The Problem with Desi Culture - The Burden Women Carry

Assad’s rape victims break their silence

The torture victim stood in front of her tormentor wondering what treatment would be meted out this time in the notorious Branch 215, also known as Raid Brigade run by military intelligence in Damascus. Would it be a merciless beating or would it be another sex assault on her already broken body?

The start of the investigation was interrupted suddenly by a ringing telephone and she watched and listened with incredulity as the voice laughing and giggling down the line prompted the torturer to break into a warm smile. Almost automatically, he softened the tone of his voice, for that is the effect most daughters have on their fathers.
In the seconds that he looked away from his torture victim he had morphed from brutal monster into a warm and caring father. This was one of the more chilling aspects that emerged from the stories I heard from Syrian women who have been swept up on an industrial scale and thrown into Bashar Al-Assad’s prisons since the start of the 2011 war. The cold reality is that the mass rapes, sexual assaults, punishment beatings and mental torture are being inflicted on women routinely by someone else’s fathers, husbands and even grandfathers.

At the end of the shift, these men must return to their family homes and normality, having completely destroyed the lives and souls of the women and young girls in their grip. The harsh reality is that if your husband works in Branch 215 then he is probably a serial rapist or is standing by as a spectator watching the most heinous, unimaginable crimes being carried out on women prisoners and girls.
I wonder how this particular monster responded when he got home and was asked, “What did you do today, Daddy?” Obviously he would not be telling his daughter about the teeth he smashed, the bones he had broken or the sex he had forced on his victims.
While trying to shine a light on this dark underbelly of the Assad regime, I met several women who ended up in Branch 215 or other equally terrifying prisons and ghost jails run by the Syrian regime. In every encounter, the image of Bashar Al-Assad loomed large, either in portraits hanging on walls or on the T-shirts worn by the men responsible for the brutal rapes.

Yes, you read that accurately. Incredible as it may seem, the face of the Syrian leader is emblazoned on T-shirts worn by the rapists in his employ, as if he defiles Syrian women by proxy. No wonder that many who manage to get out of the prisons cannot bear to look at the face of the Syrian leader. Those small, thin lips and piercing stare must send shivers down their spines every time they see his image.

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Relax, Malala's jeans aren't an assault on your national identity

A new photo of Malala Yousafzai recently surfaced on the internet, in which the 20-year-old education rights activist can be seen wearing jeans and heeled boots. This caused a furor among many Pakistanis, and resulted in personal attacks and criticism online.

This is not the first time Malala, who recently started studying at Oxford University, has been at the receiving end of criticism from people in her home country for supposedly defying cultural norms.

The fact that she is now being lambasted for wearing a Western dress and being unaccompanied by her father should come as no surprise.

Muslim women in Pakistan are perceived by many to be the guardians of culture and honour, without actually being given a choice in the matter.

Their bodies are continuously associated with controversy and shame, as a result of which successful women like Malala are made to carry the weight of the reputation of not only religious values, but also of Pakistan, on their shoulders.

The concept of culture in Pakistan is continuously conflated with a monolithic perception of religion and nation, and a Pakistani woman’s free will to decide what to wear is often demeaned as a result.

The obsession of many Pakistanis to police women and the way they dress stems from their perception of women’s bodies as ‘private’. This is why violence against women is seen as a matter worth concealing in Pakistan.

Women themselves are not even supposed to leave the confines of their home. Overreaching these bounds can always lead to harmful, but justified, repercussions in the eyes of many Pakistanis.

Malala, however, has consistently been seeing as defying such cultural norms, while also challenging the premise of a nationhood that relies on a woman’s honour, thereby breaking out of the notions of chaadar and chaar dewari that so many men in Pakistan hold onto for dear life.

Zia ul-Haq’s policies that served to subjugate Pakistani women have left a lasting impact much to the detriment of the rights of women in the country. This has led to everyday institutional injustices meted out against women, fueled by not only by religious but also jingoistic identity clashes.

That is why even the violence afflicted on Malala five years ago is ignored, as violence against women is seen as something that resides in the private domain of our lives, at the expense of our lives and sanity.

Malala has risen above all this, which gives the men of Pakistan a lot of cause for insecurity. Hence, be it unsolicited advice, widespread criticism, moral and body policing, or even assault, women like Malala are always ‘asking for it’ according to such men.

This goes to show how the Pakistani state has actively encouraged the regulation and surveillance of women’s bodies, be it through the laws imposed through the Hudood Ordinance that have still not been rectified fully to this day, or the dress codes that are now being imposed in universities across Pakistan.

Furthermore, shalwar kameez has grown to become a symbol of a religious form of nationalism. Somehow, it has become a visible marker of a Pakistani Muslim’s identity, a choice emblematic of traditions and honour.

Views echoing such sentiments fail to take into account the malleable nature of culture, and end up promoting cultural homogeneity over diversity. Shalwar kameez was never a quintessentially Muslim dress, but rather its veneration by Pakistani men represents state control over women’s bodies at the expense of their agency.

In fact, the criticism of jeans is not against a kind of fabric; her critics think that her individualistic choices come at the expense of her responsibility as the custodian of the country’s honour.

Thereby, she is walking over the fragile reputation of her countrymen, which rests on Pakistani women maintaining an air of conservatism, as per societal norms, while representing the country abroad.

It is very clear that such narratives of nationhood exist at the expense of the bodily autonomy and mobility of Pakistani women, thereby leading to the politicisation of female bodies.

Pakistanis are prone to using women as easy political targets to vent cultural anxiety, be it towards Mahira Khan smoking or Malala wearing jeans outside of Pakistan. We thrive on not the display, but the decimation of a woman, for the sake of a spectacle.

In conclusion, the autonomy of Pakistani women is perceived to be a threat to the religious and national integrity of Pakistanis for many reasons. This is why Pakistani women’s bodies happen to be where patriarchy is at control the most: at home.

This also holds true in light of the visceral responses often levelled at Malala and her personal choices. Her independence, according to many Pakistanis, comes at the expense of the country’s reputation that rests on many things, including the need to conceal and exercise control over female bodies.

Such reactions speak of the larger cultural anxieties among Pakistanis that lead to violence against women all over the country. Nevertheless, Malala continues to stand tall, above and beyond the country’s patriarchal mindset, wherever she goes.

Forced To Marry

Forced marriages are not permissible in Islam yet they do take place in certain Muslim communities for a number of cultural reasons.

Did you ever hear your Imam speak against this during the Friday Khutbah ?

I Was Wounded; My Honor Wasn’t

 THIRTY-TWO years ago, when I was 17 and living in Bombay, I was gang raped and nearly killed. Three years later, outraged at the silence and misconceptions around rape, I wrote a fiery essay under my own name describing my experience for an Indian women’s magazine. It created a stir in the women’s movement — and in my family — and then it quietly disappeared. Then, last week, I looked at my e-mail and there it was. As part of the outpouring of public rageafter a young woman’s rape and death in Delhi, somebody posted the article online and it went viral. Since then, I have received a deluge of messages from people expressing their support.

It’s not exactly pleasant to be a symbol of rape. I’m not an expert, nor do I represent all victims of rape. All I can offer is that — unlike the young woman who died in December two weeks after being brutally gang raped, and so many others — my story didn’t end, and I can continue to tell it.

When I fought to live that night, I hardly knew what I was fighting for. A male friend and I had gone for a walk up a mountain near my home. Four armed men caught us and made us climb to a secluded spot, where they raped me for several hours, and beat both of us. They argued among themselves about whether or not to kill us, and finally let us go.

At 17, I was just a child. Life rewarded me richly for surviving. I stumbled home, wounded and traumatized, to a fabulous family. With them on my side, so much came my way. I found true love. I wrote books. I saw a kangaroo in the wild. I caught buses and missed trains. I had a shining child. The century changed. My first gray hair appeared.

Too many others will never experience that. They will not see that it gets better, that the day comes when one incident is no longer the central focus of your life. One day you find you are no longer looking behind you, expecting every group of men to attack. One day you wind a scarf around your throat without having a flashback to being choked. One day you are not frightened anymore.

Rape is horrible. But it is not horrible for all the reasons that have been drilled into the heads of Indian women. It is horrible because you are violated, you are scared, someone else takes control of your body and hurts you in the most intimate way. It is not horrible because you lose your “virtue.” It is not horrible because your father and your brother are dishonored. I reject the notion that my virtue is located in my vagina, just as I reject the notion that men’s brains are in their genitals.

If we take honor out of the equation, rape will still be horrible, but it will be a personal, and not a societal, horror. We will be able to give women who have been assaulted what they truly need: not a load of rubbish about how they should feel guilty or ashamed, but empathy for going through a terrible trauma.

The week after I was attacked, I heard the story of a woman who was raped in a nearby suburb. She came home, went into the kitchen, set herself on fire and died. The person who told me the story was full of admiration for her selflessness in preserving her husband’s honor. Thanks to my parents, I never did understand this.

The law has to provide real penalties for rapists and protection for victims, but only families and communities can provide this empathy and support. How will a teenager participate in the prosecution of her rapist if her family isn’t behind her? How will a wife charge her assailant if her husband thinks the attack was more of an affront to him than a violation of her?

At 17, I thought the scariest thing that could happen in my life was being hurt and humiliated in such a painful way. At 49, I know I was wrong: the scariest thing is imagining my 11-year-old child being hurt and humiliated. Not because of my family’s honor, but because she trusts the world and it is infinitely painful to think of her losing that trust. When I look back, it is not the 17-year-old me I want to comfort, but my parents. They had the job of picking up the pieces.

This is where our work lies, with those of us who are raising the next generation. It lies in teaching our sons and daughters to become liberated, respectful adults who know that men who hurt women are making a choice, and will be punished.

When I was 17, I could not have imagined thousands of people marching against rape in India, as we have seen these past few weeks. And yet there is still work to be done. We have spent generations constructing elaborate systems of patriarchy, caste and social and sexual inequality that allow abuse to flourish. But rape is not inevitable, like the weather. We need to shelve all the gibberish about honor and virtue and did-she-lead-him-on and could-he-help-himself. We need to put responsibility where it lies: on men who violate women, and on all of us who let them get away with it while we point accusing fingers at their victims.

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