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Islam And Pakistan

By Mir Adnan Aziz

17 September, 2012
Countercurrents.org

The pre-Islam Arab culture was highly patriarchal. Devoid of any rights or social standing whatsoever, women were treated as chattels and objects of sexual pleasure. During annual and religious fairs and other festivities, they were made to dance naked. However, the most horrific practice was that of female infanticide; new-born girls were buried alive.

In the first century Greco-Roman era, women were considered greatly inferior to men. Treated as commodities, they were held to the strictest of dictated moral standards, something which the males themselves blatantly defied. Romans believed that a woman’s natural instinct was always toward luxury and thus toward moral depravity. They also believed men had greater restraint so they were allowed to spend as they saw fit. Laws concerning women, if any, were tailor-made to her total subjugation by males.

Ancient Chinese women had to pay total obeisance to their fathers, then their husbands and finally, after their husbands’ death, to their sons. Aristotle believed that women ‘were defective kind of humans’. A thousand years after the advent of Islam, French Catholics were holding a discourse to assess if woman was human or not and if she was, did she have a soul. The Parliament at the time of King Henry VIII decided that it was unlawful for a woman to read the Bible because she was impure.

In Europe and North America, more than sixty thousand women were executed or burnt at the stake on the mere suspicion of practicing witch-craft. Married European women did not have the right to own property, enter into contracts or obtain a divorce until the 19th century. The culture in Britain’s Elizabethan times was portrayed best by Shakespeare’s ‘the taming of the shrew’ and ‘the comedy of errors’. It was the male who ‘tamed’ and ‘reformed’ the woman.

In ‘The Tempest’, Shakespeare presented a lone female character Miranda. She personified woman of those times - a mere servant to man. Hamlet addresses his mother Gertude with these words when she marries his uncle Claudius on the death of his father: ‘Frailty, thy name is woman’. The first British universities such as Oxford, Wales and Cambridge, when established, allowed male admission only. ‘The emotional, sexual, and psychological stereotyping of females begins when the doctor says, it’s a girl’. These are the words of Shirley Chisholm, educator, author and the first Afro-American Congresswoman.

The advent of Islam saw the strict forbiddance of female infanticide. The Holy Prophet’s (pbuh) life epitomized the status of women in Islam. In the period of revelation, Hazrat Khadijah (pbuh) was a source of great strength and the first witness to prophet-hood. Hazrat Ayeshah (pbuh), a jurist and scholar of great intelligence and outstanding memory, is one of the most reliable sources of hadith. Hazrat Umm e Salma (pbuh) counseled the Holy Prophet (pbuh) on political matters. Hazrat Nusaiba valiantly defended the Holy Prophet (pbuh) during the battle of Uhud. The Holy Prophet described his love for his daughter, Hazrat Fatimah (pbuh), in these words: ‘Fatimah is a part of me, and he who makes her angry, makes me angry’.

Women in Islam have been depicted as ideals for mankind. Two of them are Hazrat Maryam (mother of Prophet Eesa -Jesus Christ) and Hazrat Asiya bint Muzahim, Pharaoh Rameses’s wife and the Queen of Egypt, who gave up everything when she picked the infant Moses from the river and chose to adopt him as her beloved son. The ritual of walking seven times between Safa and Marwah is an essential part of Hajj. What could be a greater testament to motherhood for all times to come than perpetuating the memory of Hazrat Hajirah’s (Prophet Abraham’s wife) frantic search for water for her infant son?

The Holy Prophet (pbuh) declared, ‘To seek knowledge is an obligation on every Muslim, male and female’. On the death of Hazrat Umar, his daughter, Hazrat Hafsa was entrusted with the first copy of the Quran. Hazrat Ayeshah, daughter of Hazrat Sa’d ibn Abi Waqqass, was a jurist and scholar who taught Imam Malik. Hazrat Sayyida Nafisa, the Holy Prophet’s great granddaughter and daughter of Hazrat Imam Hassan taught Islamic jurisprudence and was a teacher of Imam Shafi’i. Hazrat Umm Darda, taught at the great Ummayyad mosque in Damascus as well as in Jerusalem; Caliph Abdul Malik ibn Marwan was one of her many students.

The rights of women, as laid out by Islam, are termed discriminatory by many modern day liberals. Renowned scholar Karen Armstrong writes in Mohammad - A biography of the Prophet: ‘In the context of the twentieth century when, we should remember, we are still campaigning for equal rights for women, this Quranic legislation may seem prohibitive but in seventh-century Arabia it was revolutionary. We must remember what life had been like for women in the pre-Islamic period when female infanticide was the norm and when women had no rights at all. Like slaves, women were treated as an inferior species, which had no legal existence. In such a primitive world, what Muhammad achieved for women was extraordinary. The very idea that a woman could be witness or could inherit anything at all in her own right was astonishing’.

We have the distinction of electing a woman, the late Benazir Bhutto, to the highest office, something even those in the United States have been unable to achieve. Does this symbolize our reverence for the female gender of this land; nothing could be further from reality. Women are victims of discrimination, excess and manic chauvinism. Reported incidents are increasing with alarming frequency although many remain unreported because of the social stigma attached to the same.

Vani, sura, karo-kari, marriage to the Quran, forced marriages, minors’ marriages disfiguring girls by acid, women parade naked, rapes and ‘honor’ killings could well be the macabre practices of a pagan era. A childless woman is branded infertile and subjected to wrath; that the male counterpart could be deficient remains simply unthinkable in our alpha-male mindset. The concept of mothers and wives being abandoned to nursing homes, unthinkable not many years ago, is a painful reality today.

In England, a British girl of Pakistani origin, Shafilea Ahmed, was murdered by her parents in the name of honor. On their sentencing Justice Roderick Evans of the Chester Crown Court had this question for the accused parents. ‘What was it that brought you two, her parents, and the people who had given her life, to the point of killing her?’ He could well have been repeating these Quranic words from Surah Nahl: ‘When news is brought to one of them of the birth of a female child, his face darkens and he is filled with inward grief! With shame does he hide himself from his people because of the bad news he has had! Shall he retain it on sufferance and contempt or bury it in the dust? What an evil choice they decide on’.

The State is the guardian of our status as equal citizens. What we have seen is that those at the helm of affairs, like everything else, have remained oblivious to the increasingly deteriorating plight of women and all citizens – Muslims and non-Muslims alike. Dr Aafia Siddiqui was shamelessly handed over to the US by Musharraf and was incarcerated with male prisoners in Afghanistan. She has been spinelessly abandoned by the present dispensation.

The woman in Musharraf’s mind could choose to get raped for a visa, that in Yusuf Gillani’s mind could give birth anywhere, be it a rickshaw, and that in Abdul Rehman Malik’s mind is responsible for the Karachi killings echoing the Congreve lines, ‘heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, nor hell a fury like a woman scorned’.

Meanwhile, lugging around his late spouse’s photograph and his annual funeral oration at her grave is President Zardari’s adopted way of paying homage to womankind. He also pays this homage by unduly bestowing upon Interior Minister Abdul Rahman Malik our highest civil award, seemingly a ‘reward’ for rampant killings, kidnappings and reported molestation of women in police stations.

Today we are a hostage to two extremes. One can go to any extent to enforce their convoluted perception of women as child producing contraptions mandated to remain uneducated and slaves to man. The other would have us believe that she is one who can walk the cat-walk, dress and act to negate the mindset the former wants to impose. In reality what that realizes is a merely a glamorous version of the former. Had this been panacea, the modern West would have been totally devoid of clamoring women activists and movements. Some liberals also manage a sucker punch, lamenting the prohibition on ale as the root cause of all that ails us.

Tawakkul Karman, 2011 (youngest ever) Nobel Peace Prize laureate, is a 32 year old Yemeni mother of three. She has been dubbed ‘Iron woman’ and ‘mother of Yemen’s revolution’. Her role helped end Yemeni President Saleh’s 33 years of oppressive power. When asked about her hijab by Western journalists and how it was not proportionate with her level of intellect and achievement, Karman replied: ‘Man in early times was almost naked and as his intellect evolved he started wearing clothes. What I am today and what I am wearing represents the highest level of thought and civilization that man has achieved and is not regressive. It is the removal of clothes again that is a regression back to ancient times’.

Self-enrichment, dodging and evading the law are an obsession with those in power today. We see legislation to save the desensitized skin of an individual passed in a day, enforcement of established laws that safe-guard the lives of millions are merely words not to be implemented. Plight of women, all-enveloping violence and the total absence of rule of law is thought a subject too mundane to be addressed. We live in a Pakistan where the blighted euphemism of ‘taking notice’ by higher-ups reigns supreme; a farce that proves the callous and heartless incompetence of a coterie personifying a failed system.

It has become a norm to blame Islam for the intolerance and violence that we have so willingly embraced. This underlying assumption of the West is aped by many liberals within Pakistan too. Islam, a true social-order, is the religion of Pakistan, all those residing within its physical boundaries are the children of this land. What we have made of both religion and land is our own doing. Violence, intolerance, dearth of compassion and the will to national amity is no longer the act of an errant individual; it has been systematically embedded into the State and social system.

It is a recorded fact that the Holy Prophet (pbuh) permitted a Christian delegation from Najran to pray in Masjid i Nabawi. It is also a part of Islamic history that the Holy Prophet (pbuh) assured the monks of St. Catherine Monastery in Mount Sinai about the rights of Christians in writing and ensured they were followed in letter and spirit.

Today, we see an endless spate of brutal sectarian killings compounded by our dismal attitude towards those Pakistanis who practice faiths apart from Islam. What could be a greater tragedy than creating an environment of insecurity that forces Pakistanis of Hindu faith, born and raised here, to tearfully migrate to another land? What have we made of Islam and Pakistan?

We have ordained upon ourselves the right of being judge, jury and executioner. This fatal mindset has been lovingly spawned by successive ruling dispensations. Allowing ourselves to regress to bit players, if not all, many of us are playing an overt or covert role in the sordid drama of distorting both Islam and Pakistan.

No wonder, today we practice our own convoluted version of Islam that ‘is full of beliefs and empty of religion’ and live in a Pakistan ‘divided into fragments, each fragment deeming itself a nation’. What could be more repugnant and a negation of the very teachings of Islam and the envisioned ideals of Pakistan?

Mir Adnan Aziz is a freelance contributor based in Islamabad. Email [email protected]




 

 


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