A Feminist Pioneer
Our society’s misogyny is sickening. Pakistan is a place where men fight and attack each others’ women to take revenge.
Zubeida Mustafa
DAWN
Published January 12, 2024
THE women’s movement in Pakistan has come a long way since its inception. It has assumed different forms and strategies during the course of its development while focusing on the fundamental human rights of women and their empowerment. What was noticeably missing was the female sexuality dimension in the discourse. It was too sensitive an issue to talk about in public in Pakistan’s conservative environment that was fraught with controversies.
Ours is a society that is so prudish that an article I wrote on breast cancer in 1978 had prompted a horde of bearded gentlemen claiming to be the guardians of our morality to crash into the editor’s office to denounce the fahaashi (vulgarity) the paper was publishing. Being progressive and a feminist himself, the editor had shooed them away saying that breast cancer was a life or death issue for women.
In such a society, it needs guts to write about the female reproductive organs in explicit terms. There are far too many readers whose thinking is misogynistic and patriarchal. Even an innocuous piece of writing becomes pornography for them. Their anger stems from the belief that women are sex objects created to give satisfaction to man’s desires.
That would explain why Dr Tahira Kazmi’s blogs on the social media have invited the wrath of her critics who are in abundance. Mercifully, the doctor, a gynaecologist by profession, also has admirers. She has brought enlightenment to many female readers who feel after reading her blogs that they understand their bodies better. Being highly qualified — MBBS from Fatima Jinnah Medical University Lahore (1990) followed by a train of higher foreign degrees — Dr Tahira knows what she is writing. She holds prestigious positions in Oman’s Ministry of Health and the Sultan Qaboos University.
Our society’s misogyny is sickening.
Four collections of her blogs have already appeared while the fifth is under publication. A fair-minded reader would take them as a scientific piece of prose written in the social context with a strong underpinning of feminism. She describes herself as a ‘Gynae-Feminist’.
All the subjects covered are familiar to women reading English-language newspapers but no one has written on them in Urdu so frankly. Childbirth, labour pain, menstruation, menopause, incontinence and prejudice against the girl child have been covered in different social contexts. If the frankness is shocking it is because these issues have been kept under wraps. It is time they were brought into the public space to make them socially acceptable.
But what will continue to shock are the horrendous crimes against women Dr Tahira exposes. How else would one describe the practice of putting a lock on a woman’s vagina with the key kept in the husband’s pocket for safekeeping to ensure that the wife is not unfaithful to him.
It is the feminist in Tahira that is most striking. She is quick to note an injustice done to a woman. She recalls how observant and curious she was as a child and still is. “You have to convince me with solid arguments if you think I am wrong. If you force me I will hit back. I am not afraid of what people say,” she says boldly. She also has the discretion to know when silence is a befitting way to snub an obnoxious critic.
Her greatest assets have been her medical knowledge and her writing skills that helped her produce blogs with literary elegance. It was motherhood that led her on the road to self-discovery of her latent talent. She wrote her first blog on the night of her mother’s death. She was suffering from Alzheimer’s. Grief drove Tahira to write, “I saw my mother melt drop by drop” and the blog went viral. That was 2019. She turned to gynae blogging in 2021 when she saw her daughter in severe menstrual agony. It prompted her to write to explain how the female anatomy makes pain a handicap for a woman needing male understanding. Pain also makes a person creative, with reference to Faiz’s verse on his heart attack and the pain he suffered, Tahira wrote, “Kash Faiz ko mahwari aati”.
What angers Tahira is the traditional view that women carry the honour of the family — meaning the man’s. Hence shame is attached to the woman’s reproductive organs that are given derogatory names. Why can’t the spade be called a spade one may ask.
Our society’s misogyny is sickening. Pakistan is a place where men fight and attack each others’ women to take revenge. Where were these critics when women were paraded naked in the streets of Nawabpur (1984) and when Mukhtaran Mai was gang-raped on the orders of a male jirga (2002)? Presently, 30,000 girls are trafficked every year to be sold into prostitution to satisfy men’s lust and not a voice is raised. It is this distortion the good doctor blogger is trying to correct.
www.zubeida-mustafa.com
Published in Dawn, January 12th, 2024
THE women’s movement in Pakistan has come a long way since its inception. It has assumed different forms and strategies during the course of its development while focusing on the fundamental human rights of women and their empowerment. What was noticeably missing was the female sexuality dimension in the discourse. It was too sensitive an issue to talk about in public in Pakistan’s conservative environment that was fraught with controversies.
Ours is a society that is so prudish that an article I wrote on breast cancer in 1978 had prompted a horde of bearded gentlemen claiming to be the guardians of our morality to crash into the editor’s office to denounce the fahaashi (vulgarity) the paper was publishing. Being progressive and a feminist himself, the editor had shooed them away saying that breast cancer was a life or death issue for women.
In such a society, it needs guts to write about the female reproductive organs in explicit terms. There are far too many readers whose thinking is misogynistic and patriarchal. Even an innocuous piece of writing becomes pornography for them. Their anger stems from the belief that women are sex objects created to give satisfaction to man’s desires.
That would explain why Dr Tahira Kazmi’s blogs on the social media have invited the wrath of her critics who are in abundance. Mercifully, the doctor, a gynaecologist by profession, also has admirers. She has brought enlightenment to many female readers who feel after reading her blogs that they understand their bodies better. Being highly qualified — MBBS from Fatima Jinnah Medical University Lahore (1990) followed by a train of higher foreign degrees — Dr Tahira knows what she is writing. She holds prestigious positions in Oman’s Ministry of Health and the Sultan Qaboos University.
Our society’s misogyny is sickening.
Four collections of her blogs have already appeared while the fifth is under publication. A fair-minded reader would take them as a scientific piece of prose written in the social context with a strong underpinning of feminism. She describes herself as a ‘Gynae-Feminist’.
All the subjects covered are familiar to women reading English-language newspapers but no one has written on them in Urdu so frankly. Childbirth, labour pain, menstruation, menopause, incontinence and prejudice against the girl child have been covered in different social contexts. If the frankness is shocking it is because these issues have been kept under wraps. It is time they were brought into the public space to make them socially acceptable.
But what will continue to shock are the horrendous crimes against women Dr Tahira exposes. How else would one describe the practice of putting a lock on a woman’s vagina with the key kept in the husband’s pocket for safekeeping to ensure that the wife is not unfaithful to him.
It is the feminist in Tahira that is most striking. She is quick to note an injustice done to a woman. She recalls how observant and curious she was as a child and still is. “You have to convince me with solid arguments if you think I am wrong. If you force me I will hit back. I am not afraid of what people say,” she says boldly. She also has the discretion to know when silence is a befitting way to snub an obnoxious critic.
Her greatest assets have been her medical knowledge and her writing skills that helped her produce blogs with literary elegance. It was motherhood that led her on the road to self-discovery of her latent talent. She wrote her first blog on the night of her mother’s death. She was suffering from Alzheimer’s. Grief drove Tahira to write, “I saw my mother melt drop by drop” and the blog went viral. That was 2019. She turned to gynae blogging in 2021 when she saw her daughter in severe menstrual agony. It prompted her to write to explain how the female anatomy makes pain a handicap for a woman needing male understanding. Pain also makes a person creative, with reference to Faiz’s verse on his heart attack and the pain he suffered, Tahira wrote, “Kash Faiz ko mahwari aati”.
What angers Tahira is the traditional view that women carry the honour of the family — meaning the man’s. Hence shame is attached to the woman’s reproductive organs that are given derogatory names. Why can’t the spade be called a spade one may ask.
Our society’s misogyny is sickening. Pakistan is a place where men fight and attack each others’ women to take revenge. Where were these critics when women were paraded naked in the streets of Nawabpur (1984) and when Mukhtaran Mai was gang-raped on the orders of a male jirga (2002)? Presently, 30,000 girls are trafficked every year to be sold into prostitution to satisfy men’s lust and not a voice is raised. It is this distortion the good doctor blogger is trying to correct.
www.zubeida-mustafa.com
Published in Dawn, January 12th, 2024
Honour or dishonour?
Public figures should criticise honour killings vehemently.
DAWN
Published January 12, 2024
WHERE did the term ‘honour killing’ come from? What is so honourable about conspiring to kill a female family member if she chooses to marry of her own free will? How long will women have to suffer this fate at the hands of the menfolk in their family or community?
A recent article in Dawn discussed another statistic in the mounting data of honour killings at home and abroad – an immigrant Pakistani family settled in Italy killed their daughter because she refused to marry a Pakistani boy of their choice back home. Instead, she wanted to spend the rest of her life with her Italian boyfriend.
Filmmaker Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy won an Oscar for her documentary on honour killings, A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness. She was lauded by the international community for being courageous enough to highlight a problem that has plagued this part of the world for aeons. If argued religiously, Islam is very vocal on the subject and grants equal rights to men and women to marry of their own choice. Then why are women treated as children of a lesser God? Is family honour solely their responsibility?
A recent television serial, Razia, also dealt with the treatment of females as second-class citizens, and touched upon the curse of honour killing as Razia’s brother and father, suspicious about her involvement with someone, conspire to kill her.
Public figures should criticise honour killings vehemently.
However, destiny intervenes and she escapes unscathed. The play, starring Mahira Khan, was extremely well-made and highlighted irrational and twisted attitudes of society without any overblown drama. The six-episode production was a laudable endeavour in the way in which it addressed so many social issues crisply, without a long-drawn-out narrative.
Feudal mindsets and misogynistic attitudes are largely to blame for the proliferation of this crime.
Historically, and even in contemporary times, women in feudal setups are expected to relinquish their share of the property voluntarily and those who resist are ostracised and vilified by the community. This mindset is particularly entrenched in southern Punjab where females are sometimes wedded to the Quran in order to keep property within the family.
Ironically, while we are being encouraged to embrace the ways of the 21st century, our regressive and patriarchal society is bent on pushing us into medieval times. The article about the honour killing in Italy validates this dichotomy. Despite living in the Western world, the primitive and bigoted outlook of some South Asians there is too deeply embedded to be uprooted easily.
Education, although it will alleviate the issue to a certain extent, is not the solution. Awareness and a conscious effort to bring about a shift in this way of thinking will serve as the magic bullet for the menace. As long as women are treated as second-class citizens and the ingrained hatred towards them remains deep-seated in our societal fabric, not a lot, I am afraid, can be achieved.
Endeavours like Ms Chinoy’s documentary on the issue are steps in the right direction. She was accused of giving her country a bad name on a global platform but at least she had the courage to depict realities which very few have the courage to even speak about. Honour killings, in any part of the world, should be denounced and condemned repeatedly and the documentary is only a drop in the ocean.
Attempting to bring about change is akin to attempting the impossible. However, small steps go a long way so even a dent is an achievement. More celebrities and public figures should espouse this cause and criticise the primitive and barbaric practice more vehemently. I am quite sure that plays and films on the subject will draw significant attention to the medieval ‘ritual’ that is gaining traction, rather than being curbed and controlled.
Pakistan is already viewed as a failed state where it has been proved time and again that women, comprising 51 per cent of the population, inevitably get the short end of the stick. Women must be respected, loved and treated as equals. The founder of this nation, Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah, made it abundantly clear that for this country to prosper and march ahead, the women have to play a significant role.
And increasingly, as they emerge as a force to be reckoned with, women are becoming hard to ignore and their voices and identities tough to quash. At a time when Pakistan is sinking into a political and economic quagmire and struggles to stay afloat, we need enlightened, educated and strong women to become a pivotal part of rehabilitative endeavours.
The writer is an educationist.
gaiteeara@hotmail.com
Published in Dawn, January 12th, 2024
WHERE did the term ‘honour killing’ come from? What is so honourable about conspiring to kill a female family member if she chooses to marry of her own free will? How long will women have to suffer this fate at the hands of the menfolk in their family or community?
A recent article in Dawn discussed another statistic in the mounting data of honour killings at home and abroad – an immigrant Pakistani family settled in Italy killed their daughter because she refused to marry a Pakistani boy of their choice back home. Instead, she wanted to spend the rest of her life with her Italian boyfriend.
Filmmaker Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy won an Oscar for her documentary on honour killings, A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness. She was lauded by the international community for being courageous enough to highlight a problem that has plagued this part of the world for aeons. If argued religiously, Islam is very vocal on the subject and grants equal rights to men and women to marry of their own choice. Then why are women treated as children of a lesser God? Is family honour solely their responsibility?
A recent television serial, Razia, also dealt with the treatment of females as second-class citizens, and touched upon the curse of honour killing as Razia’s brother and father, suspicious about her involvement with someone, conspire to kill her.
Public figures should criticise honour killings vehemently.
However, destiny intervenes and she escapes unscathed. The play, starring Mahira Khan, was extremely well-made and highlighted irrational and twisted attitudes of society without any overblown drama. The six-episode production was a laudable endeavour in the way in which it addressed so many social issues crisply, without a long-drawn-out narrative.
Feudal mindsets and misogynistic attitudes are largely to blame for the proliferation of this crime.
Historically, and even in contemporary times, women in feudal setups are expected to relinquish their share of the property voluntarily and those who resist are ostracised and vilified by the community. This mindset is particularly entrenched in southern Punjab where females are sometimes wedded to the Quran in order to keep property within the family.
Ironically, while we are being encouraged to embrace the ways of the 21st century, our regressive and patriarchal society is bent on pushing us into medieval times. The article about the honour killing in Italy validates this dichotomy. Despite living in the Western world, the primitive and bigoted outlook of some South Asians there is too deeply embedded to be uprooted easily.
Education, although it will alleviate the issue to a certain extent, is not the solution. Awareness and a conscious effort to bring about a shift in this way of thinking will serve as the magic bullet for the menace. As long as women are treated as second-class citizens and the ingrained hatred towards them remains deep-seated in our societal fabric, not a lot, I am afraid, can be achieved.
Endeavours like Ms Chinoy’s documentary on the issue are steps in the right direction. She was accused of giving her country a bad name on a global platform but at least she had the courage to depict realities which very few have the courage to even speak about. Honour killings, in any part of the world, should be denounced and condemned repeatedly and the documentary is only a drop in the ocean.
Attempting to bring about change is akin to attempting the impossible. However, small steps go a long way so even a dent is an achievement. More celebrities and public figures should espouse this cause and criticise the primitive and barbaric practice more vehemently. I am quite sure that plays and films on the subject will draw significant attention to the medieval ‘ritual’ that is gaining traction, rather than being curbed and controlled.
Pakistan is already viewed as a failed state where it has been proved time and again that women, comprising 51 per cent of the population, inevitably get the short end of the stick. Women must be respected, loved and treated as equals. The founder of this nation, Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah, made it abundantly clear that for this country to prosper and march ahead, the women have to play a significant role.
And increasingly, as they emerge as a force to be reckoned with, women are becoming hard to ignore and their voices and identities tough to quash. At a time when Pakistan is sinking into a political and economic quagmire and struggles to stay afloat, we need enlightened, educated and strong women to become a pivotal part of rehabilitative endeavours.
The writer is an educationist.
gaiteeara@hotmail.com
Published in Dawn, January 12th, 2024
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