Tag: Pakistan

This is sad and barbaric:

A Pakistani minister and woman’s activist has been shot dead by an Islamic extremist for refusing to wear the veil.

Zilla Huma Usman, the minister for social welfare in Punjab province and an ally of President Pervez Musharraf, was killed as she was about to deliver a speech to dozens of party activists, by a “fanatic”, who believed that she was dressed inappropriately and that women should not be involved in politics, officials said.

Mrs Usman, 35, was wearing the shalwar kameez worn by many professional women in Pakistan, but did not cover her head.

May God rest her soul.

They caught the man who did it and he had no regrets saying he was following Allah's commands.

This happened in a place in Pakistan where I used to live.

You know, what is so weird is that I was once looking through all the profiles of the Pakistani Assemblypersons and I actually stopped at her profile and scanned it and thought maybe I should contact her.

Now she's not there.

Update [2007-2-20 21:28:8 by Ali Eteraz]: She may have been killed because she tried to organize a men-and-women marathon.

Also, the brutality of Pakistani politics cannot be discounted. She had been elected on a reserved seat for women. Now, after becoming popular, she was going to run on a general, open seat which I'm sure was threatening to rival politicians. 

h/t Aslam 

Update [2007-2-20 21:30:8 by Ali Eteraz]: It's a joke 

Is this a joke? My source didn't say it wasn't and well, this is Pakistan we're talking about:

Pakistan Supreme Court Ruling

A seven year old boy was at the centre of a courtroom drama yesterday when he challenged a court ruling over who should have custody of him. The boy has a history of being beaten by his parents and the judge initially awarded custody to his aunt, in keeping with the child custody law and regulations requiring that family unity be maintained to the highest degree possible.

The boy surprised the court when he proclaimed that his aunt beat him more than his parents and he adamantly refused to live with her. When the judge suggested that he live with his grandparents, the boy cried out that they also beat him. After considering the remainder of the immediate family and learning that domestic violence was apparently a way of life among them, the judge took the unprecedented step of allowing the boy to propose who should have custody of him.

After two recesses to check legal references and confer with child welfare officials, the judge granted temporary custody to the Pakistan Cricket Team, whom the boy and the courts firmly believe are "not capable of beating anyone."

One of the most unfortunate realities of the study of the Islamic world, today, is the parochialism of this study: If it isn't the Middle East, it probably isn't Islamic -- or, at least, worth study. Middle Eastern Muslims often remain unaware of Islam outside the Middle East, or the means by which it got there, and Orientalists compound the problem by reducing Islam's big tent to three unequal poles: Arabs, Turks and Iranians.

This is just another way of grumbling, 'What About Pakistan?' Where does Pakistan fit in? What does Pakistan represent in terms of the contemporary Muslim world? At Adda-fication, Jajabor discusses the formation of the Pakistani state, as part of an ongoing series (around Language Day, commemorating the 1952 riots sparked by Pakistan's refusal to recognize Bangla as an official language), for this reason

To my Bangladeshi and Pakistani readers: The post is not an exercise is pro-Pakistani nostalgia or anti-Pakistani rhetoric, but in reminding ourselves of the complex trajectories of history that are too often levelled into simple narratives.

Since this blog (if you haven't heard of it, I imagine that's only because it's so new) is composed largely of Bengalis (and Bengalis in the West), this perspective, from what was once Pakistan, is a tense one:

I am a tad nervous. Not so much because of stage fright, but more so because it's always hard to talk about Jinnah and the idea of Pakistan. Too many people seem to have axes to grind when it comes to this topic. I have none. I care about being sensitive to all sides.

The idea of Pakistan is intrinsically tied to both Pakistani and Indian nationalisms. For the Indian state, the fact of Pakistan's creation was anathema because it gave the lie to its claims to represent both Hindus and Muslims of Hindustan.

The Pakistani government seems to be capitalizing on the momentum created by the recent reforms in its Zina Ordinance. The National Assembly has now begun work on The Prevention of Anti-Women Practices Bill, which bans six practices, namely 1) depriving women of their property rights, 2) vani (marrying girls off to settle blood feuds), 3) forced marriage, 4) divorce by pronouncing it three times in one sitting, 5) marrying women to the Quran and 6) watta satta (exchange marriages).

The most interesting provision for me is this - the bill says that husbands who bring charges of adultery against their wives, but cannot prove it, will face charges of slander. I'm curious about what kind of punishment those charges entail. I am even more interested in the part that says that in such cases, the wives would have the right to initiate divorce proceedings. Since women do not have the unilateral right to divorce in Islam, I wonder how such divorce proceedings would work.

These bills are so necessary and no doubt a result of some hard fought political and ideological battles. But they will not have an effect on the ground until and unless the victims feel safe enough to vindicate the rights given under these laws. And that security will not come unless the everyday man's attitude towards women changes, when she is not looked upon as an chattel or object to be exchanged (in the case of vani or watta satta) or be disposed off (in the case of uttering "divorce" three times in one sitting).

Grassroots efforts to reform these attitudes need to be undertaken not just by NGOs or social groups, but especially by the local Imams and religious leaders, who have more sway with the man on the street than all the NGOs in the world combined. After all, it was a local Imam that condemned Mukharan Bibi's rape and encouraged her to come forward with her story and file charges. A few more like him, and these laws will truly become powerful weapons against men who oppress the very women whose honor they claim to uphold.

Well, here's a shocker. Check out the dumbass slogans:

LAHORE: Even though the Punjab University (PU) administration has taken steps to undo the decades-old hegemony of the Islami Jamiat Talaba (IJT) – the student wing of Jamaat-e-Islami (JI) – on campus, PU hostels are still the centre of IJT activities. Thousands of students coming from all over the province come into contact with IJT and are influenced by it.

IJT activists use the hostels, also known as IJT headquarters, as the place for preaching and are constantly inviting students to attend lectures and sermons on jihad and a pious life. Posters and stickers saying, ‘Quran or Sunnah Ki Dawat Ley Kar Utho Aur Chha Jao (dominate the world by teaching the Quran and the Sunnah)’, ‘O Allah, bestow a pious life and martyrdom upon me’, ‘Allah loves two drops in His way: tear shed in His fear and a drop of blood shed in His way’ and ‘Jihad – the Highway to Heaven’ adorn the walls, notice boards and dormitory doors.

Plus the IJT killed Qasim Kidwai's mosquito!

I remember seeing these idiots in Pakland, protesting to take out the words "vagina" from medical text books; rocking buses till they flipped. In the 1970's, the IJT was most successful in riot stabbing where numerous students died (this continued through the 80's). Sometimes they descended upon public schools and beat up a couple of teachers for the hell of it, and cancelled class for the day. At one point in Pakistan I used to attend (forced by dad) a private school four days a week and the public school two days a week (because he thought private school would make me too soft). I used to love when the frothing fundos showed up (they only came to the public scools, so only the poor kids lost their chance at education). They usually knocked over a wall of the school then ran in. We yelled "hartaal!" (strike!) and booked it, climbing over a wall, and back home. Most of the extremists at the university level are more of the armchair fanatic kind. The canon fodder comes from the way out madrassas.

I didn't buy Musharraf's manifesto, In The Line of Fire. I had little desire to support the dictator by forking over twenty-something dollars, not to mention that much dough for a crap effort. Columbia Libraries did, though, and so I did too, insofar as I supported Musharraf by checking his book out of the library and reading a chunk of it while on vacation.

A few superficial sort-of conclusions, since I'm not yet halfway through: Musharraf is a terribly bad writer, plagued by an arbitrary mind. If there could be a computer program written to translate text into Musharrafism, perhaps a sample passage could read like this:

I really loved being in the Army. It was an immense challenge, and demanded constant self-reflection, which I'm good at it, because I'm such a sexy fat little man. Then there was that great time me and Bunty ate kabobs that we found near the movie theatre. The Army is not, in other words, for everyone, for not everyone can be so hard on himself. 

Musharraf is also an astonishingly insecure person, who needs to tell us, far too often, how tough, brave, resilient, action-hero-ish, hard-working, indomitable and popular he is. After all, it's not enough to win at rigged referenda and speaking the language the richest minority of your subject population does. And he is, worst of all, ashamed of being Pakistani, which is the worst characteristic of a dictator.

Like so many others among Pakistan's corrupt, or simply authoritarian, elite, Musharraf readily imbibes and unquestioningly constipates himself on half-truths and convenient fictions, designed to convey an acceptable Pakistaniness. To help ease his military mind's clearly successful brainwashing (see also 'ghusl of the neuron'), he remains deliberately ignorant of India, and that Pakistan is a Muslim state with strong Indic roots and realities. How could he accept that? To him, Pakistan has to be the "Other," that to justify his military's obsession with defeating and one-upping India. But not an Islamist other, an acceptably soft, smooth Muslim nationalism, the laxative of Islamism.

Better to call it "In the Bubble," for Musharraf's worldview is at times as incorrect, stereotypical, pathetic and rotund as the middling mullah's. Take this precious fiction, from page 19, the chapter teasingly titled: "Turkey: The Formative Years":

Tukey and Pakistan have many things in common--first and foremost, Islam. Just as Pakistan was a new country in 1947, Ataturk's country was a "New Turkey" ... Kemal had saved Turkey from balkanization and obscurantism.

Actually, Ataturk was a dictator. Like you! Score two for the in-common column. Turkey's transition from dictatorship to democracy has always been helped by that segment of its population which was not embarrassed of being Anatolian, in the fullest sense of the word, and only after Ismet died and one-party rule went the way of the Taliban did Turkey become the "enlightened" state Musharraf claimed Ataturk made it. Even now, it is the Islamists and the Kurds who represent Turkey's possibility of becoming a true democratic, moderate, confident state: It is the Turkish military that is obscurantist and dogmatic. But, of course, it takes a dictator to not see a dictator.

Much of Pakistan's cuisine originated in Turkey.

No, it didn't. Much of Pakistan's cuisine is South Asian, and is frankly speaking the same as Indian cuisine: We have peculiarities, and the influences of Baloch (Iranian) and Pashtun (Afghan) cultures, too, but chicken tikka masala, the samosa, gulab jamun, lassi, ruh afza, daal roti, channe, these are not Ankaran imports. I'm hungry.

Much of Pakistan's cuisine originated in Turkey. So does Urdu, our national language.

No, Urdu did not originate in Turkey. Musharraf's proof? That "Ordu" is a Turkish word. Good God, are you serious? Get this: The Sanskrit term for the Indus was Sindh(u), or "River," leading to the Persian Hindi and the Greek India, from which we derive terms such as Hindi, Hindu, Indus, India, etc. Does that therefore mean India is a Greek country, because it is officially known as "India" and not "Sindhia" or "Aryavarta"?

Urdu is a beautiful, rich language, with a strong influence of Persian and Arabic, and little if any Turkish influence -- especially the Turkish spoken in Turkey (see also, 'ghusl of the language'). Urdu is grammatically Indic, and has far more in common with Bangla, with Bihari, with Hindi, with Punjabi and Sindhi, than it does with Turkish in any of its Central Asian registers. (Or even Persian.) Its high literature does ooze a certain Persian joie de shairi, but that cultural influence is from one Aryan language to another. This is like reading a history book by a mullah: "Pakistan was founded in 711 by the Arabs."

No. No. No. You were not elected into power, and you cannot write, and you have to stop doing sajdah to other dictators. At least don't be so obvious about your obsessions, Musharraf Sahib. The country is listening.  

I wrote about Nazenin Fatehi, the woman in Iran who stabbed one of her three would be rapists to death, but found herself on death row. Good news:

The continuation of Nazanin's re-trial took place today. It was delayed from 10:30AM to 12:30PM, in part due to the fact that so many people showed up in support of Nazanin's campaign. They were required to move court rooms. The international committee against execution says that normally in a case like this, 10-15 people show up. But today, 200-300 came to support Nazanin and there were many news reporters present. Nazanin's two defense attorneys proceeded with their defense.

After much discussions, the four judges unanimously determined that the lower court decision in January of 2006 was wrong and Nazanin killing the would-be rapist was not intentional. The defense attorneys are hopeful that the final decision on the fate of Nazanin will be announced in the next few days.

This is a very large step forward for Nazanin, and it brings great hope that she will avoid a new death sentence. Maybe she can even be free! This would not have happened without support from people all around the world, so thank you to all of you! But please don't rest yet. Until Nazanin walks out of the prison gate, she will continue to need our support.

h/t Samaha 

We now wait for the sentence.

Also check out Amnesty's call for action about Panah, a refuge for victim of severe domestic violence in Pakistan. See bold part on how to help.