Women and violence

The debates about these laws have been going on for years, but no Islamic country led by Pakistan has made any effort to revoke this legalized violence by men against women including murder. In Nigeria right now several women are scheduled to be stoned to death by the Islamic Courts. The real reason is that Islamic law fulfills the desire of all Islamic men to exploit, control, brutalize and dominate women and keep them as domesticated slaves for housework and sexual services. Islam is penetrating our societies - Mosques that spread anti-women Islamic laws are being built everywhere...

PAKISTAN: BRUTALITY AGAINST WOMEN DISGUISED AS TRADITION

Been Sarwar

THE NEW YORK TIMES, August 6, 2002

"How could a tribal council in the Pakistani village of Meerwala Jatoi decree that a young woman be raped in revenge for a crime allegedly committed by her brother? They were certain they could get away with it, of course. And they would have, except that one local Imam spoke out against it during Friday prayers. A journalist in the mosque that day reported the case; the story was picked up nationwide, then worldwide. Absent this circumstantial chain, the rape would have been ignored..

That was and is the norm for rape - except that no tribal council (known as a panchayat or, in regions bordering Afghanistan, as a jirga) is known to have pronounced such a sentence.

Government officials routinely turn a blind eye to panchayat or jirga justice, which mostly settles matters related to land orfamily disputes. Police chiefs and district commissioners attempting to end jurga law find no government support. The strengthening of jirga law beyond Pakistan's tribal areas has run parallel with the rise of Islamic extremism.

Jirga law is rooted in tribal customs and in the power of tribal elders. The state, willing to exchange some of its powers for social stability, has let these men take responsibility for many 'private' matters. This often means, in practice, giving this small portion of the population power over others, particularly women, even at a time when elsewhere in society, the power of the elders is declining.

. . . the State, in its insecurity, might even cede more power by redefining public affairs as private, thereby shifting accountability away from itself and into the hands of others. This has heppened not only with jirga law - giving both accountability and power to tribal elders - but on a larger scale with Islamic law and practice.

For example, the panchayat's decree in Meerwala Jatol that the punishment of rape be carried out by four men echoes the Pakistani law introduced by Gen. Zia ul-Haq, whose military rule lasted from 1977 to 1988, in his attempts to Islamicize the country. One law introduced in 1979 requires the presence of four witnesses to an act of rape or adultery before the crime can be established.

This law obliterates the distinction between adultery and rape, criminalizing a private offense (adultery) while, making rape a private matter in which the burden of proof lies on the victim. Yet even General Zia's campaign to create new laws and punishments and label them as Islamic was questioned. When in 1981 the punishment of stoning to death was challenged before the federal Shariah court - part of Pakistan's extensive Islamic legal system - a majority of the bench agreed it was un-Islamic.