It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
PUBLISHED 26 JUL, 2021 IMAGES STAFF DESK REPORT Men need to step up and stop detracting from a very important conversation.
How many acts of violence and how many murdered women will it take for us to admit we have a problem? After a harrowing week following the murder of Noor Mukadam, on Monday morning we saw that 'not all men' was trending on Twitter — and that did not go down well with us.
Women are dying, they are literally being slaughtered, and a section of our society does not want to call out men because "not everyone is evil". Complicity is as evil as the crime itself because complicity exonerates the criminal, it lets their behaviour continue unabated and tells the victim that no one is on their side. Ignoring someone's behaviour because they are your friend or brother or whatever makes you as bad as them.
When the conversation is about one gender and how it is rampantly subjected to violence and you decide to throw in the 'not all men' detractor, you are complicit in letting the abusers and harassers and murderers continue their horrendous acts without any accountability.
There are too many tweets and opinions online regarding 'not all men' to tackle but we've addressed some of the most common 'justifications'. Here goes.
"Oh, but it happens everywhere, not just Pakistan."
Yes, but we live in Pakistan and Noor was murdered in Pakistan, as were Saima, Quratulain and hundreds of thousands of other women whose names we don't even know. When a crime happens in Pakistan, our outrage will be a thousand times more than if it happens elsewhere because we live here. That victim was one of us.
When it happens in our own backyard, it does and should pinch us more.
But why did she go to his house/get in his car/meet him/put herself in that situation?
Counter question: why did he kill her? Victim blaming is not going to solve this problem.
When you say you are not victim blaming by asking these questions, please know you are because your outrage is directed towards how the victim put themselves 'in harm's way' as opposed to the act of violence.
What about your father/brother/son/husband/cousin/best friend?
When attention is called to men being the main perpetrators behind gender-based violence, it's not a personal attack on your father, brother, son, husband etc or you.
But, do keep in mind that the rapists, killers and harassers of the world are all someone's brother/son/father/husband. They were not spawned in a lab, ready to be inflicted upon society like a plague. They are among us every day and they don't have a sign tattooed on their foreheads saying that they are rapists or killers.
Not every man is a rapist
No, not every man is a rapist, but in a society where harassment is brushed under the rug, how many men have done things to make women uncomfortable? How many men in positions of power — and men do occupy majority of positions of power in Pakistan — have used their influence to improve the conditions for women? Or have they, in fact, used that power to continue abuse or let others continue?
Making women uncomfortable is a form of harassment too and unless we wake up and realise that, we'll continue to live in a society where these things persist and are hushed up until someone dies.
These situations rarely begin with murder. There is a lead up but those aggressions are so common that women brush them off as 'normal', something 'everything goes through'. They are NOT normal. Abuse is NOT normal. Gas-lighting is NOT normal. The sooner we realise how toxic these behaviours are, the sooner we can start calling them out and stop accepting them as normal.
So no, not all men are rapist but all men should denounce these acts and have conversations which will give them a deeper understanding of the issues women face.
Not all men
Does reading about toxic behaviour that sounds eerily familiar make you feel uncomfortable? Does your heart beat a little faster thinking about the time you sent some explicit messages to an unsuspecting woman or you didn't take no for an answer? Does reading of women's experiences of harassment make you feel angry not because women had to experience this but because that harassment sounds uncomfortably familiar?
A late night text to a female colleague, a slight brush against a woman in a grocery store, staring at a woman walking on the road in jeans, zooming in on a lower neckline in a picture on Instagram, being persistent and flirting with a woman who has already said no and thinking it's 'romantic', laughing at a crude joke at the expense of a woman, looking at a violent threat online and not reporting it — or being silent when you see these problematic patterns in the society. Introspect instead of saying not all men.
Yes all men
If you truly believe that not all men are complicit, then prove it. Stop getting upset when you see posts on Twitter saying 'yes all men' and prove that not all men are complicit. Be an ally, not an adversary. When you come across a woman who you don't agree with, don't throw out expletives to try and put her down.
In the wake of a series of acts of violence against women, stories are being shared online of other aggressors, ones who haven't escalated to the level of murder yet. Listen to these stories, even if it makes you uncomfortable and understand what makes a monster. No one is born like this, they're created every time you let an act of aggression or harassment go.
When you post and say 'not all men' you are minimising the pain of women. You are missing the point and detracting from the conversation. If you truly believe you are not one of those men then great, pat yourself on the back, give yourself a thumbs up and stay quiet. Listen to what women are saying. Stop making this about yourself and listen, because women in Pakistan have a lot to say and it's time someone finally listens.
So yes, all men, not because all men are harassers but because all men are complicit. You aren't doing enough to help and you need to recognise it. Call out your friends when they objectify women, understand that no woman is asking for it, stop toxic behaviours. Social media is currently glorifying behaviour such as not staring at women or not harassing them, but that is simply the bare minimum. All men need to step up so that the ones who perpetrate acts of violence against women can be brought to justice.
There's another far more relevant phrase being circulated on social media right now that we all need to hear and use — educate your sons.
Every rapist is someone's son. Every murderer is someone's son. Every harasser is someone's son. Teach them now so they don't become the problem later.
FEMICIDE, MISOGYNY, PATRIARCHY
PAKISTAN
Women are angry. Men will witness This was another case of a man thinking he needed to show a woman her place, and things got out of hand.
It was a day of anger. Women were angry. And men were to bear witness.
This was a day different from all the other days. Usually, men are angry, women stand down. But on that day, when we staged a sit-in at the #JusticeForNoor protest in Islamabad; a Sunday — a day when most people in the capital stay home with their families, now there is a dark shadow cast on the word family itself. Yet, this seemed like a new family; these women who had come together for a cause.
I stood in an enclosure roped in by volunteers who wouldn’t let anyone in except women and trans people. A speaker at the protest said: This is our space and while we applaud the men who have shown up in solidarity, today we ask them to stand back and stay quiet.
We were also told that the district officer had not permitted us to march beyond the sit-in at the press club, but we insisted we must march to the point closest to our parliament. We were taxpayers and we had demands — it was a simple case of wanting representation and being heard.
A participant speaking at the protest calling for justice for Noor Mukadam in Islamabad. — Photo by writer
We walked from the press club to the famous D-Chowk, one foot after another. In front, a woman wearing two-inch platform heels walked too, finding it harder than the rest of us in traditional khussas, but walking nonetheless in the same formation, her short hair clumped together from the sweat. It was a scorching afternoon and the sun beat down on us at about half boiling point. Inside us all, there was a slight thaw from the numbness we all felt over the last few days when we received news of 27-year-old Noor’s beheading — a violent murder, but an intent all too common. A man thought he needed to show a woman her place, and things got out of hand.
These streets belong to all of us, they are not men’s property — a young woman yelled into a crackling microphone. She stood atop a pickup with a banner honouring the three recently slain women at the hands of the men. Her voice was shrill, from screaming azadi slogans, and from just being a woman. We need a base voice in the rally, I said to my friend who was also a speaker. She smiled back from behind her Covid mask. At that time, humour felt like resistance.
Behind me, young girls raised a poster over their heads that read — raise better men. Almost all of us had deep sunset orange henna on our hands, intricately applied. The day Noor was murdered was the day we were all supposed to celebrate Eidul Azha and be merry. We were supposed to make offerings; not be an offering.
Protesters calling for justice for Noor Mukadam. — Photo by writer
I was marching somewhere in the middle of the crowd. Some women had dyed their hair blue, pink, and silver — it’s in vogue. Girls were wearing sleeveless, there were women in niqabs and there were women who were dupatta-clad, some women were demure, others boisterous, all focused on one single motive — mourning.
We walked, we chanted shame-shame-shame, and we walked some more.
When we turned onto the eight-lane Jinnah Avenue, we grew wide like a river that meets an ocean, in front of us was Constitution Avenue. The symbolism was unmistakable. Our founding father and his sister side-by-side in politics gave Pakistan a visual blueprint of how to behave, and our constitution, guaranteeing our protection and our equality. Our founding father died a year after the nation’s birth, his sister suspiciously dead not long after.
In Pakistan, women’s Constitutional rights are guaranteed, but are generally out-claused by other matters that are more important to the country than 51% of its population. Still we walked, onwards. To our right was commercial area and on our left were the banks that help roll out loans to enable the commercialism — all of this is mostly for men. We marched between the two, daring to ask, daring to name our murderers, daring to be soft, daring to be hard and to be shell-shocked; one more loudspeaker chant: give patriarchy one last push to its final end!
An attendee speaking at the protest in Islamabad. — Photo by writer
I chanted dry-mouthed, voice grainy. Maybe for us women, pushing patriarchy down may require much more than a nudge. I was parched and asked a friend to buy me some from water from a street hawker. The water was like hot soup. I thought of blood; blood is drawn out of women, much like hot soup. I’ve become morbid. Dark thoughts are a consequence of knowing too much. It is also a consequence of choosing not to cope by ignoring the problems our society coughs up again and again — violence against women, domestic violence, victim-blaming, and the well-funded war on women.
Call the gender wars what you may, but the blood must remain within our skins — no need to bleed us out because of minor discomfort to a moral code like honour. Feel dishonour, but please do not kill for it. Someone recognised their friend and rushed to them for a hug; they trembled and held each other tight while we marched on around their little friendship island. I am so glad you had the courage to show up, she told her friend.
We were promised that Noor’s friend was to speak, but she couldn’t. She was overcome by the protest and by the trauma it unleashed. I would be too. We had heard witness testimony earlier of a sister of a slain woman. She spoke about her nieces witnessing the crime. She spoke of delayed justice. She spoke of evidence tampering. She spoke of death. Her voice didn’t rattle, she had recounted it over and over again, but the rest of us shuddered and cried over the relatability of it — the familiar feeling of not being believed. Of getting silenced. Every story began with silencing, and every story was un-silenced because of social media’s ability to garner support for the underdog.
We finally sat down on the road to the parliament — the road blazing hot. This was it. This is where we say goodbye to Noor, but not to our need to bring her up every day of our lives; in memory, in words, and in a very cautious life for our daughters.
Why do we wait for a hashtag to get justice? The last speaker asked us. We nodded. The question assumes that #JusticeForNoor will get Noor Mukadam justice.
When we slowly walked back home from D-Chowk, banners in toe, the birdsongs from the trees along the well-heeled parts of Islamabad were louder than usual. I gathered some wildflowers along the roads leading back to my home. They now sit blooming in an earthen vase near a poster from the protest. They are also loud.
Aisha is a freelance writer and the Co-Founder of Women’s Advancement Hub.
The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.
I DID not know Noor Mukaddam personally, but I am related to her family and thus to their suffering. But one does not have to know Noor or be related to her to be utterly gutted and devastated by her death. The circumstances of the case are well-known by now and it would be accurate to say that they have devastated an entire country.
Moments of such deep and soul-crushing tragedy are rare; they stun and surprise not simply as a consequence of individual facts but also in their capacity to reveal the face of the nation that may at other times be obscured by the bows and baubles society affixes to pretty itself up. Editorial: It would not be an exaggeration to describe Pakistan as no country for women
It is also a moment when we are all shaken by moral whiplash, slapped awake and forced to confront the absolute brutality of the society we have created, one that permitted a killing whose horror must never leave us. Noor has left us — truly light has left us — sitting with this record of our astonishing failure in the darkness of grief.
Noor’s death came in the wake of a lurid melee of cases of Pakistani men slaughtering Pakistani women. Just days before her death, Pakistan, or rather those Pakistanis who mourn such crimes and killings, had witnessed another act of bloodthirsty femicide. Quratulain, whose picture as a beautiful glowing bride was put side by side with the photo of her bruised and battered corpse, was killed allegedly by her husband.
Perhaps the new tools of virtual connection can bring together the grieving whose goal is to create a Pakistan that does not just belong to men.
If her bloated and beaten face were not devastating enough, there was the testimony of her young daughter narrating, in the lilting, sing-song voice of a child, the moment-by-moment narrative of how her mother was beaten to death. She said, he put on songs — to drown out the noise of the torture — but she, along with her three younger siblings, heard everything. She saw it, too, her mother being doused in water and shivering in the air conditioning, the punches and the beating her father dealt out, a dying mother whose cries for help were unheard or ignored.
When it was all over, her father reportedly went to sit in the car and drink, leaving the children, the youngest only two years old, in the house with their mother’s corpse. Society’s truth falls off the lips of children, pure and untouched as they are by the filth of ulterior motives and the dictates of ego that taint the rest of us. Pakistan’s truth is that we kill women and leave children to watch over their bodies.
Quratulain’s murderer is behind bars for the moment, but he need not worry. If you can count on one thing in Pakistan, it is the unceasing march of murders of women; one happened today, another yesterday and several more will occur before the week is out.
Sitting in his jail cell, her alleged killer can feel confident, even smug, that the attention given to Noor will perhaps turn public attention away from him, and he, the son of a locally powerful man in Hyderabad, will be quietly bailed out of prison and roam free. In Pakistan in 2021, monsters roam loose but women are restrained, constrained, maimed and killed. No one has even thought about what he might do to the little girl, his daughter, who told everyone the truth about how her mother was murdered in cold blood.
As if on cue, to illustrate just how rich men walk free, Shah Hussain, the monster who brutally stabbed law student Khadija Siddiqui 23 times, walked out of prison on July 24 without completing his sentence, which was a paltry five years in the first place. We forgive the killers, we forget the crimes and we bury the women. Shah Hussain is roaming around as if nothing had happened, as if the life of a woman he stabbed has not been ruined.
Somewhere in our midst are those Pakistanis who are truly anguished and ashamed of how this country failed Noor Mukaddam and all those who have come before her. For them, the challenge of the coming days will be to translate grief into action and into attention. Public scrutiny plays a role in pushing prosecutorial action, in ensuring that the government and authorities do not drop the ball, that the parents of a killer do not pretend to empathise with the victim in one moment and refuse to turn over evidence in the other.
There is no doubt that it is the continuity of public attention that will ensure that a killer caught red-handed with the victim’s blood all over him be made to pay for his crimes. Concerned Pakistanis who want this to be a turning point must put their heads together to see how they can create Facebook groups, news update alerts, and newsletters so that factual information about the cases (rather than all the anonymous hearsay circulating on social media) can be shared.
Change has evaded Pakistan until now, but perhaps the new tools of virtual connection can bring together an army of the grieving whose goal is not to vanquish any foreign nation but rather to do what generations before them have failed to do, to create a Pakistan that does not just belong to men.
The death of Noor Mukaddam, the deaths of so many women who have died at the hands of bloodthirsty men, is what weighs on us now. It is as if the sheer horror of Noor’s case has suddenly made us all feel the burden of the bodies of dead women killed by our inability to punish men. The rage, the helplessness, the recurrent thoughts of what was done for her, have left us all grief-stricken and gasping. We grieve for Noor but we also gasp at the truth that Pakistan is a femicidal nation where we silence all women who disobey, anger or even irritate a man.
The only deliverance from our collective tragedy is through a collective reckoning unlike anything before, a piece-by-piece dissection of just how we became the sort of society where darkness kills the light.
The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy. rafia.zakaria@gmail.com Published in Dawn, July 28th, 2021
