A rape victim defies traditional code
By Owais Tohid | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor
ISLAMABAD, PAKISTAN – When Mukhtaran Mai, a simple, uneducated peasant of a small village, was gang raped on the orders of a local council, her life was supposed to be over. In Pakistan's tribal and feudal culture, rape victims are usually ostracized. But Ms. Mai refused to back down, dedicating her life to social work and to changing attitudes about women.
"I had only three choices. Either to commit suicide by jumping in a well or shed tears all my life like any other victim in such cases. Or I could challenge the cruel feudal and tribal system and harsh attitudes of society," says Mai in a phone interview with the Monitor.
For three years, Mai has been fighting an uphill battle for justice against the culprits. Monday she is set to appear in Pakistan's Supreme Court to seek punishment for 12 men, including four alleged rapists. Lower courts put one of her attackers behind bars for life, but five other convicted men were freed on appeal because of a "lack of sufficient evidence."
Her case has garnered national and even international attention, thanks to her willingness to speak out both here and abroad. Concerned that she would tarnish the country's image, the government recently banned her from foreign travel, only to back off amid protests. But her greatest impact may be at home, where her boldness has helped change people's perceptions of rape victims, say rights activists.
"She has become a symbol of resistance and defiance in the country," says Farzana Bari, a leading women rights activist who has worked closely with Mai. "For the women's movement, her case is significant as she is showing the cruel face of a system which considers women as property."
The fate of 32-year-old Mai changed when she was allegedly raped by several men on the orders of a self-styled community justice council, known as a punchayat, in the Punjab village of Meerwala. The councils consist of tribal elders and influential feudal lords.
She was punished for no crime of her own. A rival clan went to the punchayat claiming that Mai's teenaged brother allegedly had a sexual relationship with a girl of their clan. Villagers say the boy was merely seen walking with the girl. The punchayat ordered that Mai be raped by the rival clan members to settle the score.
Mai says she shouted and screamed for help while she was dragged in front of hordes of villagers for rape. She walked back to her family house in front of the villagers, shivering, with tears in her eyes. But nobody came forward as a witness in her case.
Initially her parents refused to register a complaint with the police, saying it will bring dishonor to the family and disrepute to the tribe, an attitude no different from traditional practice. But they eventually agreed, due to Mai's commitment to fight.
"I pray to God to get justice as my victory will be the victory of suppressed and oppressed women," says Mai. "God forbid if I lose. Then it will be a defeat for everyone who believes in social justice."
When the case hit the headlines of national and international media, Mai became a celebrity and visited several countries in the West.
Using money she raised abroad, she now runs a primary school for girls and boys. Within two years, the enrollment increased to 350 and she plans to construct two more classrooms. The school's success shows that the villagers trust her, even to teach their kids the Koran.
"I want to see girls of peasants study and make their own identities rather than being caught in the vicious cycle of this feudal system," she says. "I am at peace whenever I see them studying."
Mai also lends a hand to other victimized women, to whom she has become a hero. Though she has helped embolden women in Pakistan, the fragile women's movement has a long road ahead. During seven months last year, 151 Pakistani women were gang-raped and 176 were murdered, victims of the centuries-old tribal custom of honor killings, according to the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan.
A fortnight ago, human rights activists had wanted Mai to go to the US to speak on the issue but the government took her passport and restricted Mai to her house. During a recent trip to New Zealand, President Pervez Musharraf reportedly said Mai was being taken to the US by foreign nongovernmental organizations "to bad-mouth Pakistan" over the "terrible state" of the nation's women. He said NGOs are "Westernized fringe elements" which are "as bad as the Islamic extremists."
Islamabad lifted the travel ban after protests from rights activists, international media, and perhaps most significantly, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
Mai, who has postponed her trip until after the court verdict, met with General Musharraf a couple of months ago.
"Someone must have tried to create a misunderstanding as he has always been kind to me," Mai says. "But how could he even think that I will bad mouth Pakistan? I love my country as much he does. I could have sought asylum, but I belong to this country and the land belongs to me."
Mai acknowledges that the pressure on her is daunting at times. "Even some people in the community taunt me, but I don't cry anymore. I only cry when the darkness hides my face. I curl up in my mother's lap but smile with sunrise with more vigor and courage," she says.
Mai wants to get married and she says lots of men have proposed to her. "But they seem to be interested more in money. I could see dollars flashing in their eyes. I tell them if you want to marry me then live with me in the village and serve people. Then they don't return," she says, smiling.
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Grace emailed me the following article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/10/opinion/10rushdie.html?hp
July 10, 2005
India and Pakistan's Code of Dishonor
By SALMAN RUSHDIE
IN honor-and-shame cultures like those of India and Pakistan, male honor resides in the sexual probity of women, and the "shaming" of women dishonors all men. So it is that five men of Pakistan's powerful Mastoi tribe were disgracefully acquitted of raping a villager named Mukhtar Mai three years ago. Theirs was an "honor rape," intended to punish a relative of Ms. Mukhtar for having been seen with a Matsoi woman. The acquittals have now been suspended by the Pakistan Supreme Court, and there is finally a chance that this courageous woman may gain some measure of redress for her violation.
Pakistan, however, has little to be proud of. The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan says that there were 320 reported rapes in the first nine months of last year, and 350 reported gang rapes in the same period. The number of unreported rapes is believed to be much larger. The victim pressed charges in only one-third of the reported cases, and a mere 39 arrests were made. The use of rape in tribal disputes has become, one might say, normal. And the belief that a raped woman's best recourse is to kill herself remains widespread and deeply ingrained.
For every Mukhtar Mai there are dozens of such suicides. Nor is courage any guarantee of getting justice, as the case of Shazia Khalid shows. Dr. Khalid was raped last year in the province of Baluchistan by security personnel at the hospital where she worked. A Pakistani tribunal failed to convict anyone of the crime.
Dr. Khalid says that she was subsequently "threatened so many times" that she was forced to flee Pakistan. "I was hounded out," she says, expressing dissatisfaction that the government neither brought her attackers to justice nor protected her from the threats that followed.
That is the same government, led by President Pervez Musharraf, that confiscated Mukhtar Mai's passport because it feared she would go abroad and say things that would bring Pakistan into disrepute; and it is the same government that has allied with the West in the war on terrorism, but seems quite prepared to allow a war of sexual terror to be waged against its female citizens.
Now comes even worse news. Whatever Pakistan can do, India, it seems, can trump. The so-called Imrana case, in which a Muslim woman from a village in northern India says she was raped by her father-in-law, has brought forth a ruling from the powerful Islamist seminary Darul-Uloom ordering her to leave her husband because as a result of the rape she has become "haram" (unclean) for him. "It does not matter," a Deobandi cleric has stated, "if it was consensual or forced."
Darul-Uloom, in the village of Deoband 90 miles north of Delhi, is the birthplace of the ultra-conservative Deobandi cult, in whose madrassas the Taliban were trained. It teaches the most fundamentalist, narrow, puritan, rigid, oppressive version of Islam that exists anywhere in the world today. In one fatwa it suggested that Jews were responsible for the 9/11 attacks. Not only the Taliban but also the assassins of The Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl were followers of Deobandi teachings.
Darul-Uloom's rigid interpretations of Shariah law are notorious, and immensely influential - so much so that the victim, Imrana, a woman under unimaginable pressure, has said she will abide by the seminary's decision in spite of the widespread outcry in India against it. An innocent woman, she will leave her husband because of his father's crime.
Why does a mere seminary have the power to issue such judgments? The answer lies in the strange anomaly that is the Muslim personal law system - a parallel legal system for Indian Muslims, which leaves women like Imrana at the mercy of the mullahs. Such is the historical confusion on this vexed subject that anyone who suggests that a democratic country should have a single, unified legal system is accused of being anti-Muslim and in favor of the hardline Hindu nationalists.
In the 1980's, a divorced woman named Shah Bano was granted "maintenance money" by the Indian Supreme Court. But there is no alimony under Islamic law, so orthodox Indian Islamists like those at Darul-Uloom protested that this ruling infringed the Muslim Personal Law, and they founded the All-India Muslim Law Board to mount protests. The government caved in, passing a bill denying alimony to divorced Muslim women. Ever since Shah Bano, Indian politicians have not dared to challenge the power of Islamist clerical grandees.
In the Imrana case, the All-India Muslim Law Board has unsurprisingly backed the Darul-Uloom decision, though many other Muslim and non-Muslim organizations and individuals have denounced it. Shockingly, the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, Mulayam Singh Yadav, has also backed the Darul-Uloom fatwa. "The decision of the Muslim religious leaders in the Imrana case must have been taken after a lot of thought," he told reporters in Lucknow. "The religious leaders are all very learned and they understand the Muslim community and its sentiments."
This is a craven statement. The "culture" of rape that exists in India and Pakistan arises from profound social anomalies, its origins lying in the unchanging harshness of a moral code based on the concepts of honor and shame. Thanks to that code's ruthlessness, raped women will go on hanging themselves in the woods and walking into rivers to drown themselves. It will take generations to change that. Meanwhile, the law must do what it can.
In Pakistan, the Supreme Court has taken one small but significant step in the matter of Mukhtar Mai; now it is for the police and politicians to start pursuing rapists instead of hounding their victims. As for India, at the risk of being called a communalist, I must agree that any country that claims to be a modern, secular democracy must secularize and unify its legal system, and take power over women's lives away, once and for all, from medievalist institutions like Darul-Uloom.
Salman Rushdie is the author of "The Satanic Verses" and the forthcoming "Shalimar the Clown."
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