You either stay in your sanitised comfort zone, or you step out and get inured to contempt for women. Some events, though, still leave an imprint.

Nazish Brohi

When these women went to register their protest, they were told to first to do wuzu (ablution) before meeting the committee because they were paleet (impure) and were about to appear before the pak (pure).

That was over a decade ago. The court case demanding Qandeel not use ‘Baloch’ as her name because of the disrepute she brought to the ethnicity shows continuity, though none of the thousands who use Baloch as a surname took issue with it. That a country that is an avid consumer of pornography would condemn risqué behaviour in others is not surprising. The gaze of judgement seldom turns inwards.

The honour code earlier was a governance code.

Some years ago, Afiya Zia and I co-authored a paper on honour killings for which playwright/ director Khalid Ahmed translated Shailendra’s song Kaanton se kheench ke anchal. Cavorting in a truck laden with hay, Waheeda Rehman flung out a clay pot, shattered social conventions and immortalised the song in the Indian movie Guide. But embedded in the jubilance was the price she was willing to pay. This is the decision many women across Pakistan have to make when they tear through social conventions. The jeenay ki tamanna and marney ka iraada is congruent: the desire to live (as they want) requires the will to die.

Placing women on a continuum of purity and impurity is a recurring trope across many cultures: the virgin and the harlot, the home and the street, the pedestal and the brothel. Both ends, however, exist exclusively for fulfilling male desires. Women deemed impure cannot gain respectability. The pure ones live their lives in fear of being pushed down to the other side. There are caveats though. Resort to religion can help make the disreputable respectable, and class privilege can protect against the label of the prostitute.

The honour code earlier was a governance code in the absence of state supervision. However, in its current incarnation, it frees men from responsibility because honour lies not within their own actions but elsewhere. Like in folk tales across the world, men’s life, soul or strength was outsourced: the magician’s life in a parrot in a faraway land; Ravanna’s life placed in a box and given to a hermit before he left for war; the giant whose heart was in an exotic egg.

Hence in the general perception honour killing is not aggression but reaction. The perpetrator is recast as the victim of a moral crime and the killing is an act of the restitution of honour. Some years ago, I spoke to Hukumdin during the trial hearing of his son, who had bludgeoned his sister to death. He said of his daughter, “She was like a suicide bomber. She pursued what she wanted without thinking of anyone else, and it killed her and destroyed everyone around her in the process.” When I questioned him about the nebulous ‘it’ that killed her, he answered “Khudi” (selfhood).

There is a change though. Two decades ago, parliament declared honour crimes a cultural prerogative. Now with the Pre¬vention of Anti-Women Practices law passed and additions made to the Pakistan Criminal Code that disable forgiveness for family members, the prime minister himself has pledged to pass a specific law on honour crimes.

Earlier, the state itself reserved the right to punish women for sexual transgressions under the Hudood Ordinance. Now not only can that no longer be invoked, the state has registered itself as a complainant in some recent cases of women being punished for sexual transgressions.

Previously, women have been killed inside the court premises while the judges looked on; now people have been sentenced with the maximum punishment for honour killings. In the past, people have looked to religion as justification for honour crimes whereas now most religious authorities condemn such murders. And earlier communities were unequivocal about their condemnation of women accused of bringing dishonour. But before burial, henna was applied on Qandeel, which in her home district of Dera Ghazi Khan is symbolic; it is meant for girls and women who die without having sinned, free from accusations of wrongdoing.

The earlier mode of collective, interdependent living made conformity to community standards necessary and public performances of honour desirable. That mode is finishing. Social structures are in a fight for survival of the status quo. In the long term, it won’t work. But in the interim, women’s lives will remain the battleground.

The writer is a researcher and consultant in the social sector.
Published in Dawn, July 28th, 2016

This story was originally published by Dawn, Pakistan

The obsession with women is evident in Friday sermons across the country, in the Council of Islamic Ideology’s fixation on regulating women’s bodies, in society’s vigilance of women and in the preoccupation with women’s dressing, holding it responsible for earthquakes and expediting the Day of Judgement.

Nazish Brohi

While growing up, I thought ‘mod’ was an Urdu word that meant disreputable women. I didn’t figure out that it was an abbreviation for ‘modern’ till much later. It explains the moral panic around women though.

Women and through them, the home, were the last bastion against modernity. Initially ushered in through colonialism, in people’s experience, with mass schooling came mass arrests; with long-distance roads came long-distance weapons; with premium on rationality came the dismissal of tradition. Liberating laws were in tandem with obstructive bureaucracies, the consolidated state simultaneous with decimated lifestyles.

A solution was needed that allowed benefiting from colonial engagement while also keeping cultural purity and personal identity intact. So men would wear pants, speak English and seek employment and representation, while the women would study religion and morality inside the home and raise children inculcating in them the value of traditions. This vein continues. Global economic, political and material integration will not subsume us as long as women as transmitters of identity are kept uncontaminated.

But now the inner sanctum has been breached. More women are studying and working outside homes and making marriage choices than ever before. Fertility rates are declining and the age of marriage has been moved forward. They have entered gender-bender fields from corporations to parliament, from sports to driving trucks. Laws have been introduced that regulate the private domain such as prohibiting anti-women customs, addressing domestic violence, allowing divorce and dismissing the consent of guardians. The state is extending social protection to the poorest of women and offering incentives for their economic participation.

And there’s the blowback. Not only is ‘customary’ violence like ‘honour’ killings increasing, but emerging forms are breaking with the past patterns of confining violence against women to the privacy of ‘chaar divaari’. Gang rapes, public stripping and parading, circulating videos of coercive pornography are not just bodily violations but have an important function of broadcasting public warnings. For others, the velocity of social change is signalling the ‘qayamat’ they believe can be stalled by calcifying women in status quo.

The hostility to human rights as a framework is the aftershock of a seismic change. The moral compass has upended. The move from the collective as a unit to the notion of individuals was nothing less than an inversion of the earth’s poles that apparently happens every couple of millennia.

The collectivities, the tribe, the caste, the ethnicity, the biradari, the village, the family, were all sustained by a political economy that made joint livelihoods and identities necessary. Even now, across rural Pakistan I find women unable to use the singular ‘I’; it is always ‘us’ and ‘we’. They don’t conceptually differentiate between personal and family interests. It is in this context that honour killings, forced marriages, use of women in conflict mediation (swara) and child labour occur, where the detriment of the individual is to the benefit of the group. ‘We’ masks the injustices that the ‘I’ uncovers.

Some things that indicate the old authentic pre-modern are new — the hijab for instance. Other things that look new, hence modern, are old conventions — women in leadership positions for instance.

In the search for authenticity, a sort of neo-archaeology of the indigenous, a hybrid reality is created. South African visa regulations required me to get written permission from my husband allowing me to travel alone. They said it was in keeping with the local culture. I argued that no authority in Pakistan had ever asked for this. It turned out that it was about minimising honour crimes asylum claims.

Women across Pakistan, meanwhile, continue to face an old ultimatum: they can either claim citizenship of the state or membership of the community. Appealing to the former means expulsion from the latter. Once you go to the police or courts or shelters, there is no going back into the family fold. Until recently, the reverse was also true: women within the fold of their communities were out of bounds for the state. But the gendered premise of citizenship is changing.

As the state was contested, it did not have the social legitimacy to assert monopoly over violence. So instead, it ‘democratised’ violence by creating enclaves of impunity: the state had the right to use violence in the public sphere and men had the right to use it in the private sphere. As the state gains acceptance and consolidates its monopoly on violence, it has started to challenge men’s impunity in the private sphere. This changes the terms of the social contract itself. This is why there is such a strong reaction to domestic violence laws.

Women’s lives are both, indicators of change and its collateral damage. The violence they face is in the public’s knowledge but mostly beyond public consciousness. But change happens anyway, whether willed or not. So where does that leave me?

A woman in a remote village on the border of Sindh and Balochistan was trying to understand what I did as I explained my research and advocacy work. Her ancestors were the traditional mourners of the Talpur rulers, women who were paid to wail about death and misfortune, communicate suffering and provide collective catharsis.

She rolled her beedi and had her eureka moment. “You do the same thing,” she said while smirking, “You’re the new generation rudaali.” I laughed. Then I agreed.

The writer is a researcher and consultant in the social sector.

This story was originally published by Dawn, Pakistan