Rape in Pakistan
Jason Kuznicki on Dec 1st 2006
Pakistan modernized its rape laws today. It’s a baby step in the right direction:
Human rights activists have long condemned Pakistan’s old law for punishing — instead of protecting — rape victims while providing legal safeguards for their attackers.
The new legislation, known as the Protection of Women Bill, was supported by Musharraf’s government as part of efforts by Islamabad to soften the country’s hard-line Islamic image and appease moderates and human rights groups who opposed the old law.
How bad was the old law? Rafia Zakaria offers a practical history. Ali Eteraz summarizes the relevant sections:
Under the Hudood Ordinance of 1979, to prove an act of rape, a woman must produce four adult Muslim male witnesses (to the act). Most disgustingly is this next requirement: if a woman fails to prove rape (i.e. to produce four adult Muslim male witnesses to the act), she is jailed, or, better yet, can be sentenced to death for adultery. Pakistan has not needed to produce Kafka, you see, for it had the cruelty of [General] Zia ul Haq (America backed, lest you forget).
Eteraz also links to this extended discussion of the law, which makes for some ghastly reading.
But even the new code is far from what we would consider a proper one:
Under the new law, which was approved last week by Parliament, judges can choose whether a rape case should be tried in a criminal court — where the four-witness rule would not apply — or under the old Islamic law, known as the Hudood Ordinance.
So it’s possible, but only possible, that a woman might not always face an utterly unreasonable standard of evidence. (Before you ask: Yes, these four believers in good standing must witness the actual penetration.)
The photograph attached to the Washington Post story is remarkable, too: It shows a meeting supporting the traditional law. In a crowded square, there’s not one woman to be found.
Filed in The Barracks
I’ll probably have a few comments as I read the links, but I had to put one up after reading the WaPo article. The Mukhtar Mai case — the gang-rape mentioned — was in fact even uglier. Her younger brother (he was 13) did not have any sort of a ‘relationship’ with an older — and upper caste — woman. In fact, what happened — I spent some time investigating this when I was involved with an almost exclusively Pakistani forum (I love “Paki Pop” music and got started discussing this, but spent 5 months and 1500 posts on various topics) was that he was, himself, raped by male members of the woman’s family, and the other story was part of a cover-up. (Ironically, it was Mukhtar’s imam who gave her the strength and support she needed to carry on bringing out the true story, and the men involved in her brother’s rape were, eventually, punished.)
Several points on the Zakaria article. Musharraf DID order the xchanges, but earlier — I thin it was in January — a bill to repeal the Huddod ordinances was brought into the Parliament, SUPPORTED y the ‘religious parties.’ It was blocked by Musharraf’s party. (I generally have found Musharraf a good leader in a very difficult situation, but his attitude towards women has been truly horrible, and some of his comments on the Mukhtar Mai case — saying that she had ‘made a good thing out of being raped’ because she had received a lot of financial support (and used it to found several schools for women in her area of Pakistan — she even enrolled in the 4th grade of one of them because she was illiterate at the time of the rape) and commenting about how she was now wearing better clothes — were disgusting.)
The reason the women were afraid to accept the bail and leave prison was that, for many families, a woman who has been raped has, herself, brought dishonor to the family and the proper thing to do is for her to commit suicide. (I should state that the vast majority of the Pakistani forum I mentioned — most members of which were ‘desis,’ Pakistanis living in the West — thought this idea abhorrent, but there were some who said precisely this.)
In fact, I remember one discussion comparing the advantages of remaining in Pakistan or living in the West, where several of the female members — some of ehom had recently returned to Pakistan for a visit — mentioned the ability to walk the streets without fear of being raped as an advantage to living in the West.
One final point before I go on to the third link. One thing that should be remembered is that, whatever the laws actually are, the police in Pakistan — as in India — are incredibly corrupt and frequently, especially in the more rural areas (and the NWFP — the Northwest Frontier Provinces, an area of unbelieveable primitiveness socially) and under the thumb of the influential families and the religious leaders.
(A brief story on the last point. In one city, there were several video stores selling Indian and Pakistani movies — and movies are VERY important in that area, the prime source of entertainment. The local Muslim groups protested that these were un-Islamic and rioted in front of one of them. The police response — these territories have no local government (other than tribal councils) but are under the jurisdiction of the central government — ordered all of the stores to close, at once, without compensation, costing several people their hard=won businesses.
A further point that is frequently missed in comments about Islam. THE Qur’an is the Arabic versions. (Translations are not called that but are referred to as the “meaning” or the “message” of the Qur’an.) And Arabic is an incredibly ambiguous language. (It is even more difficult if, as some of the stricter Wahabists hold, the proper version of Arabic to use is the ancient “unpointed” one — i.e., one where the vowels are not written.)
I was exploring the Qur’an in one of my blogs — I’ve linked to it even though I haven’t been back in almost six months — working from back to front (shorter to longer Suras) using five different translations since I am incurably monolingual. The variances were incredible, practically no verse was rendered in the same way. Sometimes the differences were minor, in others the meaning was completely different. I was corresponding with some Arabic speakers at the time, and some of them were unable to clarify the confusion.
The other main ‘literary source’ of Islam is the Hadith, a collection of stories about the life of Mohammed that were supposedly transmitted orally by his companions. But these are not collected into a narrative form, but are merely jumbled together in six main — and contradictory — collections. Even believing Muslims will argue as to which are ’strong’ or ‘weak’ — a non-Muslim would say ‘authentic or spurious. In fact, one prominent ex-Muslim has contended that there was a ‘cottage industry’ of creating Hadiths, and another sees them as nothing more than an attempt to retroactively explain some of the ambiguities and remarks in the Qur’an.
The Qur’an itself is NOT a narrative like the books of the Bible. Rather it is — to an unbeliever — simply a collection of sermons (almost rants) delivered by Mohammed over a long period of time, frequently contradictory, in some cases so diffuse as to be called incoherent, and incredibly repetitive.
It is these ambiguities that frequently confuse Western commentators — since there is ‘no Pope in Islam’ no centralized body of doctrine. Is Islam ‘the religion of peace’? Yes, by some interpretations. Is it the religion that teaches that all unbelievers must be killed ‘wherever they are found’? Again, yes, by some interpretations. And neither side is being hypocritical. Both are quoting Qur’anic passages — frequently as interpreted by different imams and bveing quoted by people who have not learned Arabic themselves.
I know I am going on at great length, but a word sbout what is generally considered the genesis of the ‘four witnesses’ rule for BOTH adultery and rape. The story is that Ayesha, Mohammed’s child-bride, had been traveling with one of his companions, and when they returned, (Ayesha was not exactly beloved by many of the companions) there was an attempt to accuse her of adultery with her traveling companion.
There is little doubt that Mohammed did truly love Ayesha above his other wives, and even though he may have believed the story, he wanted to make sure that she was not punished. So he declared the ‘four witnesses rule,’ knowing that there would be almost no example where such a case could be proven. Sadly, modern Islam uses the rule for rape, but not in the case of other ’sexual transgressions’ such as adultery and fornication. (Of course, with fornication, pregnancy is pretty good proof that sex, consensual or forced, has occured.)
And two final (*really*) cooments about the Farooq article that is linked to. While Muslims frequently speak of the Qur’an and Islam as ‘gender-neutral’ in fact, in all translations of the Qur’an I have read, EVERY verse is addressed to men, or to believers in general. Women are, in almost every mention, the ‘objects’ of the phrase, not the subjects. No verse is addressed to women in general.
And Farooq states:
“Islam is incompatible with authoritarian, autocratic, hereditary or hegemonic system. After the Prophet Muhammad, rightly-guided leaders were based on a constitutional/representative, participatory and accountable system. This system got subverted through a counter-revolution, leading to an unislamic system, where it became hereditary and/or autocratic.”
But it should be pointed out that the ‘rightly-guided leaders’ refers to the first FOUR successors to Mohammed, whose reign, I believe, lasted substantially less than a century. After them — even if Farooq is accurate, which is doubtful — there is NO example of a “constitutional/representative, participatory and accountable system” in Islam until the current century, when these ideas were (re?)introduced into Islam through the example of the West.
[...] Of course the efficacy of hijab in preventing rape would be testable, if only the rape laws in Muslim countries were not so skewed against the accuser: Pakistan can require as many as four male witnesses to the act — virtually guaranteeing that the only rapes ever punished are those gang rapes in which the men later repent. The very same system that declares men to be sex fiends, and that writes this shame on women’s clothing, is also legally structured to let men get away with it. [...]