19.7.05

Justice for women in Islam?

How many men in Kuwait have been convicted for raping a housemaid? And yet, there are hundreds, thousands even, of maids over the years that have been raped or abused, and yet are punished by the system while nothing happens to the perpetrator. How many sponsors are stopped from sponsoring another housemaid once it is known that they have raped, abused, and/or not paid their previous housemaid?

Whilst it's easy to be critical of the justice system, or lack of it, in Kuwait and other Gulf countries, it's not only here that there is a problem. I came across the following article in The Times written by the renowned Salman Rushdie which highlights the strict Islamic code that condemns women in Pakistan and India, and have 'cut and paste' it in full...
Where is the honour in this vile code that condemns women to die in shame?

Salman Rushdie
IN HONOUR-AND-SHAME cultures such as those
of India and Pakistan, male honour resides in the sexual probity of women, and
the “shaming” of women dishonours 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 “honour rape”, intended to punish a
relative of Ms Mukhtar for having been seen with a Mastoi 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 350reported 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 mere39 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 Musharraf, that confiscated Mukhtar Mai’s passport
because it feared that she would go abroad and say things that would bring
Pakistan into disrepute; and it is the same Government that has allied itself
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 that 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 cleric has stated, “if it was consensual or forced.” Darul-Uloom, in the
village of Deoband90 miles north of Delhi, is the birthplace of the
ultra-conservative Deobandi cult, in whose madrassas the Taleban 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 Taleban but also the
assassins of The Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl were followers of
Deobandi teachings. Darul-Uloom’s rigid interpretations of Sharia 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 such as 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 favour of the hard-line Hindu nationalists. In the
1980s 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 such as 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 organisations 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 honour 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 secularise
and unify its legal system, and take power over women’s lives away, once and for
all, from medievalist institutions such as Darul-Uloom.

1 comment:

exMI said...

Yes, it will take generations. It certainly did in the "west" and we are still not clear of this kind of stupidity.