The moral police in action
Well, this keep getting bizarre. Some clerics have taken it upon themselves to tell the women of Karak city, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, on how to visit a market: don’t go there alone, always be accompanied by a male member of your family (mehram) because your going there alone is an attempt at spreading vulgarity. While no one can question the motive, even if somebody does, who knows what the self-appointed moral police might unleash upon them, the manner in which they have taken the law and personal lives of many a woman of the area into their hands is surely highly questionable.
Clerics in our neck of the wood, much like everywhere else, have never been in favour of personal freedoms, civil liberties or overall a more progressive bent of mind. But that doesn’t give them any justification to impose upon others their contorted and regressive views. The committee of clerics that made the decision comprised of former district amir of Jamiat-i-Ulema Islam Hafiz Abne Amin, Mualana Mir Zaqeem, Mualana Abdul Rehman and other cleric. Such an attempt was also made during the last Eid but the civil administration of that time abandoned it soon after the civil society mounted pressure on them for caving into the demands of some clerics who want to push the society back to Stone Age. This time the administration has rejected the suggestion right away though the clerics are now trying to force the local shopkeepers to do their bidding. Besides the obvious demerits of the decision on denial of human rights basis, there are some social aspects that cannot be ignored. What if a family doesn’t have a male member, or if they have but is not available or is not able to go out? What if there is a medical emergency? What if women want to visit markets where the presence of men is more of a nuisance than a convenience, like a cosmetics store? What about the poor and the destitute who have no one to look after them? The Maulana says that the presence of unaccompanied women in markets was not only against local Pakhtun culture but also against religious norms. Can he explain what culture and religion he is taking about, for the religion Islam does not prohibit women from going to markets, neither does Pakhtun culture? If the clerics think their misogynic view of Islam is the right one, then they couldn’t be more wrong.
The KP government, headed by right-wing PTI, needs not only make its position clear on the issue but also assert itself and restrain these clerics, one of who is a former member of PTI’s coalition partner right-wing JUI-F that earlier on happily agreed to ban women from FATA to cast their votes. PTI Chairman Imran Khan should first clear his party’s stance on these acts of regression against women and press on his KP government to take measures to protect women rights before he talks to Bill Gates on polio eradication in Pakistan, for if that’s not the case it would weaken his credibility as a politician before one of the world’s leading philanthropists.
