I was amazed to see prime minister Nawaz Sharif’s congratulatory message on the nomination of Shareem Obaid Chinoy’s documentary, ‘A girl in the river: The price of forgiveness’, for an Academy Award. As expected on such occasions, he also vowed to eliminate the evil of honour killing while expressing his government’s commitment to bring an appropriate legislation against this wicked practice. I wished someone in PM secretariat who drafted this statement for Nawaz Sharif should have advised him that an anti-honor crime bill has been eating dust on the National Assembly agenda for years. In fact, that bill has long been lapsed, thanks to his parliamentarians’ indifferences with the very concept of accepting the honour killing a crime. What these artists can do is make noise, create awareness and finally get a traitorous certificate for washing the dirty linen in public.
Is the PM really so uninformed? Doesn’t he know what the Council of Islamic Ideology (CII) has been doing on all these male chauvinistic issues? The other day the National Assembly Standing Committee on Religious Affairs shot down PML-N MNA Marvi Memon’s proposed amendment in Child Marriage Restraint Bill 2014, to raise the minimum age of girls marriage to 18. Committee hid behind a ruling issued by CII in recent past wherein any such legislation could be considered as blasphemous. We all know what this term ‘blasphemy’ could bring in terms of violence and bloodletting. That’s why committee thought better not get into any controversy.
I wonder why the fixing of minimum age for girls marriage could be declared blasphemous. What has this got to do with religion? Yes, all these evils — honour killings, Karo Kari, Swara, marriages at young age — are part of traditions prevalent in tribal societies. We need to offload these traditions which find their acceptance in society under the smokescreen of faith, which is nothing but an in-built male instinct to keep the woman folk under thumb. It was the UN which abolished the established tradition of slavery after a lapse of hundreds of millenniums. Do we need the UN to shoot our evil-minded traditions as well?
MASOOD KHAN
Jubail, Saudi Arabia
