Behind the Iron Purdah

A young woman was recently flying from Islamabad to Karachi. She was seated next to a woman in a hijab, who looked our friend up and down, and then asked her if she knew how to read. The younger woman, thinking that the other was perhaps illiterate and needed help with her travel documents, replied in the affirmative. “Then can you read this?” said the woman, handing our friend a pamphlet. When the young woman read it, she realized that it was a booklet about why women should be wearing hijab. She read the first sentence, then handed the pamphlet back to the woman and buried herself in her book for the rest of the flight.

It’s not just women who enjoy accosting perfect strangers with instructions on how to dress and comport themselves in our country. The other day a friend related to me the story of a recent trip she’d made to the graveyard. Apparently a man came up to her as she was visiting a loved one’s grave and began to harangue her for being in the cemetery.

“But what was wrong with it? What was he upset about?”

“He told me that women shouldn’t be in graveyards.”

This made me think about the super-conservative elements in our society who would like to see men and women kept completely apart; or if that’s impossible, the women should at least be wrapped up from head to toe, rather like the mummies in ancient Egypt. Our nation can be aptly described as a lunatic asylum masquerading as a country, but a less emotional analysis reveals that what our country is going through is a tension of opposites, where forces on all ends of the spectrum keep the country in a state of constant flux.

Nowhere is this more apparent than the position that women hold in this country. On the one hand, we are mothers, daughters, and sisters, the most respected beings according to our religion; on the other hand, with honor killings, forced marriages, and domestic violence, you’d think we were animals that need to be kept in cages, bred according to the whims of our owners, and culled when we have outlived our usefulness. On the one hand Pakistani women are becoming Air Force pilots; on the other, sold as sex slaves. We are constantly told of all the rights we have in Islam but apparently this doesn’t include the right to vote, as women are being disenfranchised in the NWFP as we speak. Pakistani women earn their PhDs in universities both at home and abroad, but every day in Pakistani villages there are girls who are taunted by their relatives and neighbors when they want to go to school.

Getting back to the issue of people who want to see Pakistan emulate the Taliban in terms of how women should be treated, I began to think about what this country might look like if these people actually had their way. The image I conjured up in my mind wasn’t exactly pleasing, but it might serve a useful purpose to take a little trip through this kind of Pakistan, just to see where we might be headed if we aren’t careful.

To start with, any visitor to Pakistan would have to identify his gender on the visa application. If he is male, he gets to fly into the Quaid-e-Azam Terminal, where the floors are made of marble, the restaurants are spiffy, and the planes take off and land with pleasing regularity. However, if you’re a woman, you have to fly into Fatima Jinnah Terminal, a terminal built specially for women. However, unlike the terminal for men, this terminal is so run down and nasty that all women would be discouraged from ever traveling again, let alone traveling without a mahrem. The floors would be covered in garbage, the bathrooms never cleaned, and the planes would catch fire every day.

Your trip into the center of Karachi would also depend on your sex: males get to travel in Mercedes on the flyovers and iron-lined roads, while women have to ride in donkey carts on broken-down roads and end up in ditches more often than not. (oh, and women can forget about driving in Pakistan. Why should Pakistani women drive when Saudi women can’t?)

At your hotel – the International Ambassador if you’re a man, the Aawami Aurat Hostel if you’re a woman – you’ll receive the best of Pakistani hospitality. The meals at the Ambassador will be prepared by top male chefs from Cairo, but the meals at the Aurat Hostel will be prepared by a Kacchi maassi with seventeen children and no teeth. Your laundry at the Ambassador will be cleaned in the hotel dry-cleaners, and at the Aurat Hostel, it will be taken to the Lyari River to be beaten on rocks by illiterate women. For recreation at the Ambassador, you can watch DVDs of the latest English movies such as Shrek 2, Million Dollar Baby, and Mr. and Mrs. Smith on your in-room television, but the Aurat Hostel will feature lectures by various Islamic scholars on “The Proper Dress Code for Women in the Islamic Republic” and “Raising Children the Islamic Way”..

If you want to put your children in school, Pakistan has some excellent schools for boys, where your son will be taught English, mathematics, and science by foreign-qualified male teachers; he will be able to take his A-Levels and apply to any university in the world. However, if your child happens to be a girl, she will go to one of the girls’ schools set up by the government’s Aurat Foundation, which has prepared a special curriculum for your daughters, to include: Quranic recitation, child-minding, household budgeting, cooking, sewing, and housework (hygiene and first aid optional). The uniform at the boys’ schools will consist of white shirt and grey pants, available in three sizes – S, M, and L -- whereas the girls’ uniform will be a black burqa (free size – one size fits all).

Should you meet with an accident and necessitate a trip to the hospital, fear not. Pakistan boasts the best hospitals in the Subcontinent, and you will be whisked by ambulance to a state of the art operating room where you will be taken care of by the best doctors in the country. Wait a minute – did you say you were a woman? So sorry. First of all, nobody can actually pick you up off the floor and put you into an ambulance because they’re not your mahrem and they aren’t allowed to touch you or the moral police will lash them til they need hospitalization as well. You can’t be in an ambulance because the driver and attendants are not your mahrem either, and we all know how hard it is to find a female ambulance driver in a country where women cannot drive. Finally, even if you manage to make it to the hospital alive, you can’t have your life-saving operation because there’s a dire shortage of female surgeons, and heaven forbid a male doctor should actually try to perform heart surgery on you because he’s only allowed to look at your face and your hands.

God forbid, should your operation be a failure, you can be assured of a perfect Islamic burial: if you are a man, you will be wrapped in a proper white cotton shroud and sent off to the graveyard by a procession of weeping, wailing male relatives while your women sit at home and read the Quran for your departed soul. However, if you are a woman, you won’t be taken to a graveyard, because of course women should not be allowed in graveyards. Instead, you will be buried in an unmarked grave at the bottom of your garden, where your bones will disintegrate and be eventually used as garden fertilizer, ensuring that you are of some use in death because you certainly held no real purpose during your lifetime.

Does this sound like the kind of country you want to live in? I didn’t think so. Our sisters in Afghanistan certainly didn’t expect to wake up one day and find out that the world around them had changed irreversibly; we should learn a lesson from them and be aware of all the precious rights and liberties we stand to lose if we become complacent about our country. Ridiculous as the Iron Purdah seems, it just might become a reality if we continue to sleep while our rights as women are slowly taken away from us, one by one.