It is what happens in Karachi every December and extends sometimes to January or February but hardly ever to March. The sweltering heat abates, blossoms emerge in flowerbeds, the air is dry and cool, and the wedding venues are lit up like amusement parks (which they also are in a sense).

Rafia Zakaria

I did not coin the term and it isn’t exactly new. It is the creation of author Adnan Malik, who in 2015 wrote evocatively about the strange phenomenon that takes place in Karachi every winter. He described it thus: “A fleeting psychological and physical condition brought on by seasonal displacement when a false sense of mass euphoria and well-being affects the population of urban Pakistan” and is considered as causing the mass influx of expatriate Pakistanis, the nice weather, the many weddings, etc.

Having endured the slow slog of nine months of summer, the sun moves a bit further away, allowing everyone to clean up and get made up.

Like so many other people, Malik himself was afflicted just as most Karachi dwellers are, having endured the slow slog of nine months of summer, the load-shedding and the water outages, the heat-related exhaustion and anger all lifting suddenly and inexplicably as the sun moved a bit further away, allowing everyone to clean up and get made up, trussed in finery to show the world and their relatives that they had survived another year, could still fit into the sari blouses or the bridal joras of the last Decemberistan.

An essential fixture in the end-of-year euphoria is of course weddings. Over the years, and at least in Karachi, they have become not just nuptials of two people, two families, two friend groups, etc but also a function of a sort of pop-up all-ages nightclub.

Like most other things in Pakistani society, the roles are scripted but also evolving. The young -people realise that the functions and the many dance practices and pair-ups that come with them are really a mass speed-dating event. New partners can be found or discarded or considered; Decemberistan does not last forever and so its opportunities must be partaken of with gusto.

The dancing, now absorbed into the script of the shaadi, exerts its own pressures. Friends, the best of them being in demand for several weddings simultaneously, must be rounded up, choreographed and offered up before guests as examples of the couple’s popularity and coolness.

In many weddings, brides and grooms have also entered the fray; dance duets featuring them have become a sort of predicted performance of their ability to move in tandem, proof of sorts of their ability to be good husbands and wives.

Not all Decemberistan parties are of the marital sort. One inventive host threw a bash mocking the Ambani wedding on the other side of the world. The inherent hilarity of the event was not only the satire of copying the gaudy debauchery of Indian others but also that the satirisers were those who are unlikely to note obliviousness of a similar sort among their own.

It was okay, of course; Decemberistan permits and even requires such buzzworthy events, and it would be cruelty to limit opportunities to show off only to those getting married or trying to get married. There are other sorts of flirtations enabled by Decemberistan — and the celebrations, if you have the chance to attend one of the parties, are proof of that.

Where there are consumers, there are those facilitating their consumption. This year, many designers came up with specific Decemberistan collections. One of them even provided delivery options (around the world, no less) along with an impressive cache of clothes for ‘any Decemberistan event’. Make-up and beauty parlours, waxing ladies and hair mavens, are all booked up long before the actual December arrives. If one were looking to set up any of these businesses, December¬istan is the time to do it. The demand is such that the discernment falters, even disappears.

A word, too, about the arriving expatriates, perhaps the hungriest of the Decemberistan breed, wanting to be seen attending so many events that the workaday mediocrity of the rest of their lives lived abroad are forgotten.

Often, a white friend or two tags along, eager to consume the “verve and colour” of the South Asian wedding, never quite understanding the function of the whole thing or of their own presence, but always good for the Instagram likes and Facebook shares of the event. Attending a wedding at home seems a mainstay for most expatriates, passing judgement on the events and the way things were and the way things are, almost an edict of their expatriate faith.

There are, of course, those unfortunate souls that cannot partake of the ebullience of Decemberistan, those who have jobs that require them to be there early and bosses who have no sympathy for the midnight dinners that come with the month, those who have to work the events themselves and those who for ethical (yeah, they exist) reasons find the excess and gluttony, the untempered braggadocio and the lustful exhibitionism that comes with partaking, against their principles.

Perhaps this last group, small and near invisible as it may be, can devise an alternate Decemberistan, a Decemberistan Lite that can be composed only of enjoyment of the weather and nature, the chill in the air and the flowers underfoot, a relative- and dance practice-free Decemberistan that can reform and revive the Karachiites who suffer all year long.

The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.
rafia.zakaria@gmail.com

This story was originally published by Dawn, Pakistan

It has been nearly 10 years since an angry mob raged through the streets of Gojra in the early morning hours of Aug 1, 2009. The trouble had begun the day before, Friday, when certain xenophobic clerics had incited Muslim villagers, citing rumours about the desecration of religious verses. On that grim day, around 10 Christians were burned alive.

Rafia Zakaria

Later on, when the dead and injured were counted, when the politicians woke up and began to offer their thoughts and prayers, the tragic toll, besides the number of dead and injured, would become apparent: a community devastated by the anger of a mob motivated by hate.

There have been other incidents of hate and of sectarian violence since Gojra. And like Gojra, some have begun on Friday afternoons, after a preacher harbouring extremist views has riled up the fervour and sensitivities of the crowd before him. There have been times when such angry mobs have killed; or, if they have not, they have demanded murder or defended murderers.

Those who use freedom to abridge and destroy the freedom of others must not be permitted to do so.

For a very long time, there has been no accountability, no real means of connecting the men who are accused of preaching hate to a congregation of faithfuls to the incensed mobs that then march out into the streets. It has been assumed that the men standing at the pulpit, delivering the sermons, can do no wrong, can say no wrong, are disconnected from the rising levels of animosity and hatred that is, tragically, on the increase in many parts of the country.

Until this March, it did seem that little would change when it came to sermons inciting hatred and delivered by a section of clerics. On March 2 this year, the government, specifically the interior ministry, announced that it was considering 44 subjects that would be considered permissible topics for Friday sermons. The plan would be disseminated among the 1003 mosques in the Islamabad area as a pilot project.

According to officials of the National Counter Terrorism Authority, or Nacta, which collaborated to create the project, the plan has been developed after looking at similar plans implemented in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the UAE. In all of those countries, appropriate themes have been given to clerics who prepare their Friday sermons in accordance with the directives.

On March 25, the committee overseeing the plan announced that it would be implemented and that the government would, in fact, be issuing a list of permissible themes to be addressed at the Friday sermon.

While many clerics in Islamabad have expectedly opposed the plan, insisting that the religious institutions and mosques in the city are controlled by the Auqaf department and not the capital’s administration, the committee that has decided to implement the plan contains representatives from both the Auqaf department and the administration.

The monitoring of the sermons (to ensure that clerics are complying with the approved themes) will be carried out by the Auqaf department, the capital administration and the Special Branch of the Islamabad Police.

In the days and weeks to come there are likely to be many obstacles to this sort of directive.

Over the years, while many other facets of Pakistani life have been circumscribed — made subject to diktats and directives, just laws and sometimes unjust laws, the whims of military rulers, the eccentricities of democratic rulers — the clergy has faced none. Some clerics who purport to represent the majority of Pakistanis have taken it upon themselves to issue directives and incite extremism.

The involvement of Nacta illustrates this — in hundreds, possibly even thousands, of mosques, clerics urge support for extremist thought, even violence, whilst ignoring the reality that thousands of Pakistanis have died as a result of violent tactics.

For too long, hate-filled clerics have remained above the law, able to operate with impunity.

Freedom is a great thing, particularly in relation to faith. However, in this case, the freedom accorded to clerics has been used to abridge the freedom of so many Pakistanis to practise their own faith and in their own way. Those who use freedom to abridge and destroy the freedom of others must not be permitted to do so; they can only be seen as the enemies of freedom itself, and they must not be allowed to misuse their authority in religious matters.

This monitoring and theme-implementation project will, at its inception, only be operative in Islamabad. The Special Branch has the capacity to implement the plan and monitor it. Close monitoring is essential to ensure that mosque leaders see that this is not a symbolic move.

In terms of the programme’s implementation in the rest of the country, there will be a need to enhance the monitoring abilities of the police. In this age of closed-circuit television, however, actual people may not be necessary to identify those who are not complying with the interior ministry’s approved themes. The directive could simply require that all mosques submit a text of the Friday sermon in written form prior to delivery and a recording following it.

The regulation of Friday sermons and the development of a code of conduct that ensures that our religious institutions are not abused or made into hotbeds of inciting hatred is crucial to the welfare of Pakistan. A mosque is a place for prayer and reverence, and the monitoring and regulation of Friday sermons will ensure that it can continue to be sacred and respected.

The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.
rafia.zakaria@gmail.com

This story was originally published by Dawn, Pakistan

Maryam Nawaz looked prim and poised as ever as she stood before hordes of men in Mansehra last week. She wore a pumpkin-coloured shalwar kameez, and as always a chiffon dupatta on her head; the lipstick on her lips matched exactly. Insulating her from the crowd (the stage was so packed that Maryam Nawaz had to interrupt her oratory with a chastising, “there is no more room left”) was a cabal of grinning younger women, dressed with lesser finesse than the leader whose presence required their own.

Rafia Zakaria

As it happens, this assertion is incorrect, its fallacies a direct challenge to the Constitution of Pakistan which defines the establishment and jurisdiction of the courts, the provisions for judicial independence and the method via which new judges would be appointed working in collaboration with parliamentary committee — this is a somewhat important point which has been apparently forgotten by, among others, Maryam Nawaz.

If Pakistan’s courts, which are the real courts of the people, are handicapped and their verdicts discarded, the leftover would be a minimal democracy.

It is not a coy or accidental forgetting but a politically expedient one. In insisting that ‘the court of the people’ constitutes the crowds at her rallies or those voters that make up the PML-N’s support base, Maryam Nawaz is looking out for her father’s benefit. If Pakistan’s courts can be delegitimised by setting up a false dichotomy between the will of the people and the verdicts delivered by courts, then it happens that the verdict disqualifying her father from participating in elections can be similarly discredited.

In this anti-constitutional perspective, the courts are somehow against the people and the laws they enforce independent creations. Random crowds or voters of this or that party are better judges of right and wrong, guilt or innocence.

This is not so and should in fact never be so. In a constitutional democracy, and Pakistan is one, constitutions, ratified as they are by the people’s elected representatives, represent checks on power. They ensure that those who get the votes and make the laws (via parliament) are not the same as those who interpret and apply the laws (the judiciary).

The separation ensures that the people who get the votes and make the laws, even if they happen to be prime minister, are not above the law themselves. The reason is simple: a constitutional democracy is presided over by a president or a prime minister, and not a king who ruled by virtue of the support of the people and without any constitution binding his actions; prime ministers are bound by them.

It is a crucial distinction, largely lost in the political rhetoric that insists that this or that lawmaker or prime minister be ‘exonerated’ by the people in a show of crowds and cheering and such. It is important not simply because the progeny of past prime ministers should not be whipping up frenzy to make way for unconstitutional action, but because of how such views erode democracy itself.

One of the hallmarks of a transition from democratic to authoritarian rule is an erosion of the instruments of democracy and the concentration of power in a single branch of government. If Pakistan’s courts, which are the real courts of the people, are handicapped, their verdicts discarded and their decisions discredited, the leftover would be a minimal democracy which cannot be distinguished from the tyranny of the majority.

In such a set-up, laws would matter little, and the powerful, with a clever duping of the people, could rule endlessly and without the constraint of any law at all. Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini and other fascist dictators did just this when they did away with constitutional provisions that reflected, for instance, protection of a minority instead of the untrammelled mobs that gathered to hear the Fuhrer speak.

At the Democratic convention prior to the 2016 election in the United States, a Pakistani American lawyer named Khizr Khan got on stage and offered then-candidate Donald Trump a copy of the American constitution. As a Muslim-American, he wanted to remind the would-be president that democracy constitutes many parts, among them a respect for the constitution that protects the equality of all before the law. It was a powerful moment and a memorable one.

A similar moment needs to happen in Pakistan; some brave Pakistani needs to stand up and offer a copy of the Constitution of Pakistan to Maryam Nawaz, so that she can read for herself where and how the courts of Pakistan were created to apply the laws of Pakistan.

Undoubtedly, justice is a difficult commodity to mete out in Pakistan; prosecutors disappear, judges are harassed, their children threatened, their lives at risk when they dare to challenge the powerful and well-connected. When the right thing is done, when the powers that be, or that were, are held to account for their transgressions, when sentences are imposed, these must be recognised as acts that strengthen Pakistani democracy. All Pakistanis can do this, for the recipe is simple: every time there is mention of the ‘court of the people,’ refer them to Part VII, Chapter One of the Constitution. There, they can find out for themselves that the courts of the people already exist. They would know that they exist not for the exoneration of one or another politician, but for the protection of Pakistan’s democracy.

The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.
rafia.zakaria@gmail.com

This story was originally published by Dawn, Pakistan

A lot was done in the name of Muslim women in the waning weeks of 2017. Saudi Arabia gave permission for women to enter the previously forbidden sports stadiums and allowed female contestants participating in an international chess tournament in Saudi Arabia to forego the abaya and hijab. In future months, the kingdom benevolently promised, women would be permitted to drive trucks and motorcycles in addition to driving cars.

Rafia Zakaria

Then there was India, whose autocratic and notoriously xenophobic leader tried to paint himself as a champion of the country’s Muslim women by supporting the passage of the Muslim Women (Protec-tion of Rights of Marriage) Bill, 2017. The bill, which has until now only been passed by the Lok Sabha, or lower house of parliament, not only makes oral talaq a criminal offence, but goes further and actually imposes a jail term of three years on those found to be using this method of severing marital ties.

Women, particularly Muslim women whose fortunes and futures have been regularly used as pretexts in the half century past, are not stupid.

If one is a Muslim woman, one has to try hard not to laugh and slow-clap at this clamouring of three separate countries, a monarchy, a theocracy, and a supposed democracy and their pitiable attempts to ‘help’ Muslim women. The monarchs of the kingdom, playing as they are to a largely foreign audience, can be seen slapping the backs of other men, at having gleaned a few more miles of positive press from the lifting of a driving ban whose most immediate consequence is not the liberation of women, but the firing of immigrant drivers.

Similarly in Iran, the throttling of dissent for decades, the suffocating environment perpetuated by a system that hardly allows men or women to breathe and affords even fewer opportunities to engage in global discourse, will hardly be dissipated by the reining in of a noxious arsenal.

Finally, there is the case of India, a country whose cosmopolitan character and democratic institutions have proven woefully inadequate before the advance of Hindu nationalism. With systematic and terrifying doggedness, the purveyors of Hindutva have undermined all checks and balances, thus proceeding to vilify the minorities with gusto.

In accomplishing this campaign of vilification and marginalisation of Indian Muslims, the rulers next door have borrowed a case from the colonial playbook, sect against sect and women against men. If the white colonialists of old aimed to save Indian women from Indian men, the Modi government’s ‘neo-colonialists’ seek to save Muslim women from Muslim men.

So while Saudi Arabia plays to the gallery abroad — as a country whose pliability and goodwill is valuable on the world stage — and Iran courts an audience of young people, India pretends to protect some of its poorest minority women from the poorest minority men. Freeing them from oral divorce in which a man declares ‘I divorce you’ three times and considers a marriage dissolved, will, in the words of BJP minister M.J. Akbar, liberate the women from the repressive yoke of this practice. We are witnessing a situation similar to the one in the days of the old colonialists, when India’s Muslims and Hindus went for each other’s throat on cue; today the warring parties involve Muslim sects in India.

Even as the representatives of the largest Indian Muslim organisations declared their opposition to the ban or at least the jail term, the leader of the Shia Waqf Board immediately went on record saying that he considered the three-year proposed jail term to be ‘inadequate’. In his view, the mandatory jail term for the offence of declaring an oral divorce should be much longer. Notably, and rather sadly, he and nearly all the politicians loudly professing their views regarding Muslim women are men.

This last fact is not a coincidence. In India and in Saudi Arabia and in Iran, men have, as is their habit, installed themselves as the ultimate arbiters of deciding what will or will not free Muslim women from the yoke of the repression that they face. Each set of these domineering men, separated as they are by sect, or faith or purpose, has devised its own entirely male recipe for helping the very women whose views the men regularly ignore.

To cover up personal corruption or religious prejudice or abuse of power, they have decided now to turn to this: spinning their own welfare as the noble desire to liberate or ingratiate themselves with women.

It is likely to be a failed attempt. For starters, women, particularly Muslim women whose fortunes and futures have been so regularly used as pretexts in the half century past, are not stupid. True concern for Indian Muslim women is not coming down hard on divorce laws but making attempts to reduce the rampant discrimination and harassment that they (along with Indian Muslim men) regularly face.

Similarly, a sincere desire to liberate Iranian or Saudi women is not to lift the onerous restrictions that the state should never have imposed in the first place, but to restore to them the freedom of thought and dress and belief that have always been their birthright.

In clamouring loudly to declare themselves the champions of Muslim women, the autocrats and theocrats and lapsed democrats of the world forget that the oppressed may be silenced but they are not stupid. To become true supporters of Muslim women, men in all three of these countries need first and foremost to shut up and listen.

The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.
rafia.zakaria@gmail.com

This story was originally published by Dawn, Pakistan

It was only a couple of months ago that the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) came out with its women’s magazine. Titled Sunnat-i-Khaula, the magazine attempted to appeal to Muslim women, offering first-person stories of a female doctor who gave it all up to travel to ‘Khorasan’, an interview with the wife of a commander (he did the dishes and helped around the house), and even a supposedly inspirational portrait of a child soldier.

Rafia Zakaria

Last week, the militant Islamic State (IS) group, which has long been in the game of recruiting women and has a whole brigade comprised of them, renewed its call for action. Unlike prior attempts at recruitment that have appeared in Dabiq, the group’s English-language magazine, this latest one was issued in its Arabic newspaper under the title ‘Wajib un-Nisa’.

Unlike previous attempts at swelling the numbers of women in IS-controlled territory, which hinted at fighting as an option for women, this latest call demands it, calling it an obligation and a duty. Specifically, it says, “Today, in the context of the war against the IS, it has become necessary for female Muslims to fulfil their duties on all fronts in supporting the mujahideen in this battle”, and that women should “prepare themselves to defend their religion by sacrificing themselves [for] Allah”. To bolster the legitimacy of its command, the directive points to the women who were companions of the Holy Prophet (PBUH) and who (according to IS) fought alongside men, and also to female warriors in the golden age of Islam.

With so many men leaving, the militant Islamic State group is quite predictably turning to women.

Unlike the TTP, whose open attempts to recruit women surfaced only very recently, IS has been targeting women as recruits for some time. Even in the initial days of the group’s takeover of Raqqa in Syria, its efforts were directed at women who were recruited into the Al Khansaa Brigade, which went around disciplining and abducting women who did not conform with the group’s stern directives.

Women without a full-face veil, women without guardians, and even women talking loudly were all subject to the wrath of this wandering all-female morality police.

On social media, the group’s female recruits, particularly those from the West, took on the task of wheedling others to join, talking about how lovely life was in daula [the IS-controlled ‘state’] and what a grand time was to be had in living in such a pure place. Even then, the group manufactured a genealogy for the female warrior. Al Khansaa, originally a female poetess, and Nusaybah, a female warrior, were selected from history for this purpose.

Propaganda for terrorism was thus couched in religious duty, a return to Islamic authenticity, both of which had been honed to perfection in the group’s recruitment of men. The small difference was in the details, mentioned here and there: that women were to have a ‘supporting’ role whose focus was the implementation of decisions by men.

So it was until this summer, when IS began to lose. As the reports of the group’s losses mounted and fighters were lost, more were required. The desperation was evident in the group’s propaganda; an article in Rumiya, another of its propaganda publications, asked women to “rise with courage and sacrifice in this war”.

Perhaps pre-empting that this could be considered a capitulation to the fact that no male fighters were available, the author went on to add that this call to women was “not because of the small number of men” and that women should join owing to “their love for jihad”.

The argument that turning to women does not come from the surrender of men would be harder to make now. Last week’s call to women to fulfil their obligation for ‘jihad’ and undertake terrorist attacks came in the wake of enormous losses suffered by the group. According to the New York Times, more than 1,000 IS fighters surrendered en masse to Kurdish militias. Their commander had told them to make their own decisions and they had chosen to surrender, they said, because it meant they would have some chance at survival. With so many men leaving, the IS is predictably turning to women.

The whole story proves only one thing: terrorist groups, whether they are the TTP or IS, manipulate history and text and faith, all to serve their own desire for power. When the groups take over territory, women are deemed worthless, sentenced to isolation, banished from public space and treated like animals. Other women are recruited to carry out these degradations, to beat and search and imprison others.

In those moments, faith to these groups means segregation, seclusion and derision, a relegation of women to the status of lesser beings. When they are losing, so too does the religious demand, and suddenly, women are duty-bound to be in the battlefield fighting alongside men and carrying out attacks. All the reasons previously offered to keep them hidden and at home and subject to the whims and directives of guardians disappear in an instant.

Muslim women are smarter than Muslim men. The sly manipulation of faith that lies at the core of all terror groups and that is so useful in recruiting men is unlikely to be quite so effective in drawing in women. Unlike Muslim men, Muslim women know and remember that the violence now being demanded of them by IS is a mere redirection of the violence that is inflicted upon them.

Men who justify beating women, mistreating women and abusing women as a religious right, are now arguing for the same women to take up arms so that they may return to power and to the task of subjugating women. Whether it is IS or the TTP or some other militant group, Muslim women are not fooled, not duped by the propaganda that insists that murder is a religious duty.

The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.
rafia.zakaria@gmail.com

This story was originally published by Dawn, Pakistan

War bleeds people; it spills over borders, rivers, deserts and forests, with people hiding and pleading and always, always running. Along with the Rohingya, the people of Syria have seen incredible devastation in the past few years. Even as other wars have waxed and waned, these conflicts have continued in full view of the world, with the feeble bureaucrats of the United Nations looking on and doing nothing.

Rafia Zakaria

The trade in Syrian brides evolved from just these circumstances. Turkey, which has taken in several million refugees fleeing Assad or the militant Islamic State group or the general barbarity of war, is one venue for the hapless trade in Syrian women. Refugees are everywhere in Istanbul, huddled and eager for any charity that they can get. It is no surprise, then, that some of the women among them have become targets for a thriving war economy in marriage.

In one case, reported by the UK newspaper The Sunday Times, an elderly man approached a refugee family about marrying their 17-year-old daughter. He wanted a girl with fair skin (what’s new?) and blue eyes (sigh) and she fit the bill. The man was already married, and polygamy is forbidden in Turkey. In order to get around this, only a religious and not a required civil marriage ceremony was carried out. With this, the two were married.

A woman is not a toy. But the moral mechanics via which she is transformed into one are notable.

The young girl was taken to a home ruled over by an old but cruel mother-in-law. One of the reasons the girl had agreed to the marriage was that she could not afford a sight-saving medicine that she needed for her eyes (the same blue eyes that the man so coveted). She never received the medicine. The man used her and his mother mistreated her. Then he tired of her and sent her back to her family. By this time her sight had degenerated to such an extent that she was becoming blind. The man divorced her in the same perfunctory way he had married her. The money he had paid to her family had long evaporated. In essence, the man purchased the young girl as if she were a toy, and then discarded her when she no longer amused him. There was no one to stop him.

Except that a woman is not a toy. The moral mechanics via which she is transformed into one are notable here. Beneath the purchase of a woman for pleasure is the idea that such a ‘marriage’ — and the quotation marks are important — is somehow permissible in religion. Underlying this sort of justification is the idea that a marriage as an act of charity is allowed despite the fact that the intention is not to form a lifelong relationship but to fulfil the whim of a rich man.

Embedded in this justification is the idea that a male is a whole human and a woman not quite that. And that in turn, buying a woman or using her as a thing without rights, instead of a person with them, is part of faith. All of these ideas preclude any understanding of marriage as a bond based on mutual respect or love or equality, and reduce it to a commercial transaction in which the man is a buyer and boss and the woman is a purchased product.

Syrian women, particularly those who are facing these dire conditions, are not currently in a situation in which they can contest this arrangement. That burden falls on all the rest of the watching world, particularly the Muslim world, which must grapple with the idea that the idea of marriage has been reduced to the purchase of women. Muslim scholars, usually so eager to issue fatwas and edicts on controversial issues of global import, have unsurprisingly remained silent on the matter. No one, it seems, is willing to point out the many injunctions that stress the equality of men and women, that point to marriage being a relationship of love and equanimity, rather than exploitation and profiteering.

Beyond issues of faith, the idea that marriage is a transaction carried out by men and endured by women further embeds the idea that Muslim men, Turkish or Pakistani or otherwise, are somehow inherently unable to respect women. This premise, now a staple of Islamophobic propaganda in the West, uses examples such as the ones involving the sale of Syrian women to Turkish men as the material for exclusion and mistreatment. It is difficult to insist that not all brown men from the Muslim world are committed to hating women, treating them poorly and insisting on their inferiority, when so few of them speak up against the misuse and mistreatment of Muslim women.

The example of Syrian women for sale is a dire one, but the idea that marriage is a transaction that involves the purchase of a woman, who must amuse and endure silently and exist in servitude, has millions of supporters in Pakistan. It is on the basis of that kind of support that economies of mistreatment, of the sale and enslavement of women, can exist and persist. As long as all of these smug and silent men continue to treat their wives as their property and marriage as a hierarchy, all marriages, whether they happen in refugee camps in Turkey or in fancy mansions in Karachi, are marriages of desperation.

The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.
rafia.zakaria@gmail.com

This story was originally published by Dawn, Pakistan

The World Happiness Report operates from the premise that happiness can be measured, counted up via surveys, tabulated in statistics and then ranked by country. This year’s report ranks 155 countries in a master ranking of happiness. It also proves statistically what all of us have known tacitly: rich people are happier than poor people, more likely to describe themselves as “happy” and consequently rich countries, made up as they are of rich people, are happier than poor countries.

Rafia Zakaria

According to the report’s authors, however, Norwegians are happy not because of their country’s wealth but in spite of it; ever frugal, they drill their oil reserves sparingly and slowly invest the profits rather than frittering them all away. As a consequence, Norway’s economy is cushioned from sudden downturns and its people from common worries that are everybody else’s affliction. Those who save are rarely sorry and the case of Norway, the happiest country in the world, proves just that.

How you estimate Pakistan’s position depends on whether you are an optimist or a pessimist.

At number 80, Pakistan falls in the middle of the pack of countries ranked by the happiness index, not anywhere in the league of Denmark and Norway but beating both India and Bangladesh. At number 122, India fell four places in the happiness index between last year and this year’s rankings. One Indian publication blamed unemployment, malnutrition and poverty as possible causes, another threw the blame at the lack of vacation time, citing a study that ranked India as the fourth most vacation-deprived country in the world.

At number 79, China ranks higher than India but (rather surprisingly) sharp improvements in the standard of living of the Chinese over the past 25 years have not produced equivalent advances in levels of reported happiness. If the World Happiness Report is to be believed, the Chinese are absolutely no happier than they were in 1990 when per capita income was significantly lower than it is today. A possible cause for Chinese unhappiness could be the perceived lack of personal and political freedom, an indicator on which the world’s happiest countries rank very highly. More money, it seems, cannot entirely eliminate the misery produced by the constrictions and constraints of a repressive society.

The import of a World Happiness Report lies in the insights it can provide about the human experience as a whole — and there are some interesting ones in this year’s edition. Across all 155 countries, unemployment produces a huge drop in an individual’s estimation of their own happiness. Similarly, regardless of whether a country is rich or poor, the misery of mental illness is the single factor having the largest impact on happiness. It makes sense then that countries that have few resources to deal with mental illness and in which mental illness is stigmatised do not rank as highly on the happiness index as those where the mentally ill can be properly treated and are not subject to social exclusion and ostracism.

For all its insights, however, the World Happiness Report is yet another ranking according to whose parameters rich countries rank higher, seem better and hence establish a dominance of sorts over lesser nations. The happiness ranking, comprehensive and exhaustive as it may seem, does not reveal that the countries at the bottom of the list — the Central African Republic, Yemen and Syria amongst them — have all been the subject of troublesome meddling by richer, more powerful (and happier) Western nations. Invasion or intervention of this sort is not measured or interrogated by the authors of the happiness index, nor is it considered a possible cause for a lower happiness ranking.

The underlying premise of the World Happiness Report is that ‘happiness’ measured subjectively via a number of variables is the most coveted state of being in the world. Happiness, it is assumed, is the object of all human action and the consequently ultimate metric of well-being, more thorough and accurate than earlier tabulations that ranked the world’s nations on the basis of other measurements — the sum of their gross domestic product or the level of their economic growth. And yet even this metric of ‘happiness’ and its measurement using (at least in part) surveys of individuals may be unduly reliant on individualistic notions of self.

In societies where group identities are dominant, survey questions that demand subjective and individual estimations of happiness would be unusual, with survey respondents unaccustomed to considering their relative happiness or unhappiness independent of the consensus of family or clan or tribe. Similarly, some societies may prioritise piety or unity over individual happiness, making the latter a less than ideal measure of their well-being in relation to others.

At almost exactly halfway down the happiness index, how you estimate Pakistan’s position depends on whether you are an optimist or a pessimist, inclined to see the glass half full or half empty. In either case, improvement is always possible: the Central American country of Nicaragua, beset with just as many challenges as Pakistan, came in at number 43, making it the most improved country in the entire set of rankings. What’s possible for Nicaragua may be possible for Pakistan, a climb from the bottom half into the upper half, a transformation from an almost happy country to a truly happy one.

The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.
rafia.zakaria@gmail.com

This story was originally published by Dawn, Pakistan

Undoubtedly, there were others who suffered more. Even before the rains beat down on Karachi this year, taking a few and then a few more and finally over 20 lives, hundreds others had died in neighbouring countries. The citizens of Karachi died as they do every year in an increasingly destructive monsoon season: a child drowned in an underground tank, two men were electrocuted while riding a motorcycle, another in his home. The run-up to Eid meant that there was livestock everywhere, tied up in markets and outside homes. The waste from these animals mixed with stagnant water — the deadly mix of offal, excrement and raw sewage in standing water — may well raise the number of dead. They will not be included in the official death count for this year’s rains.

Rafia Zakaria

It was not that there were no problems: Karachi swelled to many millions more than two decades ago and its meagre means of managing even a little rain even then were deficient. The first rains were mixed with pollution. Children and grown-ups developed eczema and other rain-related skin ailments if they came in contact with a lot of it. Some knew this; others thought they were just unlucky, scratching and itching and taking whatever medicine by whatever sorts of doctors that they could afford.

A city home to millions and in the direct path of terrible destruction should be better informed about the effects of changing weather patterns.

Things are different now. Dr Ghulam Rasool, the department chief of the Pakistan Meteorological Department, stated in a recent interview that the rising temperatures in the Arabian Sea now almost match those of the Bay of Bengal. If in the past, the higher temperature in the bay had meant that a lot of precipitation (particularly the development of tropical cyclones) occurred in that region, the warming of the Arabian Sea augured a change in weather patterns. The devastating cyclones that were once confined to the bay can now easily develop in the Arabian Sea. Even before they develop into cyclones, tropical depressions forming off the Sindh-Makran coast can trigger sea storms.

In sum, the rains that flooded and destroyed the city last week are a best-case scenario; in years when the city is less lucky, things can get worse, much, much worse. It is possible that it may rain less often, but when it does, it is far more likely to be a deadly and disastrous event.

Karachi, now a megacity but one devoid of anything more than the most basic emergency services, is particularly at risk. An analysis of the deadly heatwave that hit Karachi in June 2015 has shown that a low pressure area over the Arabian Sea reversed the flow of air from land to sea instead of the other way around. With the sea breezes blocked in this way, the temperatures in the city rose and so did the humidity.

The low-pressure system remained suspended over the sea and the city grew hotter and hotter. By the time it moved, scores were dead and many more sickened by heat exhaustion, dehydration, sunstroke and related ailments. According to the Met Department, a similar low-pressure system suspended itself over the Arabian Sea earlier this year, but luckily it was much farther from Karachi’s coastline and was not able to make life as miserable and the air as hot and punishing as it did in 2015.

One would imagine that a city that is home to millions and lies in the direct path of terrible destruction and devastation would be better informed about the effects of changing weather patterns accompanying climate change perpetuated by global warming. If the science is too complex, one would expect that self-preservation, the fear of dying at the hands of a heatwave or tropical cyclone, would lead many to pay attention and make some changes.

Yet even while so much has changed, the apathy, the passivity or the recklessness of an entire city remains unchanged. Even today, millions flock to the ocean in the face of cyclone warnings, even touting this behaviour as exemplary of the fearless attitude of the city. It is likely that they will be doing just that when the storm, previously only forecast, actually hits. The thousands who will die will not be lucky, nor will they be brave; they will simply be dead.

Finally, a word to the television channels whose round-the-clock transmissions are just as much a feature of our times as the rain and ruin and changing weather patterns. Unlike the rest of the world, where warnings of catastrophic weather incidents result in scientific forecasts and many warnings for caution, all attempts at preserving life, no such mercy is available to the Pakistani television viewer.

Unchanged from last year, and the year before and the many years before that, news anchors, their caked-on make-up seemingly untouched by rain or heat, recycle the same old lines about eating samosas and ‘enjoying’ the same weather that is drowning small children, electrocuting people and making others who are bereft of their own means of power generation and water provision completely miserable. The chasm between their narration of the rain and the experience of rain (and accompanying ruin) is vast, a metaphor of denial and illusion that stands for so much in Pakistan.

One person cannot, of course, change the weather or stem the course of climate change or save all the suicidal souls of Karachi who like to dare storms from the coastline. One person can care, heed the signs, listen to the warnings, act in a manner that ensures caution for one’s own life and the life of others. Imagine, then, what a city of those people could do and what a lovely place it would be in rain or shine, regardless of the weather.

The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional laws and political philosophy.
rafia.zakaria@gmail.com

This story was originally published by Dawn, Pakistan

“You can’t clap with one hand,” one of the rapists in the notorious Delhi gang rape case had famously said after being convicted of rape and murder. This man, along with five others, had been found guilty of taking a young woman to the back of a Delhi bus one night in December 2012. The men raped the young woman inflicting injuries that were so terrible that the doctors, including those in Singapore, where she was sent for treatment, could not save her. A few weeks after the incident — after she had identified her assailants and given her statement — she succumbed to her injuries.

Rafia Zakaria

It was an unusual move, according to experts; lower courts in India routinely hand out death sentences but many if not most are overturned on appeal based on some technicality such as shoddy investigation by the law-enforcement authorities. So it was expected it would be the same in this case, some detail or procedural provision invoked to show ‘mercy’ to the men. The fact that this did not happen signifies that the highest court in India saw it necessary to uphold the worst possible punishment in a case so grotesque that it saw hundreds of protests across India and headlines around the world.

Unlike in India, little attention has been paid to the issue of rape in Pakistan.

Across the border in Pakistan, little attention has been paid to the issue. Unlike the Indian Supreme Court, the higher judiciary in Pakistan has seen it fit to sentence convicts to death, even those who are mentally ill. In many cases, defendants have been executed even when there are problems with investigations and prosecutions. It is rape, and not the death penalty, however, that is the issue here. While India has imposed the highest punishment on these gang rapists, Pakistan has yet to take similar action in rape cases.

One relevant example is the 2002 case of the gang rape of Mukhtaran Mai. Like the woman in the Delhi rape case, Mukhtaran saw her assailants and was able to identify them and chose to do so. It wasn’t enough. As happens with so many cases in Pakistan, the case was pushed around on appeal from one court to another, in the mess of parallel jurisdictions that is the Pakistani judicial system. Initially, six men — the alleged rapists and those who were part of the panchayat that ordered her rape —were found guilty. Justice, it seemed, would be served, to a woman who had undergone the most horrific ordeal possible.

It was not, however, the end of the story. In 2005, five of the six men, who had been found guilty and sentenced to death by an anti-terrorism court, were acquitted by the Lahore High Court and the sentence of the sixth was commuted to life imprisonment. In 2011, an appeal to the Supreme Court against the high court verdict was rejected.

In an interview she gave to the BBC when the decision was announced, Mukhtaran said that the police had not recorded her statements properly. She said that she had lost faith in all Pakistani courts.

Most Pakistani women, particularly those who have had some encounter with the justice system, would likely agree. Like the convicted Indian rapist who alleged that the woman he raped and killed had only herself to blame because she was out at nine o’clock at night, most men here are used to blaming women for the abuse and harassment they suffer at the hands of Pakistani men. If a man beats his wife, it’s because she ‘made’ him, by refusing to acquiesce fast enough, or with enough submission and servitude, to his demands.

If a male professor harasses a female student, it’s because she dressed or looked or smiled in a certain way and so ‘deserved’ the treatment. If a boss harasses an employee, well, you ‘can’t clap with one hand’; it’s her fault for being in his employ, for working outside the home, for being present in a place where he can prey on her.

A border may divide India and Pakistan but this logic of ‘you can’t clap with one hand’ unites its men.

In the initial days after the Delhi rape incident, several newspapers commented on the fact that the men were not particularly big or burly and looked rather ordinary. It is an important and thought-provoking comment because it draws attention to the rapist in every South Asian man, sitting dormant and eager to grab an opportunity. In Delhi, that opportunity came when six men jointly decided to prey on an innocent female for the crime of being out at nine in the evening.

For others, it may come in other places, in empty offices or darkened corridors or silent streets. In a society where men are so unquestionably dominant and women grow up internalising this hatred towards them, the woman is always believed to be at fault; the number of rape cases and the lack of punishment for rapists simply prove the point.

In all other instances, military might or athletic achievement, rhetoric or regional influence, Pakistan and India try to outdo each other. In this instance, however, there will be no attempt to do that. India may have imposed the worst punishment possible on five of the rapists, but Pakistan will continue to ensure that its rapists go free. All the ordinary men, the ones who believe that women are asking for it simply by existing in the ambit of their predatory and sinister intentions, need not worry; in Pakistan no one will stop them, no one will get in their way.

The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.
rafia.zakaria@gmail.com
Published in Dawn, May 10th, 2017

This story was originally published by Dawn, Pakistan

Sometimes it takes a single person with courage to awaken a society. So it may be in the case of Ye Haiyan, a women’s rights activist in China who has sacrificed nearly everything to bring to attention the condition of sex workers in her country.

Rafia Zakaria

Ye Haiyan’s story is the subject of a documentary titled Hooligan Sparrow, produced by filmmaker Nanfu Wang. Wang followed Haiyan and her fellow activists as they protested outside the school and engaged in other peaceful demonstrations that highlight the plight of women in the sex trade in China. Wang herself had to contend again and again with people trying to take away the film footage. Often she could only record audio by hiding the mic inside her clothes. In several cases, even people posing as fellow activists tried to obtain access to the footage, saying that they would keep it safe and return it to Wang later, when the Chinese government or the bosses of the Chinese sex trade were not looking.

Like Haiyan herself, Wang did not fall for the false promises of people posturing as activists or the Chinese authorities. The result: this documentary is a rare and riveting look at an aspect of Chinese life and society that is otherwise unknown. Many (including myself) would assume that a strong state would also mean equal protections for women.

Animosity towards women can now be added to the list of things that the Pakistani and Chinese states appear to have in common.

It is well known that one of the cornerstones of the Cultural Revolution was to bring Chinese women into the workforce and free them of the traditional bondage imposed by gender inequality. Consequently, one assumes that women having options other than sex work would not have to engage in it in order to survive.

As the movie reveals, this is not the case; not only are young women trafficked and misused by men such as the school principal, they are later blackmailed by their male bosses who threaten to hand them over to the authorities if they do not comply. They remain stuck and abused by the men who pay for their services and by the men who enslave them in the profession. The Chinese state seems to care little or not at all about their welfare; the well-being of these women or even of the young girls who are forced into the profession appears to be a seemingly low priority for the Chinese state.

In Pakistan, as in the rest of the world, this face of China is rarely seen. The friendship between the countries has long been celebrated. Even before there were plans to build an economic corridor, schoolchildren like myself were taught to sing songs praising the brotherhood between the two countries. With China poised against India, the simple calculations of common enemies meant an adulation of the Chinese.

Chinese goods flood Pakistani markets and Pakistani newspapers and television anchors have routinely sung the praises of their always-present-in-times-of-need neighbour.

Animosity towards women can now be added to the list of things that Pakistan and China appear to have in common. Just like Pakistan, it seems that China too wants to use the veneer of respectability and pretend that abused women, particularly those forced to work in the sex trade, simply do not exist. This faulty morality impacts the women who are pushed and forced into the profession; it threatens them with arrest and punishment if they are found out. This dynamic forces the women to stay silent and invisible so that they are available to be abused by men. No one knows how they live and no one cares when they die. Both societies are completely comfortable with this.

For all of these reasons, Hooligan Sparrow, the brave chronicling of how one woman stands up to the silence and shame of society, is a film worth watching. It is harrowing to see how landlords throw everything that Haiyan owns on the street. It is inspiring to see how she refuses to be cowed, wanders from city to city with her daughter, and never once complains about the consequences of raising her voice.

In one moving scene, particularly pertinent to Pakistan, Haiyan talks of how the women in her village sacrifice everything for their families, their lives and futures hacked to pieces for slight improvements in those conditions. The fate of Pakistani women, of all classes, is much the same, their desires and wishes and dreams placed on the chopping block, by men for whom they are pawns in some other game.

Women’s activists in Pakistan, particularly those who raise their voices without the protection of wealth and family, can find in this story a different basis for Pakistan-Chinese solidarity. With so much effort being made in developing stronger linkages between Pakistan and China, perhaps this link could also be forged. Ye Haiyan and many of her fellow activists had to serve prison terms for their activism; the lawyer who defended her continues to remain in prison without trial. Their courage, one hopes, could forge a different sort of bond between Pakistan and China.

The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.
rafia.zakaria@gmail.com

This story was originally published by Dawn, Pakistan

Many of the women’s shelters currently operating in Afghanistan have been founded and funded during the Nato/US presence over the past decade.

Rafia Zakaria

It followed from all this that in the run-up to the invasion and in the months and years after, programmes and development focused on Afghan women received a lot of attention in the international media, including pictures of Afghan women going to school and walking on the streets of their country without the burqa that the Taliban had made mandatory.

Indeed, in 2015, over a decade after the invasion, the New York Times was still publishing articles touting how American-established shelters were the only thing standing between abused Afghan women and the men who would kill them.

It is unfortunate that women’s shelters are viewed as a product of a Western feminism that contravenes culture and religion.

There is a lot of truth to that premise. In Afghanistan (as in Pakistan) family and tribe are the venue of refuge and recourse. This means that women who rebel against tribal mores, be it those who are accused of sexual crimes or those victimised by men (often from their own family), have no place to go. With nowhere to go, many women would either have to put up with the abuse or take their own life. Until the establishment of shelters, no third choice was really possible.

Unsurprisingly, everyone, except the women living in the shelters, has been critical of their presence. When the whole structure of society, specifically the project of making women ascribe to the rules and whims of men, is predicated on the fact that they have no choice but to obey, it follows that anyone or anything that offers them an option is going to be viewed less than favourably.

Even Afghan government officials, who have otherwise been eager to take help and funds from the Americans, view the presence of these shelters with scepticism. As scholar Sonia Ahsan quotes in her ethnographic study of Afghan women’s shelters (called khana-yi aman), even the Afghan justice minister described the shelters as encouraging girls to disobey their fathers and family members, their presence conveying that they did not have to worry, they could run away and stay at shelters and did not have to bother with what their family members thought.

On top of all this, Ahsan notes, the fact that these women are runaways, imagined or known to have been abandoned by their families, lends further ambiguity to the moral status of the shelters themselves. The places that provide shelter to women accused of being disobedient or depraved are hence imagined as venues of disobedience and sexual promiscuity.

All the problems afflicting women’s shelters in Afghanistan exist also in Pakistan. The absence of choices for abused or accused women is just as instrumental in ensuring that they comply with everything and anything that is demanded of them. Similar to Afghanistan, Pakistani women’s rights organisations have been helped by international donors over the past decade. The idea, as in Afghanistan, has been to provide options for women who otherwise have none. Government-run shelters in Pakistan have to contend with the same criticism, often facing accusations of immorality just because they are seen as intervening in private matters where the family and their agendas are supposed to have complete sway and supremacy.

As long as state and society remain intractable, the need for women’s shelters will be there. In Pakistan, the scale of urbanisation and demographic change has meant that more women are in need of such venues when marriages and parental relationships become abusive.

However, while the newspapers are full of pictures of dead women, of women who had nowhere to go and were killed for honour or disobedience or some other reason, neither Pakistani nor Afghan society seems particularly concerned with seeing women’s shelters as a necessity. Rather, these are viewed as a product of a Western feminism that contravenes culture and religion. As funding from external sources dries up, such a recalibration is absolutely imperative in both countries. Unless lawmakers take steps to indigenise the idea of women’s shelters, and present them as crucial to the welfare of women, such a change is unlikely.

If the developments of the past few weeks are a sign of things to come, Pakistan is moving in the wrong direction. The recently passed Alternative Dispute Resolution Bill, 2017, which grants legal legitimacy to decisions made by jirgas and panchayats, is a huge blow to women’s welfare. These male-dominated extra-legal bodies, which have been known to promote the abuse and persecution of women and deny them choices, are one of the biggest enemies of institutions such as women’s shelters.

As international aid dries up in the coming years, women’s shelters in Pakistan and Afghanistan are likely to face existential issues that will threaten their survival. Unless there is urgent and immediate recognition of the need and importance of these institutions, even those that exist are likely to be no more. The consequence, and one that is sadly meaningless to many Pakistanis, will be more dead women, killed simply because they could not run and had no place of safety where they could take refuge.

The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.
rafia.zakaria@gmail.com
Published in Dawn, March 1st, 2017

This story was originally published by Dawn, Pakistan

A few weeks before 2016 took its leave, David Hale, the US ambassador to Pakistan, announced that the United States government, via the United States Agency for International Development, would be investing $7.3 billion toward increasing the number of female teachers in Pakistan. The announcement came as part of the 16 days of activism initiative by USAID’s Gender Equity Programme, which the Aurat Foundation is implementing. Around the same time, USAID also signed an agreement with Wapda to provide $81 million for the construction of the Kurram-Tangi Dam that will help generate 18 MW of activity for the Waziristan region.

Rafia Zakaria

The uncertainty regarding USAID’s future (and consequently the future of its activities in Pakistan) is not limited to delays in communication between the president-elect and the agency. According to foreign policy experts, Trump’s America First doctrine may spell far more drastic changes in US investments in development programmes in the rest of the world. In June 2015, Trump proclaimed that the US should cut off aid to “all the countries that hate us” and use the money to build its own infrastructure. In true Trump style, he backtracked on the statement in April 2016, when he said that the US should continue giving aid to countries like Pakistan because “we don’t want to see total instability”.

Regardless of which of the two statements represents Trump’s actual intentions, the prognosis in general is not a good one. Alex Thier, a development expert writing for DevEx, a development focused website, noted that scrapping USAID and having it absorbed into the State Department has been a recurrent proposal of conservatives in the US. One of the champions of this position was Newt Gingrich, who until a few weeks ago was a frontrunner as Trump’s pick for secretary of state. Even as that points to a less stringent view on foreign aid expenditures, it is unlikely that the large budgets for programmes such as gender equity, capacity building for democracy, etc will keep the same form that they have over the past eight years. Experts note that the positions of Vice President-elect Mike Pence on women’s reproductive rights also mean that funding for family planning programmes around the world is likely to dry up.

Regardless of what represents Trump’s actual intentions, the prognosis is in general not a good one.

The conservatives who are likely to have important roles in the Trump administration will probably recognise that development aid is a means to court and insure the support of other nations and maintain US influence. At the same time, it is possible that they will focus less on ideals and more on whether the countries whose coffers are being filled are delivering what the US demands of them. Focus is likely to be on getting the ‘best deal’ for the US, with little interest in the constraints facing the recipient countries.

As a recipient of USAID funds, Pakistan would be wise to stay warned and ready for the coming future. As money for women focused and gender equity programmes dries up, there is a grave risk for Pakistan’s NGO sector. Women’s organisations that rely significantly on USAID funds to implement programmes should immediately look through their budgets and focus on diversifying their funding base via local donors. Even more importantly, they should make an effort to use the money they have received to build up their cash reserves in the event there is no more money coming in the future.

Even if there are no significant changes in the USAID funding amounts that Pakistan receives, the delays in communication between USAID and the incoming Trump administration portend delays in funding disbursements, programme development and other bureaucratic measures that are essential to USAID projects around the world and in Pakistan. Since thousands of jobs in Pakistan depend on this funding, it is crucial that the government of Pakistan also take note of the issue. NGOs represent a significant economic sector in this country and employ many thousands of people. A crash in Pakistan’s NGO sector would have an impact on many livelihoods, not to mention on the communities that currently benefit from USAID-funded programmes.

Ultimately, of course, the best way forward is to reduce Pakistan’s dependence on foreign aid money in general. As I have noted in many previous articles, while external funding provides crucial resources and is useful and impactful in the immediate term, it is not sustainable. Sustainability depends in a vital sense on a population that pays taxes and does not believe in getting something for nothing. This last premise, sadly, is one that few Pakistanis wish to embrace. The consequence is a country that is dependent, extracting money from richer others, and refusing to invest in itself. The end of USAID disbursements may be the immediate problem, but the root of it all is a stubborn belief that any real national pride can exist along with international beggary.

The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.
rafia.zakaria@gmail.com
Published in Dawn, January 4th, 2017

This story was originally published by Dawn, Pakistan

It was the week before Christmas and, like all cities in the Western world, Berlin was lit up, the air was cold and the mood festive. At the Christmas market near the Zoologischer Garten train station, people milled about shopping and enjoying themselves.

Rafia Zakaria

Around 8:00pm, a semi-truck barged through the Christmas market nearby, crushing all those in its path. When the casualties were counted, 12, including the actual driver of the hijacked truck, were dead and nearly 48 injured. In the pandemonium that followed the attack, an eyewitness claimed to have seen the assailant, who had jumped from the truck and fled after it came to a stop, near a church. The eyewitness claimed that he saw the man, followed him and called the police. It was this call that led to the arrest of Naved B, who had at the time been hanging out around the Victory Column monument in the park. Within minutes, it had been conveyed to the media that the suspect in the gruesome attack was a Pakistani male. Everyone in the Western world, even those that argue for accepting refugees, could be seen shaking their heads.

Escalating xenophobia in the West has ensured that all brown men of any religion are considered suspect.

At the heart of all their consternation was an innocent man. It would take almost 24 hours for the Berlin police to finally admit that the brown, immigrant Muslim man they had apprehended was not the brown, immigrant Muslim man that had carried out the attack.

The German newspaper Der Spiegel reported that the eyewitness on whose testimony the arrest had been made had actually lost sight of the attacker between the time he spotted him and then saw Naved B in the park. The police did not find gunpowder residue or blood on his clothes as they had expected to, given that the truck driver had been killed. It was over a day after the attack when they finally admitted that Naved B, the man they had arrested, was not the perpetrator of the attack, that the real culprit was still at large.

The set of misunderstandings that led to the arrest of Naved B are not particularly surprising. Escalating xenophobia in the West, including Germany, has ensured that all brown men of any religion are considered suspect. In the logic of the terrified, there seem to be too many of them, dark and skulking in parks and around markets, representing always the threat of crime.

There is little empathy for these men, or any appreciation as to how the festivities of others may sting and burn those who are far from home, from all that they have loved, and unwelcome where they are. In their desperation, they all seem the same. Punishing one man for the sins of another may be a gross inequity if the subjects are white and Western; it is perhaps less so when they are brown or black and desperate.

It is probably because of this that the shooting death of the actual suspect, a Tunisian man named Anis Amri, 1,000 miles away in Italy is likely to have vindicated those who were quick to arrest and blame rather than underscore the caustic nature of the mistake. The disparities of Tunisian versus Pakistani, Arabic speaker versus Urdu or Balochi speaker, formally arrested versus detained, Arab versus South Asian, may all be facts but not determinative ones. There are only two of those: both were poor immigrants and both were Muslim. With the discovery of this, the two-pronged attack on the poor and the displaced, all the prejudices thriving in the West, were rendered justifiable. It was not one Muslim man, it was simply another.

Naved B may have been an actual victim of mistaken identity in the minutes after the Berlin attack. Many more Muslim men, Pakistani and otherwise, are likely to pay the price for the actual perpetrator of the ghastly massacre.

The highlighting of two aspects of identity, the Muslim faith and immigrant status as somehow special, worthy of notice and suspicion, means a heightened visibility — a presumption against that has to be proven otherwise at all times. They may not be terrorists yet, but they are all potential terrorists, men who will at some point blow up train stations, drive trucks into crowds of people, or blow themselves up.

It is undoubtedly an onerous and unfair burden. Pakistani men applying for visas for study or work in any Western country will face the consequences of all the terrorist acts committed by Muslim men anywhere in the West. To end this cycle of collective punishment, they must work as vigorously as possible to stem the tide of intolerance and extremism in their own countries.

Sadly, rejections by the West, whether they are in the languages of visas denied or for those that have managed to get there, arrests and suspicion, are likely to prevent them from doing just that. Anis Amri, the actual murderer, evaded capture and was shot to death before he could be apprehended. All the other Muslim men are, because of him and assassins like him, collective captives, guilty until proven innocent.

The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.
rafia.zakaria@gmail.com
Published in Dawn December 28th, 2016

This story was originally published by Dawn, Pakistan

Numbers, like words, tell stories. In recent years, the stories told by the numbers of Pakistan have mostly been sad ones that have largely to do with death. Collectively, they enumerate deaths from disease, deaths in childbirth, deaths at the hands of loved ones and the country’s security/state apparatus. Meanwhile, the numbers of deaths from terrorist attacks have been responsible for the state of the most bereft. We have, over the years, counted dead children, dead mothers, dead fathers, dead governors and dead prime ministers. People have died at terror’s hands while shopping, while taking their children to school, while praying and in hospitals while already dying.

Rafia Zakaria

This is welcome news for Pakistan, scarred and maimed as it is by the scourge of terrorism and its implications. Not only has the shadow of the sudden deaths of innocent people inculcated a deep sense of paranoia in those who have lived, it has ripped the fragile threads of national unity, religious tolerance and general civility. Even as terror’s shadow seems to recede, the future promises its own challenges.

Even as terror’s shadow seems to recede, the future promises its own challenges. Pakistanis are likely to find themselves increasingly isolated and unwelcome.

Beyond the constant threat of terror’s resurgence (it must be noted that even while terrorism-related deaths were reduced, the geography of their incidence expanded to a greater spatial area than before) is the challenge of combating new iterations of terror.

The attack on the Shah Noorani shrine in Balochistan, for instance, was carried out by the militant Islamic State (IS) group, which eagerly took responsibility for the attack via its news agency Amaq. Indeed, even as the older models of terrorist organisations such as the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan are being decimated, others continue to proliferate, insistent on keeping the world in their thrall. IS carried out attacks in 28 countries in 2015, up from 13 the year before. It may be only one of the world’s 274 terrorist groups, but it is the most deadly.

The numbers from the GTI also tell another story, one that suggests that local threats that isolated countries like Pakistan and left its citizens bound and gagged by fear, will be replaced by new international regimes of discrimination and isolation.

According to the report, the OECD (Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development) countries, which include mostly developed Western nations, saw a huge increase in the number of terrorist attacks. These countries (which include the United States and France amongst others) saw a 650pc increase in the number of deaths in such attacks.

Twenty-one of the 34 OECD countries saw at least one act of terror, with the most attacks taking place in Turkey and France. In 2014, there were 18 deaths from terror attacks in OECD countries. In 2015, this number had increased to 313 deaths from 67 attacks. In the US, 98pc of terror attacks were carried out by single individuals who may or may not have declared allegiance to IS but who did not have any direct contact with the organisation.

This disparity in numbers, the increase in the number of attacks in wealthy and Western countries and a relative decrease in the numbers in countries which have for a good decade been shredded to bits from terrorist attacks, is likely to cost the latter far more. Instead of examining some of the strategies that have been successful in fighting terror or noting conditions like economic inequality, exclusion based on racial, religious or sectarian identity and weak state penetration in certain areas, the OECD nations have resorted to a knee-jerk approach.

As per this outlook, borders must be shut down and sealed tight, and all the inhabitants of countries such as Pakistan, Iraq and Afghanistan be treated as would-be terrorists. Not only is this outlook unrelated to the sort of attacks being witnessed in most of these countries (as mentioned, 98pc in the US are carried out by single individuals), it also makes cooperation on the collective project of fighting terrorism all but impossible.

The good news brought by terrorism’s decreasing numbers then carries the taste of isolation and misdirected retribution. Pakistanis, whose best hopes for professional success rely on access to the global labour market, are likely to find themselves increasingly isolated and unwelcome.

While this does not compare to the immediate and ghastly devastation of terrorist attacks, it promises a slower torture, a broader condemnation of the very populations that have for so long and at such cost fought at the front lines of terrorism. Undoubtedly, much more has to be done to further secure the country from sudden carnage inflicted by acts of terrorism. Beyond the security imperative, however, some thought must also be given to the international isolation that is likely to come Pakistan’s way in the coming months and years. Without a plan, or at least some preparedness for this aspect of a post-terror Pakistan, it may not kill or injure but it will maim and maroon in other ways.

The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.
rafia.zakaria@gmail.com
Published in Dawn, November 23rd, 2016

This story was originally published by Dawn, Pakistan

THE numbers should shock and shame Pakistan but they are unlikely to. According to data produced by Sahil, an NGO that monitors child abuse in Pakistan, reported child abuse cases have increased by 36 per cent in Pakistan in the first half of 2016, as compared to the same period last year. If this were not horror enough, there is more: the number of reported gang rapes of children (classified as under 18 years old) has increased by 71pc as compared to the same time last year. Increases are also seen in the number of attempted rapes and in the number of abuse cases of the very youngest of children, those between 0-5 years of age.

It is a ghastly reflection of a grotesque society. Beyond the numbers, Sahil also notes the locations where the abuse took place. In the incidents in which location is reported, the highest number of cases — 318 — took place in the victims’ own homes, followed by 276 that took place at the residence of an acquaintance. Not only are Pakistani children at tremendous risk of abuse, it is very likely that they will be victimised inside their own homes and consequently by those they trust most, their parents or relations. It is the worst indictment possible for any society; it is not just the world with its venom and vice that lies waiting to exploit them, it is also their very own.

Rafia Zakaria

Beyond the home, child abuse was found to have taken place in varying numbers in the street, in wooded areas, in havelis, in seminaries, schools, shops, shrines, hotels and marriage halls. A look at this exhaustive list proves one truth: there is no corner of the country where the exploitation of children is not taking place.

The inclusion of places such as schools, seminaries and havelis also points to the fact that those allotted some store of power via class or classroom regularly abuse the children who are entrusted to them. As is the case with abuse anywhere, the relative powerlessness of victims ensures that few cases are actually reported, and even of the ones reported, only about half make it to newspapers and the television media. The truth is that the size of the problem of exploited children is far greater than we imagine.

One of the cases investigated in detail in the Sahil report is of the child abuse ring whose existence and involvement in hundreds of cases came to light in May this year. When police carried out a raid at the premises of one well-off man who owns a warehouse near Swat, they found him in a compromising position with a 14-year-old boy. The subsequent investigation revealed that he had been involved in abusing scores of children, regularly videotaping and taking pictures of them so that he could blackmail them into further abuse. These videos and pictures could also be sold on the internet and to other paedophiles.

The damning details recorded in the Sahil report reveal how abusers groom and victimise children. One victim reports that he was selling sweets at the market in Swat when he was asked to visit the video game shop of a man. He was then abducted, put into a sack and taken to the warehouse owner at gunpoint. The report reveals that the abductor himself had been abused by the warehouse owner, who made videos of him and used them to blackmail him. Eventually he said that if the abused abductor (who is now 19 or 20 years old) would not have a sexual relationship with him, he would have to start supplying him other children. In this way, the victim became a child-abuse facilitator.

There is no corner of the country where the exploitation of children is not taking place.
Another former victim was similarly coerced into becoming a facilitator, ensuring a continuing cycle of abuse and persecution. The USB drives and the memory cards on which the material was recorded were kept in a safe in the warehouse owner’s house.

Sahil’s investigation into the Swat case, a classic iteration of just how paedophiles find victims and initiate chains of victimisation that keep them supplied with new victims, also provides insight on the consequences for victims. Abuse victims often show signs of post-traumatic stress disorder, stammering, grinding of teeth and debilitating feelings of shame and guilt. In cases in which the children are abducted they may also suffer pain in their arms and legs from having being chained and bound for long periods of time.

Sahil’s findings are a chilling read; but the consumption of the details is absolutely crucial if an apathetic society clinging to denial is to be woken up and prodded into action.

While the Swat incident involves abuse and rape by a paedophile who was usually a stranger to his victims, the inordinately high number of children who report being abused in their homes means that abusers are often relatives and loved ones. In these cases, the taboo against reporting abuse, particularly if abusers are powerful male members of the society, means that children have absolutely no recourse but to put up with what is happening.

The mechanisms of shame that form the fulcrum of morality in Pakistan victimise abused children a second time by insisting that the taboo against public conversations about child rape and molestation must be maintained, even if it guarantees the continued persecution of children.

A shame culture’s premise that what is unseen does not have moral reality means that those abusers and paedophiles can continue to enjoy the cover afforded by the private realm of family and by blackmail. Given these realities, it is very likely that abuse cases will continue to rise, and Pakistan’s children exploited and raped, while everyone else watches unmoved or simply looks away. These are painful truths; it is easier to disown them and say they’re not our kids, and so not our problem.

The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.

rafia.zakaria@gmail.com

This story was originally published by Dawn, Pakistan

The Rio Olympics began with the signature fanfare that accompanies the Games every four years. However, unlike every year, the nature and size of the spectacle, the synchronised dancers, over-the-top fireworks and the millions spent brought a new set of disappointments with them.

The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.

Yet, if you were holding your breath to see any of this reflected in the opening ceremony of the Rio Olympics, you waited in vain. True, the indigenous tribes of the country, disenfranchised, marginalised and fetishised, were included in the ceremony; but they were forced into the same round of antics and acrobatics that could have belonged in any nation with less of an anti-colonial agenda. If anything, the tributes to all things specifically Brazilian melded in with the general rituals of pomp and pageantry.

A better Olympics, one that is not exploitative, may simply not be possible.

It is not Brazil’s fault and, in a sense, Brazil’s failure underlines the elusiveness of a decolonial discourse that recognises histories of oppression and exclusion, and yet imagines and believes in the possibility of participating in global discourse. Take, for instance, the parade of nations. Out of the 206 nations participating in the Rio Olympics, 75 have never won a medal. The meaning of this statistic is that for the vast majority of participants, this parade at the beginning of the Games was the single moment in which their participation and their nation had a fleeting moment of recognition.

In Rio this year, this moment was even more fleeting. In a noble effort to thumb their nose at the dominance of English, which can in some rough approximation be equivocated with the omniscience of the colonial worldview, this parade was held in the order prescribed by the Portuguese and not the English alphabet.

It was a great idea, one no doubt adding to what the local organisers may have deemed their moment of anti-colonial independence. Its actual consequence, sadly, was rather dismal. Many countries that do not speak Portuguese but may have had some bare familiarity with the English alphabet (admittedly only owing to the colonial excesses of the British) waited in vain and then abandoned altogether their wait for their nation’s moment.

Brazil’s use of the Portuguese alphabet may have been successful in thumbing its nose at America, but it also ended up excluding several hundreds of millions of others who could make little sense of the means via which the parade of nations was being conducted (not to mention that the Portuguese themselves were colonists, their language an export to Brazil).

The case of Brazil and the Rio Olympics, then, represents the larger problem inherent in decolonisation: the efforts of emerging powers to have it both ways. In this case, Brazil wants millions to watch and the millions spent on the opening ceremony are evidence of that. Millions earned, pro-Olympic Brazilians could argue, means more available to solve the problems of inflation, homelessness, epidemic diseases and all the rest that plague Brazil in its Olympic moment.

It is possibly because of just this that the general framework of Olympic largesse was replicated with such a lack of originality, such a seeming concern toward staying close to what has been done before.

This, it was probably estimated, would ensure an audience and, with the revenue from advertising and endorsements, guarantee the avalanche of cash that all Olympic host nations await. Homage to the uniqueness of Brazil, its efforts to recapture a pre-colonial past, to restore the dignity of its own indigenous people and to present the possibility of a discourse not dominated by imperial erasures, were to be fitted into the details.

The middle ground — a more cheerful anti-colonialism that courts capitalist spending while showing off its local colour, reclaims pre-colonial history without bitterness, shakes hands with former oppressors only to spit behind their backs — is rather marshy and inhospitable. In this sense, the tenacious protesters that picketed outside the selfie-ridden enforced cheer of the inside of the stadium are probably correct; there can be no “moderate exploitation of the poor” and no “thoughtful presentation of over-the-top spending”.

It is perhaps the very framework of the Games, their crucial reliance on inducing awe in the onlooker, an effect that in turn relies essentially on power fitfully and thoughtlessly paraded, that is flawed. A better Olympics, one that is not exploitative, that truly respects and reifies marginalised narratives, may simply not be possible.

While it may not have been intentional, Pakistan’s minimal participation can be justified on the basis of these noble reasons, a disavowal of the Games as showcasing the rich and powerful and their attendant advantages. Pakistan sent perhaps its smallest Olympic squad ever to Rio, a majority of the members of its delegation participating only as wild-card entries. In reality, the small size of the delegation was a product of inattention to procedures: some athletes could not participate because they did not apply for Brazilian visas far enough in advance. This detail is admittedly the fault and product of the neglect-afflicted ranks of Pakistani sports (other than cricket), so commonplace and unsurprising that they no longer make the news.

If Brazil was in search of a real post-colonial gesture, it could have considered loosening its ever-tight visa regime to permit more athletes from poor countries to attend without being subject to the inefficiencies of their nation’s bureaucrats. Unlike white and wealthy others, these left-out athletes would not have worried about the Zika virus or the size of their quarters, relishing instead the very opportunity to compete. Brazil did not choose to follow this path and so the Olympic Games in Rio are a disappointment — a dimmer, more budget-conscious, more mosquito-infested, replication of Olympics past.

The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.
rafia.zakaria@gmail.com
Published in Dawn, August 10th, 2016

This story was originally published by Dawn, Pakistan

The eleventh day of September 2001 seems a distant memory now. On that day, 19 hijackers unleashed mayhem in the skies over the United States of America. Fifteen of these 19 hijackers, it would later be discovered, were Saudi citizens. Yet the war that ensued, that cast its bloody fingers deep into the Middle East and South Asia, would not be a war against Saudis. It was instead against Afghans, Iraqis and, at least via remote control, Pakistanis.

The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.

Last week, the scourge of terror that has seeped into every pore of the rest of the Muslim world made Saudi Arabia its target. Near the end of Ramazan, three bombings occurred in the Saudi cities of Jeddah, Qatif and Madina. Four security guards were killed and four others wounded in the Madina attack, which took place ominously close to the mosque of the Holy Prophet (PBUH), one of Islam’s most sacred sites. The bombing in Qatif targeted a Shia mosque and the one in Jeddah took place near the US consulate.

In both the Qatif and Jeddah attack, the bombers were not able to execute the attack and succeeded in killing only themselves. The three bombings in three different parts of Saudi Arabia all took place within 24 hours. While there were no immediate claims of responsibility (as with attacks in Dhaka and Istanbul) the modus operandi of the attack aligned with the usual tactics of the militant Islamic State group.

Pakistanis are weak, their lives are cheap and they can provide at best a feeble response to the aspersions Saudi Arabia casts on them.

In the days since the attack Saudi authorities have been busy rounding up suspects. According to a report published by Al Jazeera, 19 people had been arrested by July 9. Of these 19, 12 are Pakistani and the remainder are Saudi citizens. In addition, Saudi authorities claim that the Jeddah bomber was also a Pakistani named Abdullah Gulzar Khan, who had been working in the kingdom for the past 12 years. The suspect was reported to have worn a suicide belt before he blew himself up.

The inordinate scrutiny placed on Pakistanis working in Saudi Arabia is likely to become an even larger problem. Even when criminal charges are not terrorism-based, the Saudi legal system is opaque, providing few explanations of charges or records of proceedings. Owing in part to their inferior status in the kingdom and the intractability of its legal system in general, over 2,000 Pakistanis already languish in Saudi jails with 10 or more executed every year. The 12 arrested last week will simply join their ranks, the truth of the allegations against them never properly explained, the details of trials and prosecutions never communicated to the consulates of a poor country like Pakistan.

There are good reasons for the Saudi effort to pin the blame on Pakistanis. For instance, it permits Saudi Arabia to deflect the truth that in past years its propagation of an orthodox version of Islam via countless religious schools around the world has contributed to the creation of the jihadi mindset, whose pupils increasingly if not always provide cannon fodder for suicide bombers who have struck targets across the world.

According to an article published last year in World Affairs Journal, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, (either officially or via private donors) has funded madressahs and religious centres that have then been used for recruitment by extremist groups. The article quotes US Vice President Joe Biden as estimating the Saudi contribution to jihadi groups as being at “hundreds of millions of dollars and tens of thousands of tons of weapons”. Increasingly defensive about its own contribution to the very threat that is now at its doorstep, Saudi royals like King Salman have tried to deflect blame by saying that they cannot be held responsible if the money they gave for good causes is appropriated into the cause of extremism and ‘jihad’.

Blaming Pakistanis is probably another portion of this strategy of deflecting blame; of responding to the premise that the seeds they planted have grown into an invasive species that wants to throttle the gardener itself. Pakistanis are weak, their lives are cheap and they can provide at best a feeble response to the aspersions Saudi Arabia casts on them.

At a time when Saudi Arabia is investing in national unity, painting the foreign worker as a potential terrorist serves to justify the already despicable treatment allotted to them. Predictably, all other Muslim countries and even Pakistanis themselves quietly and submissively accept this role; those who speak out loud and clear about European and American excesses heaped on immigrant Muslims maintain pin-drop silence when it comes to Saudi mistreatment. The self-appointed guardians of Islam’s holy sites, it is assumed, must be holy and beyond reproach.

For Pakistanis, it is ironic that Saudi Arabia leads the ‘Islamic Military Alliance to Fight Terrorism’. Unlike even Western countries, whose excesses against alleged terror suspects, whose unauthorised bombings of this or that country have received attention and criticism in the global public sphere, Saudi Arabia retains its air of sanctity.

Given this, whether it is air strikes that kill civilians in Yemen, or the easy implication of Pakistani foreign workers as terrorists, there appears to be no one who can chide the kingdom or check its power. Pakistanis, reviled yesterday as foreign and poor or deficiently Muslim, can now be made scapegoats in the Saudi war on terror, accused and indicted, not necessarily for their guilt but simply because it is so very easy to blame them, punish them, persecute them.

The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy. rafia.zakaria@gmail.com
Published in Dawn, July 13th, 2016

This story was originally published by Dawn, Pakistan

At the end of a hot and exacting month of fasting, Eid-ul-Fitr this year arrives on the heels of a ghastly number of terrorist attacks. In the week gone by, travellers have perished in Istanbul, diners in Dhaka, shoppers in Baghdad, and several people in three separate blasts in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia the other day.

The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.

There are, of course, few answers to the troubling questions posed by such tragedies as of the past week. Several of the attacks involved suicide bombers, many as yet unidentified, men who shot and detonated, taking with them the lives and loves of so many others.

In many parts of the developing world where security is an issue and social inequity is rampant, there is deep resentment of those who access and partake in the security and privilege of enclaves.

Of all the attacks this week, the one in Dhaka stands out; due to the amount of time the attackers spent with their victims and the sorting and selection process of deciding who to kill and who to set free. According to reporting by The New York Times (and survivor testimonies), the attackers — now known to be well educated — arrived carrying grenades and firearms. One of the first things they did was to separate foreigners from Bangladeshis, asking everyone their nationality. The kitchen staff and other natives were locked in a bathroom.

As has now been recounted, the dead included Italians, Japanese and Indians. One Bangladeshi Muslim man, dining with an Indian friend and a Bangladeshi-American girl, was killed with the rest; the man, Faraz Hossain, chose not to desert his friends even though the attackers had permitted him to leave.

In the details of the attack on the Holey Artisan cafe, who was targeted and how and what sort of communications the attackers had with their hostages, are clues as to how the Islamic State capitalises on long-standing resentments in developing countries to recruit fighters for its agenda. As has been mentioned, the cafe was located in the diplomatic enclave of Dhaka and was not too far from the US embassy.

The area may not be one where many Bangladeshis would feel comfortable or fit in; to belong, one has to be an expatriate or a member of the country’s elite. Unsurprisingly, the attackers were chosen for their ability to pass as ‘elites’, to pepper their conversations with English, to exude the entitlement of those that eat expensive bread in a rice-growing nation.

This pointed class dimension — of elites, expats and their enclaves — was not limited to the selection of the venue in Dhaka. The first picture of the carnage released by the IS ‘news agency’ Amaq showed a table still set with plates of food half-eaten. Next to the plates of food were apparently glasses of red wine. On the floor, killed first by bullets and then cut up with daggers, lay the dead consumers of the repast, chosen to be killed because they were foreign, non-Muslim and drinking wine in Ramazan.

Most of the Muslims were not harmed; the kitchen staff was instructed to prepare tea for them and later sehri so that they could eat before beginning the next day’s fast. As an excuse for the fact that they were killing so many, the attackers told the living that they too were going to die soon.

The resentment towards foreigners, drinking and eating expensive food in cordoned-off portions of a country percolates in many postcolonial states.

In other parts of the developing world where security is an issue and social inequity is rampant, there is deep resentment of those who access and partake in the security and privilege of enclaves. There have even been instances where the artificially maintained ecosystems of such enclaves have been subject to scrutiny, judgment — and occasionally attack — by the larger populace. In this hotbed, the line between protecting sovereignty and ceding tolerance becomes blurred.

Postcolonial populations all bear the scars of exclusion and chafe against the dilutions of their sovereignty by the intrusions of more powerful foreigners. Given this, is there any way that true security can be arranged for the representatives who manage relationships between the wealthy and the wanting? As legitimate as the scrutiny often is, as much as it exposes entrenched local and global inequities, it also stokes some unwanted consequences. It is co-opted by outfits such as the Islamic State group, that prey on and exploit the legitimate grievances of the disenfranchised, while indoctrinating those who only perceive themselves to be so.

Deploying existing resentments and insecurities, class-based exclusions and snubs for its own nefarious agenda, is proving to be the ace in the Islamic State’s deck of brutalities. One hand in this continuing game was played in Dhaka. By freeing the locals while killing foreigners, they present a grotesque and bloodthirsty caricature of justice — the specifics of which reveal just how small qualms can be magnified by terrorists’ bloodlust into excuses for carnage.

The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.
Published in Dawn, July 6th, 2016

This story was originally published by Dawn, Pakistan

Thomas Pogge is a professor of philosophy at Yale University, one of the most eminent educational institutions in the world. From there he directs the Global Justice Centre, which advocates, among other issues, the premise that the wealthy countries of the world have a moral and ethical responsibility towards providing aid to poorer nations.

The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.

But appearance and reality rarely coalesce, as an investigation by Buzzfeed News revealed last month. Pogge is also allegedly a sexual harasser. In 2010, a Yale graduate student named Fernanda Lopez Aguilar accused Dr Pogge of sexually harassing her and then retaliating against her for refusing him by rescinding a fellowship offer.

When the incident first took place, Aguilar, who is a foreign student, went to the Yale authorities to report what the professor had done. According to Aguilar, Yale University not only did not investigate her claim, but tried to buy her silence by offering a payment of $2,000. When she refused, a panel was finally convened to investigate the matter. Their report found that while it was clear that Prof Pogge had behaved in an unprofessional manner, there was insufficient evidence that the professor was guilty of sexual harassment. Pogge was permitted to keep his post, and teach at and direct the Centre for Global Justice.

All of that happened in the years 2010-2011. More recently, the Buzzfeed investigation revealed, Yale has been confronted with more evidence of Pogge’s alleged sexual harassment in his interactions with students from other institutions. In addition, in 2015, Fernanda Aguilar, whose case had been so deftly dismissed by Yale’s internal investigation, chose to file a federal lawsuit against Yale University for violating Title IX of the Equal Protection Act, under which educational institutions like Yale are responsible for eliminating hostile environments and taking action against sexual harassment. She has also filed a claim under Title VII, which prohibits racial discrimination.

Educational institutions offer excellent opportunities for power plays and harassment, whose targets are often, if not always, women.

Some of the allegations reveal the common modus operandi of most harassment situations: offers of better opportunities. In one illustrative incident, when Aguilar and Pogge were supposed to attend a conference together, she arrived to find that he had booked them not in separate rooms as she had expected, but only one room.

Yale University may be far away from Pakistan, but the issue of sexual harassment in the campus context is not. One recent case involves a pattern ironically quite similar to that of the esteemed Dr Pogge of Yale University. In March of this year, there was a news report about a case of sexual harassment filed at Karachi University against a member of the visiting faculty.

The complainant was a young assistant professor who said that the faculty member had barged into her office and behaved inappropriately with her. It was alleged that she was later subjected to similarly inappropriate behaviour, involving physical contact, by the same teacher in the office of another, senior faculty member.

In this case, like Fernanda Aguilar of Yale University, the teacher who alleged inappropriate behavior chose to do what most women do not: make a complaint. She is said to have first gone to the person in whose office the latter incident is supposed to have taken place and whom she believed would be supportive of her situation. When, as reported, he refused to take action, she filed a complaint with the vice chancellor. It took a month and a student protest for the university to form a three-member investigative committee.

The committee issued its report, stating that “there is no conclusive evidence available to the committee based on which the charges levelled by [the teacher] can be proved” and that she “took this incident too far ahead”. If it was not enough to dismiss a complaint that had allegedly taken place in the office of a senior professor, the investigation committee chose to level a charge of its own, saying that the complainant had “previous handshakes with him in the past”.

The tone of the report comes across as dismissive and accusatory, and is an indication of just the sort of obstacles that confront working women who insist on demanding a workplace that is free of harassment. Even while the investigation committee had to be formed under the Protection of Women against Workplace Harassment Act 2010, it appears that the members seemed determined to permit a culture of harassment to continue. In the words of an investigative reporter, such is the entrenched nature of sexual harassment that even dismissive comments by investigative committees have not been considered sufficient to establish that an inquiry could well have been biased.

Educational institutions, their formats of instruction and advancement, are by design hierarchical. Being so, they offer excellent opportunities for power plays and harassment, whose targets are often, if not always, women. In the case of Pakistan, the situation is exacerbated by the fact that allegations against progressive-minded professors are quickly co-opted by members of religious groups who want to ban women from the workplace and from educational institutions altogether.

All of it comes together to create a situation where men, religious or progressive, remain the lords of campus, their bad behaviour, their misogyny, their failure to respect women, all tolerated, promoted and considered entirely and completely acceptable.

The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy. rafia.zakaria@gmail.com

This story was originally published by Dawn, Pakistan

The Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia is not one pilgrims or foreign tourists normally visit. Set against the Persian Gulf, it is the heart of the kingdom’s oil industry. Unsurprisingly, it is also home to most of its migrant workers whose labour populates this sector.

The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.

It can be safely assumed, however, that the Pakistanis labouring in the Eastern Province are not part of the ‘one family’ whose cohesion and lack of division is a priority for the kingdom. Among them is Mohammad Ilyas who works as the head of budgeting and finance at a multinational steel company. For several months now, Mr Ilyas has been trying to obtain an exit permit that would enable him to visit Pakistan. As some may remember, a confusing directive by the Saudi government several months ago stated that Pakistani workers living in Saudi Arabia would only be permitted to visit Pakistan once every year. A few weeks later, however, the Saudi government said that the directive had been withdrawn and that Pakistani workers could go back home for visits multiple times as they did in previous years.

The issue of Pakistani workers trapped in Saudi Arabia’s eastern region deserves the urgent attention of both Islamabad and Riyadh.

The renewed permission to leave more than once seems only to apply to Pakistanis in certain parts of the kingdom. In the Eastern Province, which includes the areas of Jubail and Dammam, however, things are far more complicated. As per the kingdom’s latest requirements, workers must apply for the entry/exit permit through the computerised system known as muqeem. However, when Mohammad Ilyas and others in the Eastern Province use it to apply for the permit, the system gives them an error message and asks them to visit the passport office in Jubail in person.

Both Mr Ilyas and his company representative have visited the passport office numerous times. When Mr Ilyas did so, the people at the passport office told him that he was only permitted to visit Pakistan once a year and that if he could not obtain a permit online, he simply could not go home. To add to the humiliation of denied workers like Mr Ilyas, colleagues of different nationalities, including Indians, have no problem obtaining the multiple exit/re-entry permit via the system and can visit home as many times as they wish.

Nor is Mohammad Ilyas alone in this predicament. According to the online forum Life in Saudi Arabia, where numerous overseas Pakistani workers share their issues, many other Pakistanis in the Eastern Province are similarly being denied exit permits to go home. Saudi officials at the passport office either tell them that they must try again online or simply state that no permit will be issued at the office itself. In other cases they are told that they have already visited Pakistan more than once this year and are hence not eligible for an exit permit.

On May 5, the embassy of Pakistan in Riyadh took note of the problem. The press release posted on the embassy’s website says: “The embassy of Pakistan, Riyadh is aware of the fact that some of our nationals face difficulty in obtaining multiple exit/re-entry visa from the passport offices of the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia. The embassy is in constant contact with the concerned authorities to resolve the matter.” In a previous communication issued on April 16, the embassy has stated that it had brought up the issue in writing and in person with the Saudi authorities concerned and was trying its level best to handle the situation.

It is now June 15 and Mohammad Ilyas (who has lived and worked in Saudi Arabia for the past 10 years) and many other Pakistani workers in the Eastern Province continue to be without exit/re-entry permits and are hence unable to leave the kingdom. It is true that the embassy of Pakistan has many issues on its hands. Some weeks ago, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs revealed that over 2,000 Pakistanis are languishing in Saudi jails on various charges. The Pakistani embassy is the only recourse for all of these accused. Add to this the demands of the upcoming Haj season and the ever larger number of pilgrims that wish to travel to Makkah, and you have a small consular staff beset with large problems.

Even so, the issue of Pakistani workers trapped in Saudi Arabia’s eastern region is one deserving the urgent attention of both governments. At the Saudi end, the kingdom’s commitment to the principles of justice and fair treatment, particularly in this, the holiest month of the Muslim calendar, means that they should not entrap Pakistani workers in a situation that is akin to enslavement.

At the Pakistani end, some honest answers must be demanded on the discrepancy between the ‘official’ statements given by the Saudi government’s representatives (ones that state that no restriction exists on the multiple exit/re-entry of Pakistani workers) and the reality via which Pakistani workers are being denied exit.

It is Ramazan now and soon it will be Eid. Pakistan’s workers — forced abroad because of the scant sources of employment at home — should not be permitted to become pawns of a Saudi government that seems to care little about whether or not they can be with their families for the holiday. Workers, it must be remembered, are not slaves chained to their place of employment and must be accorded the very basic right to leave and return.

The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy. rafia.zakaria@gmail.com

This story was originally published by Dawn, Pakistan

It happens far more often than anyone is willing to admit or acknowledge. A woman who is a widow, or whose family owes a debt, or who has caught the eye of a lecherous boss, or who is no longer very young, or who fails to fit the fair and lovely demands of the usual suitors, is approached by an older man for marriage.

This type of male suitor is already married, often with grown children and successful business interests. Creeping into advanced years, he wants to add something new to his life, and given his means and money, he can afford for this freshness to be a new marital arrangement.

Given the fact that four wives are permitted in Pakistan, there are no legal obstacles to his desires.

There is, however, the prospect of the ire of the existing wife and her family, or drawing the censure of a community that may giggle and snicker at an aging groom`s mid-life marriage. The answer is a secret marriage, legally valid but socially surreptitious, a recipe for the man of means to really have it all. Not only is the man newly married a second time, he is also now a secret saviour, rescuing some hapless woman from the absolute horror and hell of remaining husband-less in a society that worships men.

Not all secret marriages follow this pattern; some are conjured in secret because the parties not previously married believe that their families will be opposed to the match. Other cases more and more prevalent given Pakistan`s large expatriate worker population involve men working abroad who have wives at home and at work. Often, the second wife knows about the first; usually the first wife is completely unaware of her husband`s secret family.

When the secret wife produces children, they too bear the burden of being secret children, whose surreptitious father sires them but will not publicly claim them. If and when the secret marriage is discovered, the secret wife and her children face huge risks of divorce and repudiation, leaving them in an even more vulnerable position when the secret husband/father abandons them.

According to Dr Mohammed Fadel, professor of law at the University of Toronto, who specialises inIslamic jurisprudence, some schools of thought consider secret marriages to be technically legal on the basis that they fulfil all stipulations of an Islamic marriage contract. However, others are more sceptical of such an arrangement.

What may be technically legal, however, is not necessarily moral and may actually be quite far from being good. In his discussion of secret marriages, Dr Fadel points out that while Islamic marriage emphasises consent to ensure that the two individuals entering into marriage are happy withthe arrangement, individual happiness is not the one and only goal of a Muslim marriage.

Indeed, as Fadel argues, the technicalities of an Islamic marriage contract, the requirement of mahr and of witnesses, can be seen as safeguards that point to the necessary involvement of the community in the relationship. While secret marriages can skirt this requirement by finding witnesses (and guardians on the female side) who are willing to keep the marriage secret, this can be seen as a contravention of the purpose of witnesses themselves.

The prescription to publicise and celebrate marriage can be seen as existingforthe express reason that when a larger number of people know of the relationship, and support and celebrate it, the chances of abuse and neglect are reduced. In secret marriages, no such checks exist on the behaviour of men. Predators know their prey; most women who enter these surreptitious arrangements are already vulnerable; the underhanded nature of the arrangement further exposes them as well as their childrento abuse, shame and neglect.

In a patriarchal society, where men dominate, arguments against secret marriages are quickly transformed into promotions of polygamy. If secret marriages are wrong, eager adherents of multiple marriages argue, then it is the task of women, of first wives (and consequently second and third ones), to readily hand out permission for subsequent marriages. It`s a clever trick that, like secret marriages themselves, looks to reduce faith and its following to technicalprescriptions(andhence self-servingloopholes) rather than the larger principles of love and compassion Some attention to these values, so routinely ignored by Muslim men, would suggest that marital unions in which the wife feels subdued, coerced, used and manipulated can never be the foundation for the just society that is envisioned by the Islamic faith. A revival of love and compassion as the foundation of all marriages would require an end to both secret marriages and polygamous marriages. Both these forms may technically be allowed to exist and persist (given that the vast majority of Muslim jurists have been and continue to be men) but they would be absent of the sort of affection that exists between freely choosing partners. A compromise born of circumstances, a situation that dictates the assent of most women who become a part of such a relationship, is not the same as a choice.

In countries like Egypt, the state informs first wives when their husbands marry again, since registration of marriages is a requirement. In Pakistan, many marriages are not registered, and even if they were the state is not required to make such information available. As a result, all women, those who are married and those who may marry, are vulnerable to being duped by men who manipulate the technicality of marital requirements to suit their desires for new or more wives, while paying no attention at all to the moral requirements of a Muslim marriage.

The writer is an attomey teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.
rafia.zakaria@gmail.com

This story was originally published by Dawn, Pakistan

When interviewed by Reuters, Zardad Khan, from the village of Makol to which 16-year-old Ambreen belonged, said, `This barbarity has never happened before.` The teenager was killed, her body put in a van and burned.

His words may be true for the village of Makol but not for Pakistan in general. Over recent decades, village after village and, in particular, jirga after jirga, has been implicated in ordering murders and even rapes of women under the pretext of preserving `honour`. Over a decade ago was the famous case of Mukhtaran Mai, ordered raped and humiliated in Meerwala. More recently, a tribal jirga in Kohistan condemned four women because they were seen clapping and singing apparently in the company of men in a grainy mobile phone video.

They had been attending a relative`s wedding.

The numbers are probably greater than most imagine and, as is the case with crimes against women in Pakistan, difficult to tabulate with real accuracy. Pakistani society, at all levels, is adept at cover-ups for the crimes of men, at subterfuge supporting the easy erasure of women. The status of the jirga- or panchayat-ordered killing, an ironic form of `justice`, is a sub-category within the larger compartment of `honour killings`, both populated with the lost lives of women who died to sate the anger and bloodlust of men.

Functioning as instruments of communal justice, jirgas often dole out sentences unfettered by the constraints of the laws of the country. As Ambreen`s tragic end reveals, they can carry out their sentences. Outcry, if it follows at all, takes place after the object of their wrath is already dead. In many cases, once outcry and attention have faded, all those indicted for the crime (if they are indicted at all) are often freed to live their lives. In a country where a woman`s life has meagre worth, why should men be punished for taking it? Given the regularity with which women are ordered killed, there seems to be implicit agreement on this point.

In their current form, jirgas are composed almost entirely of men and unbound by the limits of the law of the country. It is unsurprising, therefore, that the form of justice doled out by them is misogynistic and brutal. In simple terms, a com-munity`s need for expedient dispute resolution is manipulated by its powerful men and then used to order and enforce punishments that serve their own interests. The weakness of the state`s own legal system, the cost involved in availing oneself of it and the deadly delays that all it further bolster the reach and mandate of local jirgas. Even for the villagers of Makol, which isn`t far from larger towns and cities, the court system, it seems, was too far away, too distant from the lives of Makol`s inhabitants.

It does not have to be this way. The work of one woman in the valley of Swat reveals how the actual need for justice and the provision of it at a communal level can be harnessed to protect and empower women, rather than leaving them at the mercy of ruthless and self-interested men. Three years ago, Tabassum Adnan inaugurated a Sister`s Council or `Khwendo Jirga` in the village of Mingora.

According to Adnan, who was herself married at the age of 13 and endured domestic abuse, the existing tribal councils in her community did not permit women to join them. Fed up of this decision, she got together a group of women and began discussing the issues and concerns of the community with them.

The women then pressed the men on the jirga council to take their decisions and consensus into account. According to Adnan, nearly 1,000 women in the area are now involved in the Sister`s Council by bringing their problems to it and participating in its processes.

Tabassum Adnan`s work has received international acclaim. She has received the International Women of Courage Award and just last month was also awarded the Nelson Mandela-Graça Machele Innovation Award. Her pioneering strategy deserves attention and implementation beyond Swat. A council where women of a community are empowered to intervene and participate in communal decision-making can be a crucial and pressing form of intervention in a situation that has become increasingly untenable.

Tabassum Adnan`s jirga does not currently receive any kind of monetary support from the government or from any other source, but its work and powers of enforcement could be enhanced even further if the state invested resources and empowered its leaders. The Sister`s Council, with its grass-roots and women-centred agenda, its rootedness in the community, represents a promising answer to a difficult problem.

Not only have honour killings continued in Pakistan, many women`s organisations report that their numbers have increased. One reason for this is that while there have been various legislative measures to try and combat the persecution of women and the irrelegation to the status of objects that can be exchanged or extinguished, there has been no effort towards actually bringing about change at the community level. Honour killings continue despite laws and campaigns against them, because those committing these crimes continue to believe that they are doing the right thing. They will not stop, unless others in their community speak up, and these others have to be women.

Ambreen was killed at the behest of a jirga; she is just one among so many Pakistani women who have lost their lives in similar ways with community collusion and consensus. A change can only occur if women from communities are empowered to create their own alternate jirgas whose decisions are binding on the community as well.

To help these women`s jirgas gain credibility within communities, the state should invest in them, recognise their leaders and incentivise participation. Male jirgas have made Pakistan a home for grotesque and brutal crimes, women`s jirgas may actually make it a more just and equitable place.

The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy. rafia.zakaria@gmail.com

This story was originally published by Dawn, Pakistan

The University of Cape Town in South Africa, perched on the bottom of the world, is a well-known and highly respected institution in both that country and the world at large.

On March 9 last year, a blacl< student named Chumani Maxwele, studying on a scholarship at the elite school, did something bizarre. Maxwele lives in a Khayelitsha, a black township in Cape Town so crammed with people that most of its plastic and cardboard shacks are barely large enough for a person to stand. There is no sanitation; people defecate in plastic boxes that are left on the kerb. On that March morning, Maxwele took one of these plastic boxes. When he reached the university, he took the box and hurled its contents at a statue of Cecil Rhodes, a famous British colonialist.

To understand why the statue was chosen and the now worldwide implications of Maxwele`s protest (the statue has since been removed), it is important to know who Cecil Rhodes was.

Author Amit Chaudhuri, writing in the The Guardian on the Rhodes Must Fall movement at Oxford University, quoted Rhodes` will, which called for `the establishment, promotion and development of a Secret Society, the true aim and object whereof shall be for the extension of British rule throughout the world, the perfecting of a system of emigration from the United Kingdom, and of colonisation by British subjects of all lands where the means of livelihood are attainable by energy, labour and enterprise, and especially the occupation by British settlers of the entire Continent of Africa, the Holy Land, the Valley of the Euphrates, the Islands of Cyprus and Candia, the whole of South America, the Islands of the Pacific not heretofore possessed by Great Britain, the whole of the Malay Archipelago, the seaboard of China and Japan..

Rhodes stood for British domination of the world, and the fact that his legacy includes bequests to universities around the world has now posed the question to students of whether those colonialist and imperialist values have really been rejected in this post-colonial age.

In South Africa, this question boiled up because while the end of apartheid in the country has opened up many opportunities for the previously segregated black populations, their capacity to avail themselvesof these remains limited. For students like Maxwele who make it to places like the University of Cape Town, gratitude and conformity is expected. The sanitation-less hovels in townships where they come from are not a concern for most of those milling about the beautiful campus of the University of Cape Town.

At Oxford University in the UK, the Rhodes Must Fall movement is also seeking the removal of a statue of Cecil Rhodes. It is not the only likeness of the man there; a large portrait stares down at students in the Oriel College building.

The argument here is just as crucial: if colonialistvalues are no longer enshrined in education why must students, including those from formerly colonised countries, continue to tolerate the honouring of men who played such a crucial part in their own history ofsubjugation? If Rhodes` vision of British domination of others no longer holds, then why should he be venerated and celebrated on campus? Does the continued presence of Cecil Rhodes on campus suggest a continuing, if less explicit, allegiance to the dominance of whiteness and Britishness? These are complicated questions, but particularly pertinent in the Pakistani context (where students also vie for Rhodes scholarships). In Pakistan`s universities, the decolonisation project, the sort of taking apart and critiquing of historical bequests of colonialism, has been largely subsumed in the constrictions of secular versus religious knowledge.

So while South African and non-white British students are attacking the colonising legacy and exploring ways via which knowledge and education can bedecolonised and be respectful of the heritage and identity of colonised groups, Pakistani student activism is stalled on the counterproductive premise of whether any knowledge brought over by colonising endeavours is worth learning at all.

It is a signiHcant handicap; students like those protesting in Cape Town or at Oxford seem to understand that knowledge itself must not be discarded in the quest to rid it of its oppressive and discriminatory origins. The removal of statues and pictures and such are symbolic moves that seek to reclaim educational space so that it comes to represent the truth of colonisation and how white privilege still dominates the global narrative.

In its worst iterations, colonialism`s imprint on knowledge in Pakistan has been connected to the horror of militant destruction, the destruction of schools, the bombings of universities attached to the confusion over the embrace or rejection of knowledge that bore tainted origins.

The means used by students in South Africa, whose victory over the oppressions of apartheid is recent in the scale of world history, are provocative, but ultimately far more productive. At their core, they represent the recognition of the premise that knowledge can and must be decolonised instead of being rejected altogether.

Their position is a bit different from the generation that fought against apartheid; for them, inclusion in institutions, the very ability to partake in knowledge, was enough. This dynamic, too, is reflected in the Pakistani story, where early liberal reformers simply sought to embrace the forms of knowledge that the British brought with them.

The new recipe for fighting knowledge wars, so inextricably tied as they are to the issues of militancy, can be seen in these nascent movements seeking to decolonise knowledge in other formerly colonised portions of the world. In their strategies, Pakistani students and scholars can find productive avenues via which knowledge can be transformed, made more egalitarian and representative, instead of being rejected altogether for the constrictions of ignorance and isolation.

The writer is an attomey teaching constitutional law and political philosophy. rafia.zakaria@gmail.com

This story was originally published by Dawn, Pakistan

The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan reports an increase in honor killings in Pakistan - 923 women and 82 minor girls in 2014.Only 20 percent of cases are brought to justice. Credit: Adil Siddiqi/IPS

By Rafia Zakaria
Feb 24 2016 (Dawn, Pakistan)

Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif recently watched A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness, Sharmeen Obald Chinoy`s Oscar-nominated documentary about `honour` killings. In a statement following the screening, he told Ms Chinoy and his audience that there is no `honour` in murder.

In the days sinceithas been announced that the government will move to plug holes in laws that currently allow killers (often family members) to go unpunished. Ms Chinoy has expressed the hope that her film would help put an end to honour killings in Pakistan.

It would be wonderful if her wish came true. The reasons it will not are the ones that the government needs to address if it truly wishes to tackle the problem.

Before reasons, however, consider context. I pulled up two sets of statistics compiled by the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP).

The first covers the period spanning Feb 1, 2004, to Feb 1, 2006. During this time, there were 988 incidents of honour killings in Pakistan. Nearly, but not exactly half, did not even have FIRs registered for the crime. Firearms were the weapon of choice for doing away with the victims, followed by blunt force injury with a heavy weapon.

Fast-forward a decade: another set of statistics I pulled from the HRCP database was from between February 2014 to February 2016. The number of honour killings in this period was 1,276, nearly 400 did not have FIRs registered, and most of the victims were killed by guns.

The decade in the middle has not been one without legislative initiatives or civil society campaigns to end honour killings. I chose the period immediately following 2004 because that marked the passage of a bill against honour crimes. As political machinations go, the bill that was actually passed was a diluted version of the one first introduced by senator Sherry Rehman. There was much clapping and clamour then too.

The whole thing repeated itself in March of last year with the passage through the Senate of the Anti-Honour Killings Laws (Criminal Laws Amendment) Bill, 2014. Meanwhile, international human rights organisations have devoted budgets and campaigns to ending honour killings in Pakistan. As the numbers show in both cases, hon-our killings (to the extent they are even reported) have continued and even increased.

Here is why. First, legislative initiatives have focused on the legal dimensions of the issue, the latest a much needed amendment to the gisas and diyat laws that would prevent the pardoning of honour killers.Thisis a greatidea.

At the same time, like legislative initiatives of the past, it has no teeth at all against the root of the problem: that women (and men) are considered social capital in a family, marrying them a form of adding sociological assets, creating relationships that families, increasingly torn by migration and demographic change, require.

When a woman rebels against this mechanism, not only does the family lose the possibility of capital accrued from arranging her marriage, her decision jeopardises the futures of remaining brothers and sisters, their possibilities of making good matches that sustain them in a web of relationships where individual choice defeats collective security.

In a cultural and sociological system where the family and tribe are still the only and often unitary form of social insurance against catastrophe, the death of a breadwinner, illness and job losses, collective control over the individual is the glue that holds everything together.

The second reason for failure lies in the brokenmechanisms of international advocacy, particularly as they exist in countries like Pakistan, which have faced the brunt of international aggression. Simply put, since `saving brown women` became the reason to go to war, stories of hapless victims of honour killings in countries like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and Syria have served to fuel a moral reason as to why such imperial overtures are justified. Some brown women, those at risk of honour killings, are to be saved; others who happen to be near target zonesfordrones donot.

The hypocrisy of this is not lost on local populations but it manifests in a particularly grotesque way in the towns and villages of Pakistan that have borne direct hits from American aggression; maintaining honour, which translates roughly to controlling women, has become a nationalistic goal, a stand for local sovereignty.

Women are paying with their lives; simply telling their stories has not saved them and will not save them. This last point is important, for it represents a very troubling moral bifurcation in the aid and advocacy economy via which campaigns against honour killings are funded and the communities in which moral change must take place.

The campaigns are providing jobs and causes and in some cases, international acclaim for a few; but that will never bridge the vast chasm between topdown advocacy and urgently needed grass-roots change.

The words of the prime minister are heartening.

Like most women, I would rather have a leader willing and sincere in recognising the horror of honour crimes than one who capitulates as so many others have done.

A Pakistani woman honoured at the Oscars is also a good thing, an inspiring individual victory and a hopeful honouring, even if it is one that cannot stop future dis-honourings of less lucky Pakistani women. For that, a deeper effort is required, a local and grass-roots conversation directed at those for whom family, honour and survival are intertwined, the murderous killing of the rebel justified because it pretends to be saving all the rest.

The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy rafia.zakaria@gmail.com

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