Women in Islamic Societies, Essay Example

In Pakistan, girls and women who accuse men of rapting them are usually more reprimanded than their alleged perpetrators. Shockingly, many of these girls who are brave enough to speak out are even murdered by their families in order to avoid incurring the shame of housing an unclean and impure female. In a harrowing yet unforgettable documentary, Hhilke Schellmann and Habiba Nosheen’s Outlawed in Pakistan trace the odyssey over a protracted period of time of a young woman who alleged rape and have to navigate the intrinsically corrupt and flawed criminal justice system in Pakistan. The filmmakers also trace the quest of her alleged rapists who exerted immense effort to exonerate themselves and clear their names. When four older men raped a thirteen year old girl in her own Pakistan village who later became dubbed the “black virgin” by the village she belonged. In addition, her rural village named Dadu that was located in Southern France, called for her murder, which was a firmly embedded tradition therein as sexual assault rendered Kainat a token of embarrassment. Four years after her allegations of rape against purported male perpetrators, she was still alive, and her story was shown on television in the United States, although this fact never meant that she and her family remained safe.

Despite the fact that Kainat Soomro, as a result of her allegations, was destined to be murdered at the behest of the state due to the fact that she bravely challenged the intrinsically flawed criminal justice system in Pakistan that was so steeped in patriarchy. Kkainat’s family, however, challenged the status quo and evinced endurance and strength despite the fact that life only became far more difficult as they remain steadfast in their efforts to confront the justice system and thwart traditional legal mores. The Soomros family were alienated within their own village, and faced on a quotidian basis various intimidation and fear tactics waged against them by the four men that Kainat had accused of sexually assaulting her. In addition, the other denizens of the small village conveyed their fear of undermining the tacit moral laws that had been in place for hundreds of years. The degree of how embedded the stringently traditional gender mores—which seem outdated—were with regards to rape accusation, informs why Kainat was rendered an outlaw in her mother country of Pakistan. This documentary, which was first shown in 2013 at the seminal Sundance Film Festival, recounts the haunting narrative of a young Pakistani girls’ attack as she sauntered on a narrow village street near a shot where the victim claims the owner of shop and three additional men that included both the son and father. Outlawed in Pakistan was introduced to the world at the Sundance Film Festival in 2013, and it recounts the harrowing attack by four men onto a young teenage girl as she ambulated home from school in a secluded and narrow street in her village near a shop where the victim claims that the shop owner named Shaban Saikh in addition to three other males—including a son and father—held her against her will and gang raped her. As a result, her village promulgated that she was now rendered “kari,” or a black virgin, meaning her family was required to murder her as a sacrifice in order to eschew any shame being incurred upon their family name. Indeed rape victims were never discursively framed as such in theocracies such as Pakistan as a double standard between men and women and sex persisted into the present day. It is appalling that such antiquated and discriminatory notions pervade in the modern day. Nonetheless, the purported rapists beat one of her brothers and her father, and her older brother was a missing person for three months prior to his murdered and mutilated body being discovered.

Kainat’s parents eschewed murdering their beloved daughter and opted rather to back her up in her cause in chafing against in intrinsically flawed and sexist legal system that was firmly embedded in oppressive patriarchal structures, and they decried how the system located the burden of proof on Kainat as the victim rather than on the nefarious acts perpetrated by the rapists themselves. At its core, patriarchy sanctioned double standards when it came to sex and rendered females subordinated to their male counterparts. Kainat’s brother, Sabir, told the filmmakers of this cogent and edifying documentary that he was emasculated by the perpetrators because he refused to follow the antiquated traditions of Islam, which mandated that he murder his sister for her inability to preserve her chastity and purity. The very fact that this rhetoric persists is interesting to me because I would never imagine that such antiquated discourses and ideology would persist within the context of modernity. Death threats and intimidation tactics undergirded by violence, however, ultimately forced the Soomros family to abandon their home in Dadu, and the extended family comprised of 18 family members relocated to the urban center of Karachi, where they were forced to squeeze into a small apartment that had just two rooms. The male members of the family continue having problems finding work in order to earn enough money to contribute to the family wage. As a result, Pakistani women must embroider fabrics at a piecemeal rate in order to be able to afford housing rental cost in addition to begging for money. The situation becomes dire if a young female family member cries rape, which seems antiquated yet is the real, material reality of women in the context of Pakistan today and not within an antiquated past. It is almost unconceivable that such violence and danger ensued rape accusations, a women who are perceived as sexually active—against their will or not—are rendered pariahs immediately. Such antiquated attitudes enlightens my understanding about the dissonance between Middle Eastern cultures and religions and western religions and cultures in which, despite the fact that females still occupy an inferior social position, nonetheless are granted agency and a sense of autonomy. Indeed, when Kainat goes to court she is confronted by a fusillade of negative and nasty inquiries that total over three hundred, including explicit questions about what clothing items she took off and which man raped her first.

More disgustingly, the presiding ,judge was irked at the fact that Kainat had the audacity to even chafe against the legal system and charge men of rape within her village due to the fact that she had accused a father and a son of engaging in the abominable act of gang rape. The narrator of Outlawed in Pakistan states that the hegemonic view was that gang rape of a teenage girl would never happen, which insinuates that such a heinous act would never transpire in Pakistan, a stringently traditional culture and society. As such, Pakistani society has been discursively as a sanitized locale in which rapes never occurred and fantasy reigned supreme with regards to male and female relations. “Rape” remains in unfathomable concept within the context of Pakistan, which underscores the chasm between western and middle eastern values. What is more unfathomable is the fact that, beside all of the physical and empirical evidence against the perpetrators, they were nonetheless acquitted of the crime of rape. However, their media interactions underscored an even more terrifying reality within Pakistani culture. The acquitted men conveyed their disbelief that Kainat has the audacity to accuse them of sexual violence, contending that ass Pakistani women they were supposed to “keep quiet” and know their proper place. In turn their acquittal of any crime provided proof that Kainat was a lliar and lacked sound and moral character. Her lack of decency manifested by her speaking out against her sexual transgression rendered her an outsider since she eschewed conforming to traditional gender mores.

References

Brock, C. and Cammish, N. (1997). Factors affecting female participation in education in seven developing countries. Department for International Development, London (England).

Cheema, Y. (2003). Problems of working women in export garment factories in Faisalabad–Pakistan. International Journal of Agriculture and Biology, 1560(8530), 279–280.

Offenhauer, P. (2005). Women in Islamic societies: A selected review of social scientific literature. The Federal Research Division, the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.