Women In Pakistan
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Afshan Jafar claims that the position of women in Pakistan is the product of specific, historical, political and cultural forces (53). In this paper, we will examine the historical and contemporary cultural and political forces that influence women in Pakistan. Particular attention will be given to the influence of General Zia al Haq on womens rights; this will be illustrated by examining Pakistani government policies on women before, during, and after his rule. The historical and contemporary cultural and political forces are different in the influence on women. In the past, Pakistani women were generally limited, but more respected at home. This is a significant change compared to the public degrading that they faced during and after the rule of General Zia al Haq in 1977 by Islamic justification.
In order to fully understand the basis of womens social status in Pakistan and their rights, the Islamic view of women, their position, and their role in society must be understood. In Islam, families are very important and Muslim Pakistani women are basically domesticated and raised to become the woman head of the family. According to DONNAN, women take the roles of wife, mother, and daughter-in-law. Women are taught to strive to become Khadija, Mohammads wife, and Fatimah, Mohammads daughter. When they are young, girls are taught domesticated duties. They are also given a younger sibling to watch over and take care of, modeling the duties of a mother. Muslim marriage practices require women to marry and live with their husbands. Women leave their families permanently and only under rare circumstances do they come into contact with them again. Their husbands family becomes their family. The teaching of domestication is continued no longer by the womans own mother but by her mother-in-law and sisters-in-laws.
The government of Pakistan was giving women more rights and privacy during the time immediately following the independence of the government (ROUSE). Women were seen more in public than before and were themselves, like the country of Pakistan, becoming independent as far the religion would allow. There was a continuation of the expansion of womens rights with the Family Laws Ordinance; however, there was more government involvement in womens lives.
The Family Laws Ordinance was created in 1961 and the governments interference with Pakistani womens lives spread. The extent of this went all the way into personal matters such as marriage, child custody, and divorce. The Family Laws Ordinance required that men register divorce from their wives instead of announcing divorces simply by stating it aloud (FAROOQ). It also provided that women could choose their husbands and to register divorces themselves (SHAHEED). Although these were their rights, family expectations as well as societal expectations influenced women to continue old Islam marriage traditions, which included The creation of the Family Laws Ordinance was the beginning of an expansion of government interference in womens private lives soon to be reversed under the ruling of Zia al Haq.
In 1977, Zia al Haq came to power, made Islam the official religion of Pakistan, and established an Islam based government and judicial system. His Islam goals for the country can be summed up as “Nizam-e-Mustafa,” referring to “the Islamization of the laws and social fabric of Pakistan” (ROUSE). KHAN suggests that Zias understanding of Sharia (Islamic religious law), is a one-dimensional view of the legal process that it is based on. When questioned what would become of differing interpretations of Islam and how it would be handled within his Islamization program, Zia replied, “We are not getting into that debate. We are going to the basic laws [in] Quran and Sunnah; we are not going into various schools of thought” (662).
The Islamic Ideology Council was created under Zias ruling, which issued the Hudood laws in 1979 that restricted womens rights. General Zia literally and seriously took the mandate from the Pakistani constitutions of 1962 and 1973. The constitutions called for the Council of Islam Ideology to rbing the current laws in line with Islam (KHAN 1).
Along with the Hudood laws came the Zina Ordinances, which are a “part of the Islamic-defined reform system of the legal and social structures” (62 ROUSE). These ordinances sought to modify laws in order to conform the existing Islamic laws with the Law of Evidence and the Law of Blasphemy (KHAN 1). They were related to adultery, fornication, rape, and prostitution, matters that mostly involve women (JEFFREY & BASU). Under the Zina Ordinances, a predetermined punishment is assigned to offenders based on the reading of Sura, Chapter 24, and verse 2 of the Quran (Khan 2).
The woman and the man
Guilty of fornication
Flog each of them
With a hundred stripes
Scholars who study Sunnah established a legal interpretation based on this verse Ð- the punishment of one hundred stripes was only to be applied to unmarried persons. If you were married and found guilty of fornication, the traditional punishment was death. Under the Zina Ordinances, this became the first time in Pakistans history that illicit sex became a crime against