The Long, Hard, Surreal Struggle for Women’s Rights in Pakistan

On Saturday night, I appeared as a panelist at the “Message of Peace: Countering Islamophobia” conference, hosted by the University of Toronto’s Muslim Students’ Association. One of the main frustrations I heard expressed at the podium concerned the subject of women’s subjugation, and the way it is covered by the media.

“Yes, women are oppressed in many Muslim countries,” one speaker declared. “But that is only because many Muslim countries also happen to be developing countries. Women’s rights are a problem all over the developing world.” To illustrate his point, he put up a series of slides showing black women being beaten in non-Muslim parts of Africa.

There’s some truth to that. But it’s not the whole truth. Yes, it typically is local cultural and tribal practices — not religion — that lies at the root of female subjugation in impoverished parts of the world. But only in Islamic countries are 7th-century religious texts still systematically invoked to justify the wholesale implementation of brutally misogynistic attitudes into national law. Saudi Arabia — where the Koran serves as the state constitution — offers a prime example. With the Muslim Brotherhood ascendant in Egypt, that country may soon offer another.

In other parts of the Muslim world, however, the situation is more complicated — no more so than in Pakistan, which has an enlightened, Westernized elite; but which also is home to remote rural tribes whose attitudes toward women haven’t budged an inch since the dawn of Islam.

A recent case from the village of Seertaiy in Kohistan, a district in Pakistan’s remote northern hinterlands, shows how bizarre the interaction between these two worlds can be.

Most Kohistanis are herders, and the literacy rate hovers near 10% (3% for women). As in many parts of rural Pakistan, women are treated like property, not much different than animals. Earlier this month, reports surfaced that four women had been murdered on May 31 as part of a mass honour killing ordered by a local jirga — after relatives became enraged by a cell-phone video that showed the women singing and clapping at a social gathering that also featured dancing males.

Given prevailing attitudes in Kohistan, the story seemed credible. (A Kohistani cleric and former legislator, Maulana Abdul Haleem, recently has issued fatwas justifying honour killings — also declaring that parents who send their female children to school will burn in hell.) But when local officials sought to investigate the incident, they were rebuffed by area tribesmen, who insisted that such matters were theirs alone to decide.

Then, the story gets a surreal, Pakistani twist thanks to one Farzana Bari, a human rights activist who teaches gender studies at Quaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad. Read her essays, and watch her being interviewed (in fluent English), and it’s hard to imagine that she’d have trouble fitting in with the liberal-arts department at any Western university.

On June 6, Pakistan’s Supreme Court dispatched Bari — and three other activists — on a fact-finding mission to Kohistan, to investigate whether the four women shown in the video were alive or not. Bari reports that she could find only one of the women (Amna is her name), and that she is indeed still alive. The rest of the women in the video, Bari was told, are also still alive; but they’ve moved up to the mountains for the summer with their clan — apparently a common practice among Kohistani herders.

In interviews, locals told the activists that the whole episode had been made up. But Bari herself is skeptical, given that family members of the alleged killers were the ones who’d originally insisted that the murders had taken place, and even had detailed the means of slaughter: slit throats.

One way to ascertain the truth of the matter, Bari reports, would be to bring Amna back to Islamabad to appear before the Supreme Court. “But for some reason, the provincial administration was not willing to do that,” she writes. “Perhaps, the reason is that there is hardly any government writ in that area and local officials operate through tribal elders … My fear is that once the public attention will be off the case, these [four] women could be harmed — that is if they are not already dead.”

Wherever the truth lies, the episode provides a telling lesson about the extraordinary range of attitudes toward women in Pakistani society — ranging from the modern, Westernized view epitomized by Bari and the country’s legal elites; to the primitive women-as-chattel viewpoint embraced by tribal elders.

Here in the West, where we honour the rule of law, we like to think that women’s rights can be ensconced with a stroke of a pen by a country’s president or legislature. But that’s not true of countries such as Pakistan (or Afghanistan, or Yemen), large swathes of which are beyond the reach of any centralized authority; tribal councils and local Imams still hold sway.

In these parts of the world, the impediments to female liberation are deeply rooted in history and tribal practices. They are far more complicated than a mere argument about what the Koran does or doesn’t say about women. As such, the battle for anything approaching gender equality likely will go on well past our lifetimes.

— Jonathan Kay is Managing Editor for Comment at the National Post, and a fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Follow him on Twitter @jonkay.