Malala Yousafzai

The good new is that Malala Yousafzai, the fourteen-year-old Pakistani girl who on October 9th was shot in the head by Taliban gunmen is recovering. To recall, Malala was shot because she courageously promoted girls’ education. Encouraging, too, was the anger with which many Pakistanis reacted to the shooting.

The bad news is that less than two weeks after the incident Pakistanis are reported to feel less rage over the shooting of the young high school student. Instead, true to the widely spread conspiracy theories in the Muslim world, they are now becoming suspicious of the United States being involved in the shooting of Malala in order to further tarnish the Taliban’s reputation of extremism, intolerance and cruelty, while Islamists infer that she was an American agent.

Only four months before Malala’s shooting, in July of this year, twenty-five year-old Farida Afridi was also shot, most likely by the Taliban. Farida, however, did not survive the attack. Her "crime" was creating, three years before her murder, the Society for Appraisal and Woman Empowerment in Rural Areas (SAWERA), providing women information about their rights. Though Afridi had been repeatedly warned by extremists about her activity, she continued her activism till her death.

Like Malala and Farida, other female activists have been accused by militants of corrupting the minds of non-suspecting innocent women. These activists have complained of the erosion of women’s rights and lawlessness against women in Pakistan, especially in the Swat Valley, in the north-western part of the country. Despite these conditions some Pakistani women are becoming braver.
Among them is the filmmaker Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy, whose film Saving Face won an Oscar this year. In it Sharmeen bravely exposes the practice of acid attacks on women in her country by abusive men, and the lack of accountability for these crimes.

And let’s not forget Mukhtaran Bibi, who in 2002 was sentence by a Mastoni tribal council for　gang rape because her teenage brother was accused of having sexual relations with an unmarried woman of that tribe. Rather than committing suicide after being raped as custom dictated,　Mukhtaran spoke up and legally pursued the case. Though six men (including her four rapists) were sentenced that year to death, in 2005 a high court acquitted five of the six men and commuted the punishment for the sixth man to a life sentence. In 2011 the Supreme Court acquitted the accused.
While American women are rightfully concerned with domestic women’s issues this elections season, we ought to remember the plight of Pakistani and other Asian women, as President Obama and Mitt Romney discuss foreign policy issues on their last debate before the upcoming elections.

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A Bad Week

On women’s issues this past week disappointed me. It began in my senior seminar on ethnic conflict, with a discussion of Samuel Huntington’s book The Clash of Civilization and ended with the presidential debate.

First I had a disappointing session in my class, when Huntington’s book provoked a discussion on American foreign policy. Some of the young men and women in this small class have been so angered by American intervention in Iraq, its killing of civilians in Afghanistan, and its continued support of oil-rich authoritarian regimes in the Middle East, that they failed to recognize what constitutes an outrageous abuse of women’s rights.

In his book Huntington theorized that because human beings are divided along cultural lines, in the post Cold War era, conflicts would erupt not between nation-states (or countries), but among civilizations, defined by him as the largest cultural groupings of the human species. He then identified seven or so civilizations, including a Western, Islamic, Hindu, Latin and so forth.  Of these, the most wearisome for him was the Islamic one.

At the time of its publication in the early to mid 1990s, Huntington’s work was both praised and criticized. The criticism that made the most sense to me was the argument that the world could not be neatly divided into different civilizations, none of which was homogenous anyhow.

But then came 9/11, and many of Huntington’s followers evoked his work, arguing that the attack on the Twin Towers and what ensued was proof that his thesis was correct. His opponents maintained that one could not artificially identify a standardized Muslims culture.

That in turn provoked a discussion in my class on the recent video that insulted the prophet Muhammad and the violence that it incited in Muslim countries, and the debate on free speech it triggered in the West, providing the context for the exchange that upset me.

As we became engaged in a discussion on cultural and moral relativism, some students argued that the West in general and the US in particular have no right to criticize any customs or behavior in societies that are culturally different from them.

And what if such customs or behavior violate universal human rights? I asked.
Those practices are domestic matters that no outsider should criticize, the same students insisted.

What about honor killing or female genital mutilation, to mention but two examples that grossly violate the right of young girls and women, mostly in Islamic societies? I asked.

Just the same, the students argued. If that’s the local custom, and law does not protect them, let the women die—they actually said that--or be mutilated. Protest from other students, including females, was disappointedly muted.

The following day I was looking forward to the first presidential debate, hoping that the candidates will touch upon women’s issues. And what a disillusionment that was. That neither candidate mentioned women within the context of the economy or healthcare, disheartened me still more.  Perhaps the coming week will see an improvement.

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