| September 22, 2003 | Monday | Rajab 24, 1424 |
Social laws to protect women?
Seeking an alternative to the totalitarian view of Islam
WHENEVER our secular leaders are distraught over the happenings in Gujarat or a massacre in Ayodhya or similar mob violence elsewhere in the country, they immediately demand the rule of law. They appear to share an innate belief that all laws are good in principle in India. But this is a rather naive belief since history — and our experience — has shown that rule of law can prove to be a double-edged sword.
Take the history of apartheid. It was nothing but a carefully constructed web of nefarious laws that struck at the very roots of a humane society. Similarly in Pakistan, the martial law statutes of yore and the current legal framework can hardly be held up as exemplary laws. After all, wasn’t Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s hanging couched in legalese?
Likewise, India’s controversial anti-terrorism laws are a legally foisted outrage on civil society. The statutes themselves are just one aspect of the problem; their interpretation and even brazen abuse by their black-robed practitioners are even more worrying for most Indians.
History is replete with horrendous examples of laws that have been used to unleash repression and terror if not to suspend all civil liberties. We often forget that over 400 laws and decrees were passed by the Third Reich, resulting in the destruction of the Jewish population in Europe.
On January 30, 1933, when Adolf Hitler was elected Chancellor of the Weimar Republic. He had taken the oath: “I will employ my strength for the welfare of the German people, protect the constitution and laws of the German people, conscientiously discharge the duties imposed on me and conduct my affairs of office impartially and with justice to everyone.”
Just over a week ago, many of my secular friends were jubilant over the Supreme Court’s reprimand of the Narendra Modi government. Mr Modi was hauled up sharply for not delivering justice to the predominantly Muslim victims of last year’s pogrom in Gujarat. It was the same Supreme Court that had some months ago equated Hindutva with nationalism, a ruling that had most right-thinking Indians, and specially the secular brigade, up in arms.
Now comes an absurd court ruling that has left all camps — secularists, the saffron brigade and politicians of different parties — completely foxed. Last Friday, a special court in Rae Bareilly in Uttar Pradesh, rather curiously, exonerated Deputy Prime Minister Lal Krishan Advani of having instigated a mob to demolish the 16th century Babri mosque on December 6, 1992. Although Mr Advani is one of the principal architects of a campaign to replace the mosque with a Hindu temple, the court let him off while seven of his close colleagues were asked to face charges of culpability in the incident.
Thus, court verdicts are a mixed bag. Just when you think the courts are the best guardians of civil rights, they come up with a clutch of illiberal judgments that have forced even the Attorney-General for India, Soli Sorabjee, to speak up against the apex court’s observation. It has been six of one and half a dozen of the other in recent times in India. If you were on social activist Ms Medha Patkar’s side, fighting for the disinherited tribes people who lived on the banks of the Narmada before being ejected from their homes without a thought by a string of state-sponsored dams, you would be outraged by the Supreme Court’s decision allowing the authorities to raise the height of the dam.
Then again, if you were a businessman and swear by market reforms, you would welcome the Supreme Court’s verdict that the right to strike is not a fundamental one. But if you were a worker who sought and derived his strength from the provisions of the ILO (International Labour Organisation), you would regard the ruling as an affront to basic rights.
In 1975, the Allahabad High Court had set aside Mrs Indira Gandhi’s election to parliament over charges of corruption. She used parliament to overturn the ruling and the Supreme Court endorsed it. Mrs Gandhi’s Emergency Rule was legitimised, or shall we say legalized, by a rubber stamp parliament.
Award-winning author Arundhati Roy was sentenced to a day in prison for showing far less contempt to the Supreme Court. What did Ms Roy say in an article to warrant the Supreme Court’s wrath, when she questioned a notice served on her? She wrote:
“On the grounds that judges of the Supreme Court were too busy, the Chief Justice of India refused to allow a sitting judge to head the judicial enquiry into the Tehelka scandal, even though it involves matters of national security and corruption in the highest places.”
“Yet, when it comes to an absurd, despicable, entirely unsubstantiated petition in which all the three respondents happen to be people who have publicly — though in markedly different ways — questioned the policies of the government and severely criticized a recent judgment of the Supreme Court, the Court displays a disturbing willingness to issue notice.”
Tearing the judgment to bits after her day-long imprisonment, Ms Roy said: “There are parts of the judgment which would have been deeply reassuring if it weren’t for the fact that citizens of India, on a daily basis, have just the opposite experience...”Rule of Law is the basic rule of governance of any civilised, democratic polity.... Whoever the person may be, however high he or she is, no one is above the law notwithstanding however powerful and how rich he or she may be.”
If only that were true!
WE all know that good bedside manners can win friends. For Congress Party leader Sonia Gandhi it could turn out to be a political windfall. A courtesy call to inquire after a fellow politician’s health could help her in her quest for India’s top job. All Ms Gandhi had done was to call up Ms Mayawati, the stormy petrel of Uttar Pradesh politics, to ask about the health of her party chief and political mentor, Mr Kanshi Ram, who is recovering from a cerebral stroke in a Delhi hospital.
“Mr Kanshi Ram has been lying there alone, and no one except Sonia Gandhi has bothered to inquire after him,” Ms Mayawati complained to reporters. “Those who call Sonia Gandhi a foreigner do not know the first thing about the Indian concept of hospitality and fellowship.”
Ms Mayawati recently had a bitter break up with the BJP and lost her job as chief minister of UP.
IN a letter-to-the-editor in Dawn last week, a reader lamented the state of morality in our society, which he described as being rotten to the core. He says that it is unfortunate that there were no moral and social norms or law in our country which could protect the respect and honour of the common man, and thus give evidence of our being a Muslim society.
The reader referred to serious crimes like killing of and criminal assault on women. But, if statutes of the state and even religious laws (read the Hudood ordinances) have not been able to curb such crimes in this country, can moral or social laws be any more effective?
There is no dearth of moral and social teachings in the Holy Quran which serve to protect the dignity and honour of the common man or woman for that matter. Countless ayaat and hadiths tell us how Muslims should treat others, and especially, how men should behave with women and not gaze at them. Unfortunately, abidance of these religiously/morally binding laws is not exactly what one would call prevalent in our society.
Last week, a woman went to a local bank in the Capital to withdraw money. There were three or four other customers around — all men. It was a straightforward transaction, but at the counter, she was asked by the clerk to come inside next to him, behind the counter. She refused. Then the clerk stood up slightly from his chair, beckoned her to come forward, and whispered: “Do you live in such and such a sector?” She replied angrily that she did not and what business was it of his where she lived.
She then complained to the officer-in-charge, who called the clerk to explain. The clerk denied any intention of disrespect to the woman and the officer-in-charge defended his colleague by saying: “He is not that kind of man”.
Whatever kind of man he is, can there be any statute law to protect the above woman from his kind of behaviour? Being teased in such a manner is a common phenomenon for women who venture out of the four walls of their home - to go to the bank, the shop around the corner, and worse of all, to the police station to lodge a complaint.
Treatment of women is particularly disrespectful when it is known that she is a widow or a divorcee. One widow, whose husband — a retired civil servant — died six months ago, says that going to the bank to collect pension every month is an ordeal. Not only is she being rudely spoken to by the bank staff, who treat her like as though she is a “fakir” or beggar, but other male customers intentionally knock against and touch her when they walk by.
Women who use the public transport frequently face this nuisance. A woman, who travels occasionally by public transport, had the fright of her life once while waiting for the appropriate wagon at a stop. A taxi pulled up close to her and the driver said: “Where have you been? I’ve been looking all over for you for two years!” Another woman, while waiting at a wagon stop, was approached by a passing motorcyclist who pestered her to take a lift from him.
A receptionist who travels by wagon from her home in Rawalpindi to her workplace in Islamabad and back daily, says that she has “gotten used to” such behaviour by men. She has no other choice. She is a widow and she needs to work to support her children, and the wagon is the cheapest mode of transport for her. Should all women, like her, get used to such disrespectful treatment by men?
In crowded bazaars, like Moti Bazaar in Rawalpindi, women shoppers are commonly touched and pinched by men. A lady teacher says that once a man even whispered something into her ear. Usually they do whatever they want to do so quickly and then disappear into the crowd, that it’s difficult to catch them, she says.
The same lady teacher says that she noticed that such disgusting behaviour is much less in places like big, modern shops, foreign banks and upper class restaurants. Why she asks? Is it that the people here are more gentlemanly? Or is it because menfolk in such places are deterred by the fact that the women who come here must be wives of “big shots” and not ordinary customers?
Woman drivers in Islamabad, too, are frequent victims of teasing, whether they are driving a big or a small car. A woman who drives almost everyday in the Capital says that she dreads having to come to a stop at a junction and wait for traffic to clear to turn right or go straight because inevitably the drivers in the oncoming cars would intentionally slow down so that they could have a good stare at her.
This happens often even when her husband is driving and she is on the passenger seat. Her husband gets embarrassed, angry of course, curses and swears at them, but beyond that he is helpless.
The worse, another woman driver says, is coming to a stop at a traffic light behind a Suzuki pickup full of menfolk inside. Rather than turn the other way, they inevitably will be gawking at her, often making funny faces at her too. All she can do is fume and just feel like ramming her car into them.
Last week in a letter-to-the-editor in an English daily from Rawalpindi, a clearly annoyed woman reader from Islamabad asked whether staring at women is a national past time of Pakistani men. She said that women here can be dressed in jeans and T-shirt, shalwar kameez or a shuttlecock burqa, yet men stare at them lecherously from head to toe as if they have never seen a woman before in their life.
A hijab-clad teacher who teaches Islamiat admits that some women attract attention to themselves by wearing tight and revealing clothes. But then, this does not justify men behaving in a manner contradicting what is laid down in the Holy Quran and in the hadiths about how women should be treated, she says.
There is no doubt that despite development, customary social norms discouraging the movement of women beyond their homes still very much prevails in our male-dominated, patriarchal society, she says. But if this means that men should be protective of their mothers, wives and daughters, it surely does not give them the licence to harass other men’s mothers, wives and daughters.
When one religious scholar was asked to comment on this topic, he attributed it to some rotten apples in the society. But a father of four grown-up daughters disagrees. It is not just some rotten apples, but a much wider social problem in our morally deteriorating society, he insists.
He says that he just does not feel secure about letting his daughters go by themselves on public transport to their college or university. He doesn’t even feel secure about his wife going to the shopping centre alone. Many other men share the same sense of insecurity about their womenfolk going outdoors.
Don’t talk about my daughters, a mother in her fifties says. “A woman of my age doesn’t even feel secure going out anywhere alone, even to the tailor shop which is often located in some basement or narrow lane of shops. I prefer to take one of my children at least with me always.”
Isn’t it time that the general attitude of men towards women in our society be considered a serious social problem which needs to be corrected before it gets much worse?
I HAVE been giving you the life story of the noted Iranian intellectual, Abdolkarim Saroush for the last two weeks. Today, let me share with you an interview he gave recently. It was circulated by the Third Space Seminar, a Yahoo group owned by Sardar Nadeem Omar who runs the research and publications centre and the archives at the National School of Arts (NCA) here in Lahore.
The interview begins:
Why are you going back to Iran?
I have been away for six years. I need to go back to sort out various things and visit my students, family and friends. Some of my closest friends have been arrested. Before I left, I set up an independent institute for epistemological research, which I have discovered was closed down. The building has been sealed off. I need to find out what happened.
How risky will this visit be in terms of your personal safety?
It is difficult to say. My friends tell me I am taking a risk. But I need to go.
President Mohammad Khatami is also a personal friend of yours. Will you meet him?
I avoid him and he avoids me. That is better for both of us.
Many of your students are taking to the streets in Iran calling for more freedoms. Do you think they will succeed?
These protests are coming entirely from within. They are not because of foreign provocation. Iran has had an explosion in its university population since the revolution, when there were just 200,000 students. Today there are two million. They and their families want greater freedoms and I believe the end result will be a reduction in the power of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, more power to parliament, and greater academic freedom.
How has your experience in Iran influenced your views on science?
My experience in Iran teaches me that a minimum amount of freedom is necessary for the advancement of science, for the advancement of thought. Research cannot flourish if you cannot communicate with your fellow scientists; if you cannot explain your ideas freely, or have to hide part of them lest you be arrested. I am communicating with you now. We can freely chat and freely exchange information. Science is a child of these kinds of conditions. If I hide something from you and you hide things from me, and both of us are obliged to read between the lines, these are not ideal conditions for research to progress. Yet science has done well under totalitarian regimes in China and the former Soviet Union, and even under some fairly unpleasant governments during Islam’s “golden age of science” between the 9th and 13th centuries...
Let me make a distinction between empirical research and thinking per se. Thinking needs a free environment. Empirical research, where you have a well-defined project with official approval, can indeed flourish even under a totalitarian regime, because scientists can still meet other scientists, read the literature and publish. But it is impossible to advance new theories — particularly in the social sciences — when you are under the influence of a particular view, or under pressure from a particular dogma.
You started your professional life as a chemist. Why did you switch to history and philosophy of science?
While still in Iran, I became fascinated with a whole series of problems to do with the nature of science. This happened when I took private tuition in the philosophy of
Islamic metaphysics and my teacher and I would often discuss issues such as the nature of theories, the nature of observation and experimental evidence. Neither of us was ever satisfied that we had properly understood these issues, but then neither of us knew that there existed a branch of knowledge called philosophy of science. In fact, philosophy of modern science was unknown in Iran at the time. I didn’t find out about it until I came to the UK in 1973.
Are you saying there was no teaching or research in philosophy of modern science in Iran before the Islamic revolution of 1979?
Yes. I was the first person to introduce this subject in Iranian universities. I arranged for academics to be trained and books to be translated and written. Prior to the revolution, philosophy courses at Tehran University concentrated on figures such as Kant, Hume and Heidegger. There was no teaching of the works of modern analytical philosophers. This may have been because our heads of department were mostly educated in Germany and France — French is Iran’s second language — and were generally weak in English.
You were a supporter of the 1979 revolution...?
Yes. Everybody was a supporter. We thought that there was no other way to get rid of the hated regime of the Shah and the insecurity that came with it. Scientific revolutions and political revolutions are similar in many ways. You cannot plan them, they just happen, and you become wiser after the event. After the revolution there was no one dominant view. There were secular people, moderate Muslims, radical Muslims and so on. Revolutions tend to result in totalitarianism. People like me were in it to make it more moderate.
After the Shah was overthrown, you returned to Iran. How did you attract the attention of Ayatollah Khamenei?
I met Ayatollah Khamenei when he was in exile in Paris during the 1970s. I later discovered from some of his intimate friends that he had read and liked one of my books on the philosophy of Islamic metaphysics. Khamenei himself had taught metaphysics. I was also known for another book I had written criticizing Marxism — considered a serious threat in Iran at the time — and for another on ethics and science. You could say I was a public figure in Iran.
After the revolution, Ayatollah Khamenei set up what he called the Advisory Council for the Cultural Revolution to revise the curricula in the universities. I was invited to become one of the council’s seven members and I served on it for four years. It was here that I was given the opportunity to introduce philosophy of modern science in the universities.
How did the students take to it?
The students became very excited. I myself taught the subject for more than 10 years and set up a research faculty at Tehran University. Today, I am happy to say that history and philosophy of science is flourishing in Iran. There are many professors and books are constantly being published.
How did you fall out with the authorities?
Around 1990, I published a series of seven articles in a popular cultural magazine called Kyan. The magazine is part of the country’s biggest-selling newspaper group. The articles went under the title “The expansion and contraction of religious knowledge”. In these articles, I defined a branch of knowledge called religious knowledge and tried to explain it using the principles of philosophy of natural and social sciences. These articles rapidly became quite controversial. The Ayatollahs became very sensitive. Some 10 books have since been written in response to my series.
What did you write that got the Ayatollahs so inflamed?
They didn’t like the idea that interpretations of religious knowledge can change over time, or that religious knowledge can be understood in its historical context. They thought I was taking away the sacredness of religion and making it dependent on human understanding.
But as the controversy grew, I was happy to see these ideas debated in the public media. The original articles were later published in a 700-page book, and I found that I was beginning to attract quite a following. My classrooms became overcrowded and my books were selling very, very well. Books on philosophy usually sell between 2,000 and 3,000 copies. Some of my books sold more than 50,000. This made the politicians and the clergy very sensitive as I was seen to be undermining their exclusive position. I started coming under restrictions.
What kinds of restrictions?
Vigilante groups would stop me from speaking in public. I was often attacked and beaten. I found that I no longer had a job. No one would employ me. No one would publish my work. Invitations to speak stopped coming. The magazine where my original series of articles appeared was closed down. I was summoned to the ministry of intelligence and told very explicitly that the authorities did not like me any more and did not want me to feel secure in the country.
To what degree do you think research in Muslim countries should be regulated?
When I was on the Advisory Council for the Cultural Revolution, the clerics thought there was an excessive leftist influence on the social sciences and wanted us to purge them of this. I always argued that this would not work because scientists never accept commands from anybody.
But in a country like Iran, surely religion will always guide what research you can do?
There are always barriers to science. Some come from the nature of the research itself, and these have to be recognized and acknowledged. Others come from outside, and these need to be minimized or eliminated. If you are asked to confirm predetermined conclusions to further a social, political or religious cause that has to be resisted. If you believe through your religion that you know the answer to a particular issue, then embarking on research to find the answer seems to be a contradiction.
You are sometimes described as Islam’s Martin Luther, the 16th-century Christian reformer. Are you?
I do not think I am. My main job is to offer an alternative to the totalitarian view of Islam.