What About Other Extremists?

The Taliban have simply become a cover for men to hide their own misogynist tendencies and make a mockery of institutional crimes against women routine in our society. —AFP/File photo

THE Swat video of a girl being flogged has provoked national outrage. The public punishment is being termed as an inhumane crime. Such acts are the result of the state’s impotence and inability to regulate or provide security of life and liberty to an entire part of the country.

More importantly, the long-term disregard of the privatisation of religion and punishment in the name of religion and culture has brought the results in full view. The consequent political expression of privatised religion is uncontrollable, splintered and vicious in its backlash. This is not just in the NWFP, nor is brutal violence committed only by the Taliban.

The women’s movement has been at the forefront of the struggle against a state that has institutionalised punitive action against women. Women activists have stressed that all forms of violence, from marital rape, honour-killings and acid-throwing to stoning of women are not isolated cases nor private matters. These are permissible only due to the complicity of men and state authorities, and morally legitimised by male prescriptions invoked in the name of either culture or religion. Such crimes are not committed by evil, uneducated feudal elements or ‘fallen’ Muslims but are a tool of control used equally by liberal, educated, urban, ‘good’ Muslims.

Over the last few years, the call by Islamist academics and moderates in Pakistan to replace universal human rights with more ‘indigenous’ laws and punishment, have opened the door for justifying ‘culturally relevant’ justice. The effort on the part of some within the women’s movement to reclaim religion from male theocrats has not failed: it has been far too successful.

Today, all arguments about women’s rights, punishment, citizenship, public and private roles are fixed within what is religiously appropriate. The only manoeuvring space, thanks to these liberation theologists, is that women can fight to interpret texts in their favour. Within this limited scope and with the state complicit in violence against women, today the very survival of Pakistani women depends on such interpretations rather than any universal guarantee of the protection and security of life, regardless of belief or creed.

Consider the focus on the flogging case. Certainly it is not the first public punishment. But the Swat case received wide electronic media coverage and, therefore, an immediate audience response. Reports of the burying alive of some women in Balochistan and the Tasleema Solangi case where the victim was apparently thrown before dogs before being killed, and other publicised crimes have been perceived by urban media consumers as ‘evil deeds’ committed by atavistic tribesmen or feudal elements. For some reason, however, the flogging incident, where the woman survived the brutality, has elicited a wider reaction.

While honour crimes and anti-women jirga decisions focus on culture, tradition and patriarchal practices, the nature of the punishment in the Swat case shows that the focus of the debate is on religion. It is also about the public nature of the punishment. However, all these cases are still about woman as an identity marker in matters of ‘honour’ and the regulation of her sexuality and mobility.

Therefore, we have heard almost unanimous condemnation from progressives, moderates as well as conservatives and rightwing political parties over the public flogging. This is significant. It allows conservative Islamists to distance themselves from the Taliban image as bad Muslims who appropriate religion for inhumane purposes, while projecting themselves as the more acceptable moderate alternative.

The Taliban are giving other elements of political Islam a humane cover. However, all the while the main argument has stayed technical and within the Islamic framework – whether the punishment was according to Sharia or not, whether those who implemented it were mehram or not and whether the act was executed before or after the decision to promulgate Nizam-i-Adl was taken. The state, predictably wishes to distance itself from this, call it a conspiracy and allow the accusation to fall on the barbaric and archaic nature of the Taliban.

What if the next girl is ‘duly’ and ‘appropriately’ punished after establishing proof of transgression of any sort? Then will the punishment be condemned? If we get caught in this debate of which religious conditions allow women to be mobile, free or liable to punishment, then there is every danger that with growing conservatism there are more chances of losing the argument for unequivocal and unconditional security of life for women and minorities. Or, if the Islamic revivalist academics have their way, of being stuck in more infighting and competing discourses.

It is far easier to dismiss the barbaric Taliban as the inconvenient Muslim. It also allows other Muslims to step forward today and claim authentic insight. It has also given an opportunity for some liberal politicians to actually pronounce themselves ‘secular’ by virtue of merely denouncing the Taliban.

This perhaps is the most preposterous claim and show of political opportunism in a very long time. It also contradicts the secular approach which is not about scoring points against a discredited religious group but about separating the state and preventing it from imposing any brand of chauvinism (particularly religious). Nor is it necessarily associated with western liberalism, as has been the attempt to dismiss it on these grounds.

It is time to recognise that a sprinkling of vague liberal ideals on an essentially theocratised state does not give misogynist parties the right to claim secular credentials while still accommodating, appeasing and enabling religious parties for political expediency. Equally, if an urban political party does not have rural constituencies, this does not make it automatically anti-feudal or secular.

The Taliban have simply become a cover for men to hide their own misogynist tendencies and make a mockery of institutional crimes against women routine in our society. Until such inherent contradictions are sorted out and secular alternatives take the form of policies that challenge and remove every level of institutionalised discrimination at state, social and domestic levels, none of these self-acclaimed liberals have the right to declare themselves secular in their politics. Till then, they remain as much a part of the problem as any Taliban.

-Dawn