Monday, July 11, 2005
Rushdie Exposes Izzat
July 10, 2005
India and Pakistan's Code of Dishonor
By SALMAN RUSHDIE
IN honor-and-shame cultures like those of India and
Pakistan, male honor resides in the sexual probity of
women, and the "shaming" of women dishonors all men.
So it is that five men of Pakistan's powerful Mastoi
tribe were disgracefully acquitted of raping a
villager named Mukhtar Mai three years ago. Theirs was
an "honor rape," intended to punish a relative of Ms.
Mukhtar for having been seen with a Matsoi woman. The
acquittals have now been suspended by the Pakistan
Supreme Court, and there is finally a chance that this
courageous woman may gain some measure of redress for
her violation.
Pakistan, however, has little to be proud of. The
Human Rights Commission of Pakistan says that there
were 320 reported rapes in the first nine months of
last year, and 350 reported gang rapes in the same
period. The number of unreported rapes is believed to
be much larger. The victim pressed charges in only
one-third of the reported cases, and a mere 39 arrests
were made. The use of rape in tribal disputes has
become, one might say, normal. And the belief that a
raped woman's best recourse is to kill herself remains
widespread and deeply ingrained.
For every Mukhtar Mai there are dozens of such
suicides. Nor is courage any guarantee of getting
justice, as the case of Shazia Khalid shows. Dr.
Khalid was raped last year in the province of
Baluchistan by security personnel at the hospital
where she worked. A Pakistani tribunal failed to
convict anyone of the crime.
Dr. Khalid says that she was subsequently "threatened
so many times" that she was forced to flee Pakistan.
"I was hounded out," she says, expressing
dissatisfaction that the government neither brought
her attackers to justice nor protected her from the
threats that followed.
That is the same government, led by President Pervez
Musharraf, that confiscated Mukhtar Mai's passport
because it feared she would go abroad and say things
that would bring Pakistan into disrepute; and it is
the same government that has allied with the West in
the war on terrorism, but seems quite prepared to
allow a war of sexual terror to be waged against its
female citizens.
Now comes even worse news. Whatever Pakistan can do,
India, it seems, can trump. The so-called Imrana case,
in which a Muslim woman from a village in northern
India says she was raped by her father-in-law, has
brought forth a ruling from the powerful Islamist
seminary Darul-Uloom ordering her to leave her husband
because as a result of the rape she has become "haram"
(unclean) for him. "It does not matter," a Deobandi
cleric has stated, "if it was consensual or forced."
Darul-Uloom, in the village of Deoband 90 miles north
of Delhi, is the birthplace of the ultra-conservative
Deobandi cult, in whose madrassas the Taliban were
trained. It teaches the most fundamentalist, narrow,
puritan, rigid, oppressive version of Islam that
exists anywhere in the world today. In one fatwa it
suggested that Jews were responsible for the 9/11
attacks. Not only the Taliban but also the assassins
of The Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl were
followers of Deobandi teachings.
Darul-Uloom's rigid interpretations of Shariah law are
notorious, and immensely influential - so much so that
the victim, Imrana, a woman under unimaginable
pressure, has said she will abide by the seminary's
decision in spite of the widespread outcry in India
against it. An innocent woman, she will leave her
husband because of his father's crime.
Why does a mere seminary have the power to issue such
judgments? The answer lies in the strange anomaly that
is the Muslim personal law system - a parallel legal
system for Indian Muslims, which leaves women like
Imrana at the mercy of the mullahs. Such is the
historical confusion on this vexed subject that anyone
who suggests that a democratic country should have a
single, unified legal system is accused of being
anti-Muslim and in favor of the hardline Hindu
nationalists.
In the 1980's, a divorced woman named Shah Bano was
granted "maintenance money" by the Indian Supreme
Court. But there is no alimony under Islamic law, so
orthodox Indian Islamists like those at Darul-Uloom
protested that this ruling infringed the Muslim
Personal Law, and they founded the All-India Muslim
Law Board to mount protests. The government caved in,
passing a bill denying alimony to divorced Muslim
women. Ever since Shah Bano, Indian politicians have
not dared to challenge the power of Islamist clerical
grandees.
In the Imrana case, the All-India Muslim Law Board has
unsurprisingly backed the Darul-Uloom decision, though
many other Muslim and non-Muslim organizations and
individuals have denounced it. Shockingly, the chief
minister of Uttar Pradesh, Mulayam Singh Yadav, has
also backed the Darul-Uloom fatwa. "The decision of
the Muslim religious leaders in the Imrana case must
have been taken after a lot of thought," he told
reporters in Lucknow. "The religious leaders are all
very learned and they understand the Muslim community
and its sentiments."
This is a craven statement. The "culture" of rape that
exists in India and Pakistan arises from profound
social anomalies, its origins lying in the unchanging
harshness of a moral code based on the concepts of
honor and shame. Thanks to that code's ruthlessness,
raped women will go on hanging themselves in the woods
and walking into rivers to drown themselves. It will
take generations to change that. Meanwhile, the law
must do what it can.
In Pakistan, the Supreme Court has taken one small but
significant step in the matter of Mukhtar Mai; now it
is for the police and politicians to start pursuing
rapists instead of hounding their victims. As for
India, at the risk of being called a communalist, I
must agree that any country that claims to be a
modern, secular democracy must secularize and unify
its legal system, and take power over women's lives
away, once and for all, from medievalist institutions
like Darul-Uloom.
Salman Rushdie is the author of "The Satanic Verses"
and the forthcoming "Shalimar the Clown."
