How long will Women’s Self-determination, Independence, and achievement remain a crime?
By
Huzaima Bukhari
FEBRUARY
20, 2021
“Unless
the issue of the empowerment of women is addressed, the practice of women being
unfairly treated will remain unresolved”—Kapil Sibal
In
addition to scientific and technological advancements, the world today has
moved towards better integration of relationship between men and women because
of empirically-proven data and irrefutable information for better understanding
of each other’s attributes. Researchers have proved that other than the facts
that one set is male and the other female, that one has the ability to
procreate but not without the help of the other, there is no difference in the
intellectual make-up of either sex. This clearly means that both have been
endowed with equal capabilities which stand revealed when opportunities come
their way. There are certain characteristics peculiar to both but these are not
supposed to undermine the value of any one sex or reduce it to an inferior
level. Rather they are there to complement one another for harmony and comfort.
Where this notion is over-run by cultural and/or so-called religious dogma,
indefensible tensions arise leading to unreconciled disputes and arguments that
end in nothing but an impasse.
The
emancipated woman of today unquestionably owes a lot to those men and women
who, over the last couple of centuries, have struggled tremendously and gone to
great lengths to restore her importance as a human being with substantial
rights and privileges denied to her by the dominating males. Those who stood up
and are still doing so against all odds were and are extremely brave, whose
thoughtfulness for their fellow beings shows in their unrelenting efforts to
secure for them respect and a decent life. Not only did they contribute in the
form of solid academic treatises but also through practical movements and
judicial activism that caused them much distress, hardships, and frustrations,
yet they steadfastly have and still are pursuing their aim.
The
important things in this entire furore are maturity, a sense of understanding and
appreciation of realities by the male members of this earth. They are the ones
who have successfully managed to overcome their miscomprehensions about the
fairer sex, have accepted her inert potential, submitted to her enormous knack
for multi-tasking, recognized her organizational skills, believed in her
sincerity and reposed confidence in her intellectual faculties. They have come
to terms with her existence as bearing the same value as their own and do not
look upon her as frail, dumb, or vulnerable. Families that have adopted this
mental level are happier and fairly content compared to those who still
consider women as liability and property.
Generally
it is assumed that women who are better educated than their husbands tend to
look down upon them while such men, due to their inferiority complex, find ways
to snub their highly qualified wives. In our society, if a woman earns better
than her man, he becomes a victim of his friends' wisecracks and in turn, makes
his own and his wife’s life miserable but if he is a sensible person, he would
not only ignore derisive remarks but would ensure that nothing comes in the way
of his family’s happiness. As education spreads and more girls join businesses
and professions, this thinking will also mature. Some popular movies have
depicted the notion whereby men have been shown to switch jobs with their wives
by staying home while their better halves become the earning hands. Again, this
kind of rational revolution will take time to find its place, especially in men’s
minds because for one, it is difficult to digest that women could be superior
in talents and two, the embedded fear of insecurity in their hearts that if
their partner is more successful than them, they will eventually abandon them.
Interestingly, in the majority of cases where couples are in professional
competition, women have no ego problems if their partners are more successful.
Unlike men, they do not interpret the partner’s success as their own failure.
This kind of attitude is universal and is not just confined to South Asia,
according to research conducted by psychologists.
Recently,
in a social media group, the case of a 27-years-old girl from Kohat, Khyber
Pukhtunkhwa, Hina Shahnawaz, who was murdered by her male cousin on February 6,
2017 came up for discussion. Her fault was that she had dared to attain high
education and was single-handedly supporting her widowed mother, sister, and
sister-in-law by working at an NGO in Islamabad and earning a handsome salary.
The fact that she was courageously facing her dreadful domestic situation
without taking help from male members of her family became offensive to one,
who found extinguishing her life as the only solution to curbing her
emancipation. One wonders how the survivors would be faring after her death.
Have the so-called ‘self-respecting’ males stepped forward to take over the
destitute family? How easy it was for Hina’s cousin to pump four bullets in her
body only to satisfy his false ego and what a tragic end to a woman who braved
through all kinds of hurdles to reach a position of power and financial
independence!
Killing
a living being requires cold-blooded insensitivity, brutality, and extreme
negative motivation-to deter other females from following in the footsteps of
women like Hina Shahnawaz. This illogical and uncalled-for reaction is probably
to subdue future Hinas from exercising their rights to learn, to earn a
livelihood, to live life on their own terms, and to desist from displaying
superiority which their male counterparts are incapable of matching. In other
words, if any woman tries to defy the norms, her best place is the grave to
which she is promptly transferred by her impassioned male relatives.
What
is the solution to this kind of perversion and destructiveness (borrowing from
the famous book of Erich Fromm, Anatomy of Human Destructiveness? How long will
the woman, particularly from the feudal and traditional backgrounds, continue
to suffer such ordeal, sometimes in the name of honour and many a time in
exerting her independence? These questions are mind-boggling that force one to
rethink the social, cultural, and moral values sans ethics imposed upon human
beings.
Patriarchy
is accused of female subversion but somewhere along the road, perhaps, females
themselves are responsible for their woes-when they gossip about another
female’s rise to power as being dependent less on her intellect and more to do
with her being a femme fatale, when they discuss other women in the company of
their male relatives, when they misbehave with their female in-laws when they
discriminate between the upbringing of their sons and daughters, when they
praise their brothers for audaciously treating a rebellious sister for wanting
to marry a person of her choice.
The
mother of Hina’s killer has a lot of answering to do. Had she instilled a
respect for women in her son’s heart, perhaps his reaction at his cousin’s rise
would have been different. Perhaps he would have been more appreciative of her
achievements and instead of eliminating her, encouraged his own sisters to
tread the same path to self-determination and independence. He could have made
her a role model for the younger generation to carve out a blissful life for
herself and her family. Alas, it was not to be!
The
writer, lawyer, and author, is an Adjunct Faculty at Lahore University of
Management Sciences (LUMS)
Original
headline: When empowerment is crime!
Source:
Daily times
URL: https://newageislam.com/islam-women-feminism/how-long-women’s-self-determination,/d/124353
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