On Saturday (14th July 2012), even 1433 years after the Last Messenger of Allah, strictly forbade his ummah to bury their daughters for fear of hunger or reputation, a heartless father murdered his 1-day-old daughter by burying her alive. Sources say that Chaand Khan, a resident of Kaccha Khoh, Khanewal, requested a doctor, most probably the obstetrician, to inject his newborn daughter with poison as her face was deformed. On his refusal, he went away, burying the infant alive. The neighbours reported him to the police, and now he is behind bars.
Upon reading that the vindictive father is in jail now, majority of the people who read this news item would have thought “chalo acha hua wo sang-dil insaan pakra gya. Acha agli khabar kya hai?” utterly ignoring the gaping holes in our social fabric which have been highlighted by this dreadful incident. We are a Muslim state, but then, why is number of sexual incidents (consensual as well as non-consensual), harassment at workplaces, and honour killings constantly on the rise?
Let’s start with the birth. When a girl is born, even in these modern times, the parents are never overtly happy. Many of them don’t express it, but there is always a certain disappointment at not having a son, and the added burden of not only feeding and bringing up a soul who would be leaving the parents alone in their old age, but also of protecting her innocence till that fateful day arrives. In the remote areas, however, the shame and disapproval is a lot more obvious, and the daughters are either killed, or married to some wealthy middle aged man, who would be looking for a young girl to make his (impending) old age bearable. Very few get the privilege to live without any outstanding ‘obligations’. When she is brought up, she is always kept closeted away, far from the prying eyes of the society, forced to wear outfits which conceal her figure completely. This she never resents, for she understands that it is for her own good, but what she can never get around is, that boys her age always have more freedom than her. That’s the first step towards unleashing the submissive inside her. Those who are from rich backgrounds, however, are in opposite conditions. They have too much freedom, and too less supervision, turning them into total dominants.
Whatever their backgrounds be, once they are in college or university, or even an academy (any co-ed environment, for that matter), they start to influence the boys with their ‘past experiences’. If they are from a liberal background, most of them are the eye-candies, or easy lays. They begin dating, which invariably leads to some sort of a physical contact. The foreign movies have taught them that it is normal, so they lose their innocence willingly. Their boyfriends are happy, they are happy, but the society is corrupted. Those whose background or financial circumstances don’t allow them to wear form-fitting jeans or low-cut tops, dislike this further alienation. The boys don’t pursue them, and even if they do, they cannot get away from their homes for long enough to be with them. This leads them to a dilemma: family, or freedom? The freedom, with its serpentine attraction wins, and they begin to make excuses to get away from their homes, just to be with their ‘significant others’, who, they believe, love them and will be with them forever. Alas, those poor souls are never able to differentiate between love and lust, so invariably; they are tricked into some compromising situation, where they were led to believe that it is the couple’s sheer love for each other that had brought them to that point. However, a while later, they break up over some pretty issue, and the next day, the girl wakes up to find her ‘sensitive’ images splattered all over the internet. Her dreams are shattered, her trust in men is broken, irreparably, and she might not be a normal person ever again. If the couple does stay together, the boy’s (normally jealous) friends try to intervene, to get a piece of that chick for themselves as well. Doesn’t matter whether they get her or not, either they retain some incriminating evidence for blackmailing her into silence and subservience, or if it gets too far, they simply kill her, just like Fatma Shah of Jorray Pul, who was murdered by her boyfriend Farhan’s friends on 14th July 2012, and then her body was dumped in front of his house.
Of those who manage to remain physically and emotionally unattached during their education, some are stalked (mostly due a fatal combination of good looks and evident vulnerability), either at educational institutions, or at the offices they work. The murder/ suicide incident that happened in front of Kinnaird College of Women University Lahore on 17th October 2011 is still fresh in my memory when Samar, a student of KCWU was shot by an infatuated ex-neighbour, Shams, who couldn’t take in her refusal to marry him. Then he committed suicide, to escape any persecution for his heinous crime. The workplaces are a thousand times worse for the females. They are subjected to snide jeers, sexually explicit jokes and ‘accidental’ gropes by their male co-workers. A friend living in Karachi told me, that during 2nd week of her job at one of the banks, her boss asked her out, hinting that making him happy would really speed up her promotion and salary increment. She refused, and she is still on the same pay grade on which she had started, even after 2 years. But that’s the story of a reputable corporation. What about the call centres, PCOs, third-grade factory outlets or even cheap restaurants? Where there’s no sense of morality, where the owner presumes you are his to use, any way he sees fit? Where the ultimate aim of your boss might be to pimp you out to increase his income…? The professional life in our country is worse than hell for the underprivileged/ less educated ones.
Until now, I have discussed the circumstances faced by women who find themselves unable to resist these social ‘demands’. But what of those who manage to get through, without harming either their conscience or their innocence, only because of strong moral training and constant vigilance on part of their parents? They too have ‘followers’, though they pretend to be friends. In reality, they just wait for a chance to pounce on those poor girls. One hint of emotional weakness, and they have got you! This is the reason why parents don’t feel happy at the birth of a daughter. This is what turns mothers into heart patients and fathers into diabetics, for every second after due time that their daughters don’t make it back home, they experience agony and anxiety we can only imagine. At this point, the question we must be asking is: is this how our forefathers imagined our ‘separate homeland’ to be? Did Jinnah envision every rural girl getting raped, or else, killed in the name of honour while he voiced the demand of an independent Muslim state in 1940? Is this what our religion teaches us? The nature followers who regarded the female as ‘sacred feminine’ were destroyed by the idolatrous (and later, by early Christians), to re-paint their image as ‘the vile creatures who led Adam to his expulsion from the Garden of Eden’, to dominate them, to use them the way they saw fit. Islam’s advent, among many other reasons, happened so that the women could regain their well-deserved place in the society: as man’s social and religious equivalent. Can we be so brazen; to call ourselves Muslims, but keep doing precisely what Islam forbids us from? Time to decide what position our fair sex should hold in our ‘Islamic’ society…