Bulletin Of The Oppression Of Women in Islam

The militant Lashkar-i-Jhangvi has threatened to throw acid on the faces of women who venture to the bazaars in Mekran’s largest town of Turbat, according to a radio report.

“The militants sent text messages to the public that women who venture to go for shopping in the market place like the Lehri market and StarPlus market on their own would be attacked by Lashkar-i-Jhangvi,” a caller told the pro-militant Radio Gwank based in Sweden.

Balochistan has been a battleground for secular and democratic forces and Islamists for many years, but the Islamists mostly existed on the fringe of society.

During the military dictatorship of General Ziaul Haq, Saudi Arabia pumped in millions of dollars to finance hundreds of madressahs where poor Baloch students went for religious education.

“What we see now is the coming of age of the graduates of those madressahs,” said former speaker of the Balochistan assembly Mir Akram Dashti of the National Party.

There have been at least three reported cases of acid throwing in Balochistan in the last two years. According to Amnesty International, on 29 April, three sisters, Fatima, aged 20, Sakeena, aged 14 and Saima, aged 8, were disfigured by acid thrown at them in Kalat town, Balochistan, apparently for violating a ban on leaving the house without a male guardian.

Read the rest:  Women in Balochistan, Pakistan Threatened with Acid for Shopping.

From the Express Tribune in Pakistan comes a report by Sahar Bandial on acid violence and how to combat it:

Horrific memories have a staying power, easily rekindled upon the appropriate trigger. The tragic end of Fakhra Younus in Rome last month was one such trigger. It took me back to the summer afternoon, some years ago, at the Mayo Hospital in Lahore: a dark room with a hospital bed covered by a makeshift protective tent and a muffled voice emanating from behind. A disfigured limb reached out; I stepped closer to encounter a persona, not recognisable in its physical form as human, melted away indiscriminately by the corrosive acid thrown on her by her spouse.

Words of comfort and promises of redress and legal action offered by the team of aid workers I accompanied did little to move the maimed woman, who had resigned to the dictates of fate, uninterested in seeking justice. The image is hard to forget and evokes horror, disgust, guilt and insecurity even today. It epitomises the capacity of evil, the frailty of life and the desperate dependability of women on patriarchal social norms and structures that remain untouched by a passive, and at times, complicit legal system.

Our legislature appears cognisant of the evil of acid violence and has taken the initial steps to redress it. The Acid Control and Acid Crime Prevention Act passed last December — through the insertion of Section 336-A and 336-B in the Pakistan Penal Code — has explicitly identified “causing hurt by dangerous means or substance”, including any corrosive substance or acid, as a crime.

It also provides for stringent punishment, extending to life imprisonment. However, the definitional clarity brought by the Acid Control and Acid Crime Prevention Act is not a sufficient response to the incidence of acid crimes in Pakistan, where over 700 cases of acid violence have been reported since 2006.

Read the rest here: How to Combat Acid-Violence.

The article concludes with, “Only within a more comprehensive legal system can the state’s criminalisation of  ‘hurt by acid’ and its commitment to gender equality and elimination of gender violence bear fruit.”

Sahar and others believe that stricter legislation and punishment will change the desires of a man to punish a woman, when he has been taught all his life that women are inferior and can be punished for not obeying his commands or for shaming him.  But will this law be adhered to and will there actually be dire consequences for the perpetrator?

I hope Shahar and the women of Pakistan obtain their objectives.  But under Islamic sharia law, a woman will still be punished and beaten by her husband; she still is not recognized as his equal.  There is nothing Shahar or any other person, male or female, can do to change the laws of Allah. As long as sharia laws exist, the causes, the desires that are causes for the acid attacks, will remain as the foundation for the violence against women no matter what form it takes.

From a commentary on the gender equality laws recently passed in Pakistan by Tanveer Jahan:

This month, both Houses of parliament unanimously passed two bills to further bolster legal protection for Pakistani women against nefarious practices, denoting gender-based discrimination in society. The first bill has increased the punishment of acid attacks against women to a minimum sentence of 14 years that could extend to life imprisonment, besides a mandatory fine of Rs 1 million. The second law mandates a minimum prison sentence of three years for forcing a woman to marry, including marriages contrived to settle tribal feuds, five years for preventing a woman from inheriting property and three years for a practice known as ‘marriage to the Holy Quran’.

The significance of the legislation cannot be overstated as more than 8,000 acid attacks, forced marriages and other forms of violence against women were reported during 2010 alone. The World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report (2011) placed Pakistan at third from the bottom with only Chad and Yemen lagging behind Pakistan. The report encompassed the magnitude of gender-based disparities in sectors like health and education.

Read the rest: Justice for women: too little and too slow

Acid burnings are not Sunna. But when women are seen as less than a man, inferior in intellect, whose duty is to only supply all his needs, who can be beaten for insubordination and who is fit only to breed his children, she becomes a possession like chattel. It seems that, perhaps, from this point on, for a man who is fueled by hate, it is a slippery slope to the absolute inhumanity of the violence of acid burnings. 

My question is where is the outrage of the Western women? Where are the voices of the Western feminists?  

“Acid burnings are among the most horrific crimes against women in Pakistan that are now criminalized in a landmark set of laws passed by the parliament. They stand to protect millions of women from common forms of abuse in a conservative, Muslim country with a terrible history of gender inequality.

Rights activists praised the laws Tuesday while stressing their passage was just the first step, and likely not the hardest one. It could be even more difficult to get Pakistan’s corrupt and inefficient legal system to protect women’s rights that many men in this patriarchal society likely oppose.

“This is a big achievement for the women of Pakistan, civil society and the organizations that have been working for more than 30 years to get women friendly bills passed,” said Nayyar Shabana Kiyani, who has lobbied for the legislation as part of The Aurat Foundation, a women’s rights group.

“We can’t really get good results until the laws are implemented at the grassroots level,” she added.

Continue reading Good News for Pakistani Women. Maybe.