| June 20, 2003 | Friday | Rabi-us-Sani 19, 1424 |
The budget forgotten
Woman’s status in Islam
ONE wonders what terms like woman emancipation and feminism have a relevance in an Islamic state? Islam is a religion which gives prime importance to justice. It preaches compassion, tolerance and sympathy for all, irrespective of sex, caste or creed. When the world was ruled by barbarism, Islam uplifted humanity from the abyss of savagery.
Books have a soul of their own, apart from their spirit and the import of the words that are dictated to the author. According to one of our great poets, books themselves choose who next is going to read them. This means that like all beings who possess a soul they too have no temperament for business. They keep sitting on book shelves gathering dust, probably conversing with each other, taking their time to choose their readers. Meanwhile many authors die awaiting sale proceeds of ten of the 400 copies supplied to booksellers. Whether paperback or hardbound they have to be told that authors have needs other than writing books.
But books have a point there. A well-chosen reader would pass on a good book to his friends, like my friend and benefactor, M.H. Mussanna, one among the most respected of journalists, did the other day by giving an old book, The Road To Makkah, which Allama Mohammad Asad wrote when he was Pakistan’s Minister Plenipotentiary at the United Nations and surprised many in the diplomatic crowd by his scholarship and the fact that he was a white European, Jewish, who had become a Muslim not only in faith but also in culture and spirit. Except the very learned among us not many know about him, at least now when so much of that formative period of our history has been forgotten. When I told Iftikhar Arif that I was reading the Allama’s book, he was surprised. Now! he exclaimed. The ‘now’ didn’t mean it was too late for me but that he had expected me to be less ignorant than I actually was. In any case I felt myself to be among the chosen few when I started reading this unique and magnificent book on Islam, the story of Mohammad Asad’s camel ride through the Arabian desert which became his spiritual journey to Allah. I thanked the book for selecting me to be its reader.
Allama Mohammad Asad did not become a Muslim through the preaching of any Maulana or Pir Sahib whose influence in our time is turning away many believers from Islam’s complete way enshrined in its principle of Tauhid, which translates into the practice of equality, social justice, compassion and pursuit of knowledge. He encountered Islam in the desert of Arabia which he roamed when the Arabs were a Bedouin people and had the free spirit untainted by the petro-dollars. The desert seemed to simplify life to its essentials; it cleansed men of pretence and the sham that enclosed lives lived in permanent settlements and palatial houses engenders and which we have learned to refer to as civilization in polite discourse. He found in the desert and its people a profound symbol of reality which he describes with a poet’s perception. The shifting dunes of sand like men’s fortunes, the storms that suddenly engulf you, the hypnotic sound of bells in the distance that floats in the silence of the night and the sight of an oasis and the murmur of water.
Allama Asad’s wander lust brought him to Palestine in 1922 when the state of Israel was in the making. He could see it was an Arab land that was forcibly being turned into a European outpost. But the Jewish leaders assured him they would soon turn the Arabs into a minority. This was the stance of a people who excelled in the arts and sciences and who had suffered. In his journey from here to other Arab countries he discovered the world of Islam to be a different world entirely, not inferior in any way as the Westerners believed, but different. The Bedouin of the desert was a whole being. There was no fragmentation in his personality. He was not shy of sharing his bread with you. You could go to his shelter in the sands without invitation and expect to be fed and looked after like a friend and family member. Whereas in the West people seemed to be afraid of closeness with the stranger. In fact they were afraid and insecure. Life did not give them any feeling of security. So they were busy in building huge defences, inventing newer and newer weapons. Yet this lonely frightful life was so dear to them they would readily destroy the planet itself if they felt threatened. Their way of life was the last word in human development but Asad felt more comfortable and secure among the poor Bedouin. When his wallet was lost and he was penniless, he decided to walk on foot to Damascus because he knew the fellow travellers would not let him starve.
The diplomats in New York did not understand this strange, noble world and his conversion to this way of life. And Asad was surprised that a religion which did not reject the world, which goaded man to action, to go in search of knowledge and forbade renunciation and unified the flesh with the soul was unacceptable to the West which held rationality above every thing. Mohammad Asad wrote this beautiful book to contribute more to a mutual understanding between the Islamic and Western worlds but since that doesn’t seem to be happening we can read it to deepen our own understanding of Islam and put into correct perspective a number of notions about religion that our great Maulvees have put into our heads.
KHAYAL KAHANI: True to his name, Dr Abdul Khaliq is binging on creativity. New literary genres are seldom formulated and only rarely recognized. But the good doctor has invented what he calls phabti kahani which he describes to be an equivalent of the English ‘anecdote.’ We should all be pleased to know, and it calls for celebration that the Muqtadera, the National Language Authority, has granted recognition to this new term and probably to this new genre in Urdu literature. After receiving this certification Dr Khaliq has ‘created some ‘phabti’ stories of his own. One thought anecdotes were accounts of incidents from real life and, therefore, could not be cooked like fiction but he has Fateh Mohammad Malik’s authority on his side, which I take to be final in this matter. You can read all about it and much more in fact in this interesting book, Khayal Kahani, which is Dr Khaliq’s third of another literary genre that he calls shagufta mazmeen...!
The budget is a complicated subject, something beyond the comprehension of the man on the street. It is a document full of figures buried in bureaucratic rigmarole. The books that accompany the budget speech are so heavy that you have to have strong arms to carry them.
Little wonder, then, that few amongst public representatives quite understand the hidden meaning behind the facade of confusing figures.
But there is a convenient way of ducking a debate on the budget, depending on which side of the divide a member is. If the MP is from the treasury benches, he will ‘laud’ the budget and congratulate the government for initiating ‘revolutionary’ steps that will change the face of the country.
But if the member happens to be from the opposition, the same budget document will be nothing more than a ‘jugglery of words’ that will not change anything, indeed leave the people more miserable and hapless.
This has been the case for decades now.
So, as expected, the treasury benches MPAs in the NWFP assembly on Thursday indulged in self-congratulatory speeches. The opposition, quite understandably, was miffed. Therefore, when there was nothing to discuss on the substance of the budget, the debate invariably got distracted.
ANP’s Bashir Bilour harped on the same issues he has been discussing all these past years. But in between he said something that irked the members on the other side of the fence. The upshot of his long speech was that instead of indulging in non- issues of pants and shirts and spewing fire about Jihad, the MMA government needs to concentrate on exploring avenues that could provide jobs and expand the resource base of the NWFP.
Maulana Asmatullah, taking his turn, did not utter a single word about the budget. Instead, what he did was to provoke the opposition by accusing them of saying things against the Shariat including Mr Bilour’s utterances about Jihad.
The maulana from Kohistan, who intersperses his speech with verses from Allama Iqbal, also took shots at the PML-Q — enough for its otherwise pliant MPAs to stand up and make an issue out of it.
Speaker Bakht Jihan appeared to have decided to be tough with the opposition and he just stopped short of giving them orders to get out. At times, he was heard telling the Q-League MPAs to either keep quiet or exercise their right of walking out of the house. Had it not been for Maulana Mujahid, an otherwise quite popular figure amongst journalists for his witty remarks, the Q- League might still have stayed behind.
But he really let the Q-League have it and even accused the Pakistan Muslim League of breaking the country. Not allowed to respond or have the Maulana’s remarks expunged, the Q-League marched out of the house — only to be brought back by Senior Minister Sirajul Haq.
But, while all this was on, Mr Bilour stood up to clarify his statement about Jihad. Maulana Amanat Shah sprang up and then the house saw the two indulge in a slanging match. The ANP MPA accused the religious parties of sending innocent Pukhtuns to the killing fields of Afghanistan in the name of Islam. Maulana Amanat Shah shot back, charging the ANP with supporting the United States against the Taliban who, too, were Pukhtuns. Both accused each other of selling out to the Americans.
And while all this was going on, Speaker Bakht Jihan was seen vainly attempting to bring order to the house. His voice was drowned in the din of MPAs, all talking at the same time. A seemingly amused Chief Minister Akram Khan Durrani, who had graced the house only a while ago, was seen casually asking his angry MPAs to calm down.
Thus, the debate that was supposed to concentrate on the budget instead drifted away to Afghanistan.
The speaker adjourned the proceedings for tea break. But when it met again, all that those who spoke on the budget did was to complain about the non-allocation of funds for their own districts. Drowned in the noise the wail of the Haripur’s Qazi Asad that his was the only district that had not been given a single scheme in the entire ADP for 2003-2004 — a punishment, he claimed, for not attending any of the chief minister’s functions during the latter’s visit to Haripur on April 29.
In pre-Islamic Arabia women could be inherited by relatives of their husband when the latter died, whether they liked to marry them or not. Islam stopped that practice and other similar ones which reduced the status of woman in society to that of animals, or inanimate objects which could be inherited. Girls were buried alive because they were considered a burden for the family as well as society. Islam gave woman the right to live not merely to exist!
Islam tells us that a woman deserves respect just as a man does. She deserves all the respect for just doing what she as a woman can do best. That is why as a mother she may have to be respected by her son three times more than he respects his father, but as a wife, she has to obey her husband within certain limits. A mother doing her duty properly may be no less in the eyes of God than the head of a state doing his part well.
A woman’s role as a daughter, a sister, a wife is no less important than man’s. It is obvious that men are inherently better than women in some spheres of life, just as women are better than them in several other spheres.
A woman’s role as a mother is one for which she is most suitable by her nature. Unfortunately, modern society is haunted by an unfounded disdain for this role - “women are not just machines to produce babies we often hear nice, young ladies crying out. In the world of high fashion, where smiles are affected and love is pompous, genuine respect for life is becoming dangerously remote.
A man who saves one life in his lifetime does almost enough to justify his own, in this world. Giving birth to life and nursing it is sublime. A woman does it, she gives birth. She becomes the instrument of Gods’ benevolence as the Creator. Her existence would truly be noble even if her role were confined to just that.
A woman’s contribution in multiple roles is simply undisputable. In her company, man finds an escape from all the harshness of life. In her dependence, he finds a reason to live and hope. In her purity, he sees his honour, in her love and loyalty he revives his strength.
Family is the basic unit of any society. Woman has not been forbidden from helping her family financially, just as the husband has not been forbidden from helping his wife in her duties after having fulfilled his responsibilities. Providing for the family is the husband’s duty, not wife’s except in unusual circumstances.
Islam gives equal importance to woman in family matters. The man is in charge of the family but that amounts to responsibility of financial maintenance and authority for direction and discipline exercised in a reasonable manner. However both the spouses should share in the management of family affairs and have equal authority over all children. A woman is quite entitled to go out for urgent needs.
Education improves one’s life and provides the opportunity to seek new horizon and attain a better understanding of life and its potential. This opportunity and right is not denied to woman. The Prophet (peace be upon him) emphasized the importance of education when he is reported to have said: “Seek knowledge even if it takes you to China” and “Knowledge is incumbent on every male and female”. Women were permitted to seek education and receive a high social standing for doing so. History has given us the names of many famous authoritative female scholars. A wife can continue to seek education and work as long as her noble role as a wife and mother is not disturbed.
In the West scorn is poured on women, who stay at home to look after their husbands and families. They are stamped as the unliberated lot who need to be rescued from their ill fate. But women who do nothing more than cook in a restaurant, or serve strangers or organize the affairs of their employees, are considered to be following a more worthy task, despite the fact that the actual work is no different than what a housewife would do for the family members who love and honour her.
The West has lost its way because it has been relying on fallible human prescriptions. They need to find Islam, but they will be willing to see what it has to offer if they see Muslim men and women (especially women) finding happiness and fulfilment in Islam.
The Prophet is reported to have said, “The one who properly educates, nurtures and marries off three daughters will enter paradise”. Thus Islam condemns the folks who give preference to sons over daughters and who show disappointment on birth of female children. If women are allowed to exercise their rights properly, they can earn their livelihood and hence be a boon rather than a burden for the family. The societies which do not respect their women never make real progress and they remain hollow and rootless. Napoleon said, “ Give me good mothers and I will give good nations”. Women, according to the Shariat are the counterparts of men. There is no separate order of regulation for them. There are some limited secondary regulations where strict line of distribution concerning certain duties is drawn between the two sexes. Nevertheless, the Shariat is the same and its general rule is common for both the sexes. Just like men, women have to observe the general religious standards relating to conduct, social dealings and moral behaviour.
There are no separate moral codes for men and women in Islam. Even in matters of public life they are expected to do their part, endure the sufferings of life patiently, show solidarity with the community of believers, and do all to promote the well being of society.
Throughout the period of the Prophet’s presence as ruler of Islamic state and society, women used to offer their prayers along with the congregation of Muslims in general. Muslim women used to participate in military expeditions bringing water to the thirsty combatants, treating the wounded and carrying them to safety and sometimes even engaging in active warfare.
A Muslim woman enjoys the same capacity and freedom as enjoyed by man in many areas. She too can propose a man for marriage, orally or in writing. She can freely choose her spouse, reject a suitor she does not like, or obtain divorce from an estranged husband. But being an Islamic state we do not follow our religion in practice.
The religion which elevated the status of women now sees its followers continuously hampering the freedom of women, if this is not so then why is ‘karo-kari’ so rampant, why is the abuse of the rights of women an accepted part of our culture? Why is ‘vani’ not banned or declared a crime?
Currently some efforts are being made to raise the status of women in Pakistan. Steps like greater number of seats in the assemblies and active participation of women members of parliament deserve appreciation but will it in fact result in better social status of ordinary women folk in our semi-feudal society? It all depends on the sincerity and commitments of those who are known for saying many a good things but do not mean it very often.