Are Women Fair Game in a Misogynist Pakistan?
By Karamatullah K. Ghori
Toronto, Canada

 

By any reckoning or description, Noor Muqaddam’s murder, in Islamabad on July 20—the day of Eid-ul-Adha (the Eid of Sacrifice) in much of the Muslim world, except in Pakistan—was heinous and gruesome, to say the least.

The savagery of 27-year-old, young, Noor Muqaddam’s brutal murder—with multiple dagger wounds on her decapitated body—was so telling that it stirred a streak of horror in a Pakistan that has grown almost blasé about crimes against women.

The feminist side of the Pakistani society became instantly electrified by the horrific savagery inflicted on the body of an innocent girl, literally cut down in the prime of her life. The social uproar was reminiscent of the revulsion that shook the Indian social milieu, in the twilight of 2012, when a girl was, likewise murdered by her rapists in a moving bus in the heart of Delhi.

It was as much a cry in anguish in Pakistan, in the wake of the gruesome tragedy of Noor’s murder, as it had been throughout India, following that dastardly crime against a young Indian girl.

For this scribe, the tragedy struck a personal chord, deep down in my heart.

Noor Muqaddam was a child of hardly three years when I first saw her in Baghdad, upon landing there as Pakistan’s ambassador to Iraq; her father, Shaukat Muqaddam, was my First Secretary in the Embassy. I found in Shaukat not only a highly efficient career officer but also a man of responsibility, suffusing all the traits and ethos of a middle- class Pakistani upbringing. Keenly conscious of his duties and obligations of a father. Bringing up his children in a milieu not like Pakistan, Shaukat and his wife, Kausar, lavished not only love and affection in abundance on their children but also saw to it that they were properly steeped into Pakistani traditions and culture.

But this, middle-class social awareness of responsibility of parentage, can’t be said to be true in the case of the impugned young murderer of Noor, arrested from the scene of his crime with all the tell-tale evidence proclaiming his guilt.

Zahir Jaffer, the impugned murderer, is the scion of one of the richest families of Pakistan. It isn’t hard to draw up a general caricature of children brought up in the lap of luxury among Pakistan’s nouveau-riche or super-rich families. Such children, usually, suffer from starvation of their parents’ personal care because they have more time to spend in the high-society's social calls than on their wards and children.

This murderer, Zahir Jaffer, was born in US and raised in private schools in New Jersey and its likes. One can well imagine the paucity of Pakistani culture in his upbringing and schooling. By the same stroke, his childhood and adolescence were awash with all that easy access to drugs and booze that abundance of wealth brings to this class. He’s said to have developed the psyche of a young lad for whom drugs were there for the asking, and all other ‘extras’ of high society that such an ambience throws up.

What Zahir Jaffer did to Noor, a girl from the middle class, because of her refusal to succumb to his demands—sex, marriage proposal et al. —is behavior typical of our feudal class in Pakistan. They are not given to taking no for an answer. To them, their every word is a command that must be carried out, forthwith. How dare Noor wouldn’t give in to his feudal urge for instant gratification?

The police in Islamabad have also arrested Zahir’s parents: his father, Zakir, a scion of the super-rich Jaffer clan and mother, Ismet, from the equally super-wealthy Adamjee family. The pair has been arrested on suspicion that they could have averted the treatment their son meted out to poor Noor, but didn’t. Their inebriated son was, all the time, in contact with his father, by phone, while simultaneously inflicting brutal torture on his prey.

This errant behavior of the murderer’s parents is typical of the Pakistani super-rich. To them, people of lesser social status or standing are like children of a lesser god. They worship manna and anyone not measuring up to their perch is more like a chattel than a human being. According to police reports, the son didn’t let his father doubt what he intended to do with the poor girl in sheer vengeance. However, instead of alerting the police, he only thought fit to hector his therapists in Islamabad to go and see what they could do to calm down the beast evoked in his son.

Is Pakistan’s male-dominated, patriarchal, society instinctively misogynist? Are women in Pakistan not humanbeings on a footing of social and human equality there? This question is no longer moot. There’s mounting evidence that in a country that styles itself as an ‘Islamic Republic’ anchored in Islam and teachings of its Holy Prophet (PBUH), the women of Pakistan are, at best, second class citizens.

Imran Khan (IK) is the putative leader of—according to his own proclamation—of a ‘New Pakistan’ modeled on the paradigm of the ‘State of Medina’ founded by the Holy Prophet (PBUH). But in this supposedly an ideal Pakistan, there’s no trace of its women being accorded the status of respect and admiration that the pristine State of Medina had bestowed on its women-folk 1400 years ago.

There’s hardly a day in Pakistan’s not-too-ideal almanac when there’s not a news of women raped, murdered or driven out of their homes by men supposed to protect their honor and dignity.

As these lines were being written, BBC, Urdu Service, reported, in banner head-lines, the hair-raising torture tale of a middle-aged woman in Swabi, Khyber-Pakhtoon-Khwa Province, found to have been put in chains and incarcerated in the home of her four brothers. The ‘honor-afficonado’ brothers had chained their sister, for ten-long months in a room of the house. What was she guilty of to deserve such unmitigated torture and punishment, one might ask?

According to the report, from Swabi Police, her crime was that she had gone to a court of law to seek child-support money for her children from her divorcing husband. To the ‘honor-crazy’ brothers, she had dishonored them by going out of the home. They didn’t suffice to torturing their hapless sister only physically but literally rubbed salt into her wounds by handing over her two children to their father!

With such a low-esteem and regard in evidence for women, day in and day out, is there a shred of doubt that women are in constant and abundant danger in Pakistan’s archaic feudal culture?

A picture, from BBC-Urdu Service, is going viral on the social media of Pakistan. The picture was taken of the effigy, made of plastic and cotton, of a woman, draped in traditional apparel of Pakistani women, hanging from a tall tree on the main road leading to Islamabad’s landmark ‘Faisal Mosque.’ The effigy said it all of the danger and threat that has become the staple of Pakistan’s misogynist society. But equally telling, if not more, was the cloth banner beside the effigy: ‘Upset the Set-up.’

Of course, IK’s putative ‘new Pakistan’ vision is going to be overly tested in the murder trial of Noor. How Pakistan’s shaded and corruption-infested justice system handles this hot potato will be watched, and keenly followed, not only in Pakistan but the world over, wherever there’s a Pakistani diaspora.

But along with the justice system, the whole rotten and decaying patriarchal social system will also be in the dock. It’s not only that the disfigured corpse of Noor is crying out for justice. Every woman of Pakistan is a petitioner along her side. Will this high-blown case define the future status and standing of women in Pakistani culture is a question on the lips of every pundit. The jury is out, of course, for the moment.

K_K_ghori@hotmail.com

(The author is a former ambassador and career diplomat)