and especially its women. Shahid pointed to history to find blame.<\/p>\n In 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, an event that re-created the notion of jihad<\/em> as a means to fight the war, transforming it from the concept of personal struggle into a weapon of political struggle.<\/p>\n With Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda came damage to true Islam, she said, opening the doors wider to a \u201cWahabi fundamentalism\u201d that had lain dormant for decades in the Middle East.<\/p>\n To this day, said Shahid, most Pakistani Muslims regard \u201cIslamism (as) a deviation from Islam\u201d and not the true faith. At the same time, she said, most Pakistanis distrust the West too.<\/p>\n But Wahabism \u2014 in part supported by petrodollars, she said \u2014 spread fast through religious schools (madrasas<\/em>), religious political parties, and down into village councils, where patriarchal tribal cultures \u201cbecame instrumental in exploiting and punishing women and the impoverished.<\/p>\n In 1979, Zia ul-Haq, a fundamentalist Sunni dictator, imposed martial law in Pakistan and enforced Nizam-e-Mustafa, the \u201cIslamic system\u201d of law.<\/p>\n That started \u201ca significant turn\u201d away from Pakistan\u2019s predominantly Anglo-Saxon traditions of common law, Shahid said, which had been inherited from the British during the colonial era.<\/p>\n One infamous artifact of this time was the Zia Ordinance, said Shahid. It required any woman claiming rape to produce four pious male witnesses, a threshold of evidence so high that women received the lash while the men went unpunished. The ordinance, which failed to distinguish between adultery and fornication, was finally repealed in 2006.<\/p>\n Then there was the Qisas and Diyat Ordinance of 1990, another law that had the effect of increasing violence against women. It allowed the victim of a crime, or the victim\u2019s heirs, to inflict a punishment on a perpetrator that was equal to the crime. It also allowed the perpetrator to pay the victims for a crime.<\/p>\n The practical effect of this was to \u201cprivatize\u201d crime, said Shahid, with women most often the pawns in cross-family disputes involving honor.<\/p>\n Village councils, or jirgas<\/em>, meanwhile, often used such disputes to settle personal scores, arriving at verdicts, she said, \u201cwhich are against humanistic ethics.\u201d<\/p>\n Shahid mentioned one infamous case. A Pakistani villager was sentenced in 2003 to be gang raped in order to compensate for her brother\u2019s alleged adultery. Afterward, she was paraded naked in front of hundreds. Her rape was a vani<\/em> \u2014 \u201cwomen barter\u201d \u2014 case, said Shahid. (As a legislator, she introduced a resolution to abolish and punish vani<\/em>. It was adopted into Pakistani federal law in 2005.)<\/p>\n Women and the poor are still generally caught between two judicial systems that fail to work in their favor, said Shahid. Government systems, already weakened by gender bias, supported enforcement agencies that were slow to investigate crimes against women, or ignored them all together.<\/p>\n Informal justice systems like jirgas<\/em> are \u201cspeedy and inexpensive\u201d and take pressure off formal justice systems, said Shahid. But at the same time they are also mechanisms that use \u201ccustomary norms \u2026 for personal gains.\u201d<\/p>\n While in the United States, Shahid has not been silent or inactive. Since January, she has traveled to Washington, D.C., three times to argue for the passage of the International Violence Against Women Act. It would make combating violence against women a \u201cstrategic imperative\u201d for the United States.<\/p>\n Curb violence by pre-empting it, said Shahid, who will travel to the capital again in May. \u201cYou don\u2019t need 30,000 women raped.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Pure naked crime. Those three words, in powerful tandem, are from Humaira Awais Shahid, a Radcliffe Fellow this year. She is a Pakistani human rights activist, journalist, and former member of Parliament. The phrase, she said, describes how women are often treated by customary practices in Pakistani Islam and in its tribal cultures. From 70 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4175,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-545992","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/545992","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4175"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=545992"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/545992\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=545992"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=545992"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=545992"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}