What is She?

It is said that paradise lies at the feet of the mother.
It is also said that woman is an ever changeable foot-wear
Of the male.


What is She?

An Hadith

An oft-repeated Hadith these days say that a nation which puts a woman at the helm of affairs would not prosper.

Now, even if we restrict our experience to forty-four years of the history of Pakistan, we women have the right to challenge; who was at the helm of affairs when we lost East Pakistan and Siachin? Who have been at the helm of affairs all the will we have been unable to solve the Kashmir issue? And under whom does the country lie prostrate and impoverished, dependent and unable to stand on its own feet? After all, this blighted woman was the helm of affairs for twenty months. Will only those who were at the helm of affairs for the rest of the periods pluck up courage and admit they were men and not women who brought the country to such a pass!

Obscenity

In the may 10, 1991 issue of “The Nation” Yameema Mitha in her articles “Combating Obscenity” has narrated several Indicrous escapades of the guardians of law and order and morality in the name of “Obscenity” in the capital city of the holy land, Islamabad. All this seems to be happening because of some new obscenity Act, the crux of which is that women are obscene and must be removed off the face of the earth. The concluding paragraph of her articles is after my heart and I am reproducing it below because I could do no better.

“ it is pretty obvious to most of us, “she says” that the obscenity bill has been framed by men. If it had been drawn up by women, it may have had a somewhat different focus. For example, we may have suggested the one years imprisonment and five lashes a suitable punishment for all the men out streets are littered with, whose greater entertainment in their lives seems to be scratching their prohibited parts. And at every opportunity they get they seem to be urinating on the road while ogling that the woman passing by. We might also like to suggest three years and twenty lashes for all the men on the road who boldly undress you, burqa and all, with their eyes, and who also use their hands where ever possible. In fact, we may not suggest all these imprisonments and lashings. A far more suitable punishment for such excrescences that offend the eye would be chadar and a chardivari.

An Exposure at last!

In her “My Feudal Lord”, Tehmina Durrani says, “ I have chosen the indignity and humiliation of exposure fro myself for the sake of all those women who are oppressed by men and society at some level”.

While reviewing the book, Bapsy Sidhwa comments thus:

“Pakistani women are reared on horror stories of unhappy marriages, and on tales of the forbearance of silently suffering wives. Women are eulogized for putting up a brave front before the world and hiding the misdeeds of their menfolk; vicious acts, which h even if they cost women their lives, are often regarded as pardonable misdemeanors.

Women – much like chaste China vial that contain a precious perfume – are considered repositories of family honor. Or at least that is the analogy one conjures up to hear men talk about the issue. But ‘ izzat’ is a corrosive and formidable weight to carry, and requires something more like the tough buffalo – hide pouches favored by our ‘bhistis’ to contain it.

The burden would be tolerable if the men kept faith with their traditional roles as providers, protectors and custodians of the honor vested in their womenfolk. But when the man slides from his role and protectors and becomes instead the very person from whom the women needs protection, then to carry on wit this charade is not only brutal but also imbecile. It is surprised only that I has taken to long for a woman like Tehmina Durrani to white her story.”

Boycott

A home- bound , insecure and illiterate woman has, in the course of time, become her own enemy. Such an existence leads to a limited mental horizon, using Sufism and mullahism as a cutch and getting bogged won in superstition and irrationality. However, with so much emphasis on her being the ”queen of the home” she has some to dominate, through the ages, certain aspects and events of family life. Apparently at least he man seems to have been pushed into the background. These events are : choice of life partners for sons and daughters, wedding ceremonies, birth of children and their early upbringing and funeral rites.

Once while recalling the transport drivers strike against the implication of the law of Qisas and Diyat, and eventually the knuckling down of the Mullah, some of us wondered whether women had such a clout. At first it seemed they had no such country-wide power in bringing the economy to a grinding halt. But on a second thought, it was realized that the above mentioned female roles could form the basis of a strong clout in routing the fundamentalists from our family life and ultimately from our national life.

For instant, why should a Mullah preside over the birth, wedding, under ceremonies? Why should a Mullah enter the privacy of our homes and preside over the ’mikah’ ceremony, recite ‘azan’ in the ears of the newborn baby, and why is his presence necessary for the funeral rites? On the only hand we claim that there is no middle man between the Quran and the believers, and yet nothing seems to happen without him.

Women should launch a country wide movement of boycott. Nothing could be more effective