Mukhtaran and Beyond
What happened to
Mukhtaran Mai was reprehensible. It
was done by wolves masquerading as men.
What happened after the crime appeared
even more egregious, drawing fire on
both society and state for seemingly
letting the perpetrators off the hook,
and for allegedly trying to ‘contain
the victim’. This has been the
general perception which has fuelled
revulsion, especially in the West.
The powerful preying on the powerless
has been a recurring feature in the
history of mankind and of the human
condition. The mindset behind human
atrocities needs to be purposefully
attacked.
In India, the lives of the 160 million
untouchable Dalit community –-
who suffer humiliation at the hands
of the Brahmin and the upper-caste Hindu
– is hellish (vide National Geographic
June 2003).
In Iraq, US-directed sanctions cost
the lives of over half a million Iraqi
children, a fact defended by the then
US Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright
“as worth it” when accosted
on the issue by CBS News.
In the Bosnian town of Srebrenica during
July 1995, Dutch troops of the UN simply
abandoned Bosnian Muslims to be massacred
by Serbs.
In the US, for decades blacks were lynched
in a carnival-like atmosphere without
that heinous crime being declared as
a federal offense. President Franklin
Roosevelt, in effect, did nothing. It
took the State of Mississippi 41 years
to try and for its jury to convict (of
manslaughter, not murder) any of the
killers of 3 civil rights activists
who were slain there in 1964.
In Margaret Thatcher’s Britain,
‘Paki-bashing’ was a norm,
much to the quiet delight of many white
Britons at the time who insisted on
forging closer ties with South Africa’s
pariah apartheid regime.
Magnifying the criminality of the few
is a tactic being used to tarnish and
attack the social values of Muslims
worldwide, while the so-called ‘war
on terrorism’ is underway. Under
that yardstick, few cultures can emerge
unscathed.
The Crusaders who returned to England
came back gasping in admiration for
the chivalry and compassion of their
Muslim opponents in Palestine/Syria.
Many of the Muslim practices they witnessed
became enshrined in international humanitarian
law later to be embedded and codified
in the Geneva Conventions.
The debt which the Western world owes
to Islamic civilization has been amply
documented in the book “Islamic
Jurisprudence” written by Justice
Weeramantary of the ICJ and published
by the prestigious St. Martin’s
Press.
However, socio-political prejudices
within mainstream Western media, coupled
with the contributory factor of the
Muslim elites’ moral and intellectual
failures, have facilitated the creation
of a false perception which distorts
discussion of Middle East realities.
The propaganda technique of focusing
and dwelling on negatives and using
it to smear Islamic teachings is tantamount
to equating gay marriages, out-of-wedlock
births, incest, abandoning of elderly
parents, drug addiction, alcoholism,
racism and shameless behavior with Western
values.
In the post-9/11 world, there is an
acute need for mutual awareness and
understanding. Persisting with a condemnatory
approach will continue to put the world
on the path of confrontation and pit
it against the forces of reconciliation.
The major loser will be the future of
mankind.
