PukhtunWomen

They say that sometime in the 1870s Sir Syed Ahmed Khan wrote to a colleague. ‘When on the Day of Judgment I shall be asked about good deeds performed by me in my earthly career, I shall say ‘Nothing, except that I got Hali to write his Musaddas’.

Cut to 2006, as the luminaries of the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (and Muhammad Hussain Mehnti and Laique Khan in particular) write to their well-wishers regarding their achievements in the past week and probably as they set to drafting a copy of their speech when they meet their Lord and Maker. We can suspect that in all probabilities it will go along these lines. ‘My Lord, at a critical juncture of Pakistan’s history when all eyes looked towards us as to in what direction we steer our country, at a time when the sins of the past could be erased by our actions, when Your blessings placed us in a position when we could secure the future of generations of Pakistani women in the coming years, I did you proud. I ensured that one dish (where one dish is defined as salan, rice with roti and one sweet dish’ along with hot and cold drinks) is served at weddings.’

This dear readers, is the state of affairs in Pakistan. This is what we have progressed to; and this is what the institution of the Maulana in Muslim civilization, the esteemed and revered intellectual traditiona has been reduced to. And this is our Musaddas. For any soul who had mourned that our generation didn’t have their Musaddas that we didn’t have the epic for our times a chronicle that could sum up our dilemmas, our trials, tribulations and achievements, well now we do.

One simple newspaper headline will do what the 294 stanzas of Musaddas e-Madd o-Jazr e-Islam (The Ebb and Flow of Islam) could not capture:

I was once told to have a trifle Zen approach towards life, to decrease my expectations and so minimize disappointments. So I don’t feel our contemporaries ever expected much of the governments of our time. Hardly anyone was expecting the clergy getting together and having an ijtehad in our lifetime to see how the Shariah could be adapted to something more relevant to our times, neither were we expecting any intellectual debates about Islam and secularism, actually I don’t think we even expected to enjoy the same level of human rights as our contemporaries elsewhere in the world, all we ever wanted was to maintain whatever rights we had. Come the enlightened regime of General Zia and they took with them what little dignity women did have. Now when there is an attempt to restore the ‘status quo’ pre-1979, and remember there is an emphasis on restoring rather than reworking or redefining anything, we have seen that even expecting that is too much.

As the esteemed members of parliament complain that no one has broken down the information for them, that actually no one has EXPLAINED the proposed bill for them, and as the legislature deliberates forming a committee to discuss the fine print for them. And while there are still Pakistani citizens who want to be assured that this Bill will not lead to moral decadence and licentious behavior. And as members of the Pakistani diaspora who frequent the electronic forums I subscribe to are still posing queries as to what is the content of the Bill? As to why there are images of the MMA (and we should say their other colleagues in the legislature) creating a ruckus in the parliament and tearing up the name of God and His Prophet (and I wonder when did we move from picking up and kissing with reverence when anything written would fall to the floor to a time when we can tear up and trample the written word). For the first time in my life I have totally given up. For really, no Pakistani citizen can be so ignorant about the Ordinance in this time and age.

After all that our citizens have gone through due to the ill actions of some in the 1980s, the examples every day as how the infamous Hudood Ordinance has run sough shod over women’s lives, of how the Ordinance rather than enforcing and moral and good Islamic values has given a license to the powerful to rape women and quell any kind of opposition. Someone has to actually explain this to our legislators? This they cannot decipher and summon up a quorum (and decorum!) to vote for? But they can do the math to figure how much the catering industry is suffering every year after the ‘The Marriage Functions (Prohibition of Ostentatious Displays and Wasteful Expense) (Amendment) Bill’ was passed? When it comes to this ‘travesty’ of justice our members of parliament can understand that certain legislations from the past can be wrong or politically motivated and though motivated with the intention of enforcing religious values can be in fact against Islam and Sunnah?

It is not that our Members of Parliament fear change. Or that our society does, or in fact that even our clergy does. Though ever day there is someone who will suggest very kindly that ‘you guys look down on your cultural behavior and follow The West blindly by underestimating (readers can fill in the blank whether it is Pakistani or Pashtun or Muslim) society and it is traditions’. And though there will always be someone who will quote a wise soul from the developed bloc who confesses that the First World has learnt the error of their ways and it is only in our part of the world that there is salvation and so to maintain our ‘exemplary’ gender relations. But do remember that our community has been changing, every day there are challenges, there are reinterpretations, threads that hold up the fabric of our community unravel every day and it is accepted as a sign of our times.

My particular community has seen a change in how we did Islam, lived culture, in the way we greeted each other, our social relations, our mode of business. It is only when the challenges are raised by women that our foreheads are furrowed. And we scuttle to defend our traditional values. So don’t bemoan our alleged betrayals when we find value systems that accept us and acknowledge us. When every day you reduce the space available to us, when you stifle us with your egos, when you barter our rights to score a point in the Parliament. When the parliamentarians in their negotiations with the government use our lives as bargaining chips. When a government that can get the Opposition and the Treasury united and on good behavior when it comes to amending the constitution, as it plays around with the offices of the President, Chief Executive and Chief of Army Staff, creates constituencies where there are none, rubber stamps legislations, gives amnesty to the men in khaki, is suddenly helpless when it gets to summoning them on this issue?

Or should I be flattered? That a gender that has been reduced to half a citizen, who’s voice has been silenced on so many forums, who’s life, honor, liberty, access to health and education has been trampled upon on so many times in the recent past, that if the state of affairs for her change, that if there is any chance that she gets a voice through this legislation, then Pakistani society as we know it, the fortress of Islam that we live in, will be shaken to its roots? Really, is that all that is keeping the wolves at bay?