sWhat a very schizophrenic nation Pakistan is.

Consider: we’re one of the very few countries in the world to ever have elected a woman as the head of government – and that too, not in the brave new world of the new millennium but back in the medieval 80s. Yet it took us nearly another two decades to come up with legal provisions to mitigate some of the gross injustices meted out under the infamous Hudood Ordinance and protect women from more obvious attempts to victimise them through their sexuality.

We’ve got a woman as the governor of the State Bank, but girls’ schools are prime targets for blood-crazed bombers and a huge number of women have no access to any independent source of income other than that generated by beggary, domestic semi-slavery or, once again, their sexuality.

And now it turns out that in 2003 the illustrious Council of Islamic Ideology dealt the women of the country with yet another slap in the face: it described the term “gender equality”, used in the 2000 National Commission for the Status on Women Ordinance, as “vague and un-Islamic.” The CII then said that the commission’s repeated use of the term as an ultimate goal was “impractical thinking”, since “distinct differences” in anatomy and physical and mental capabilities made it an “absurd” and “un-Islamic” goal.

Well, that leaves me absolutely speechless. All one can do is laugh, first at the level of competence and displayed by the so-called ‘scholars’ then appointed to explain to hapless Pakistanis the meaning of their religion, and then at hapless Pakistanis themselves, entirely at the mercy of the diseased imaginings and twisted minds of these same scholars.

No wonder we have the contradiction of reality between Benazir Bhutto and Shamshad Akhtar – or Asma Jehangir, or Fehmida Mirza, or Bilquis Edhi, or Maliha Lodhi – and Mukhtaran Mai, Dr Shazia Khalid and the thousands upon thousands of other women whose tales of victimisation go unnoticed to the extent that we never even get to know their names. Because, in its call for the removal of the goal of gender equality, what the CII was attempting to do in 2003 was to have women legally defined as second-class citizens; to remove women’s rights from the ambit of human rights and refer them as being just a short step above animal rights, perhaps. And I suppose that’s their job: to ram ideology – which can never be positive since it is predicated on the stripping away of people’s ability to think – down our throats.

To these smug bugs, I would like to point out that there is a difference between ‘sex’ (oops, is that a dirty word for them?) and ‘gender’: the former refers to physical and biological differences while the latter refers to the socially-constructed roles assigned to men and women by society, which dictate their rights and responsibilities.

This naked attempt to subjugate women, apparently to ‘bring them under control’, would make sense if women were out of control in the first place. But as every high-school kid across the world knows, Pakistan’s women are already so much under the thumb of uninformed guardians of a feudal, patriarchal society that any further pressure is entirely unnecessary. As was pointed out by this newspaper on Thursday, the ordinance that has earned the ire of the smug bugs “is hardly a clarion call for women to storm the ramparts and tear down the edifice of society. Article 7, which contains the offending term ‘gender equality’ calls […] to examine the policies and programmes of the government and to develop and maintain interaction […] to promote and achieve gender equality. Scarcely the stuff that should keep conservatives awake at night sweating about their slipping power.” That is exactly the point: the state and status of women in Pakistan is already so low that even having a prime minister on your side – in terms of biology – makes little difference. Leaving law and the formal codification of women-specific rights aside, the fact is that everywhere one turns in Pakistan, one sees women relegated to second-class status. The greatest measure of this is the media – television, film, etc – where women are consistently portrayed as dutiful domestics, be they mothers, daughters, wives or sisters. Think of the countless sit-coms, for example, where jokes are routinely based on women’s need to resort to subterfuge in order to get their own way – as though their will is something inexplicable and meriting no serious consideration. And, significantly, the joke usually lies in their failure to get it. Much has already been written of the gendering of women through the advertisement market, so we won’t go into that. But consider how men are portrayed: even when they deign to make a cup of tea for their partners, they must be rewarded with a grateful smile since they are clearly being extra nice. All through our media and literature, women keep house and cook and perform duties as a matter of course; men, if and when they are doing the same things, are portrayed as extra-sensitive. As for the ‘scholars’ who were part of the Council of Islamic Ideology in 2003. . . I’d simply like to point out that it’s going to be very hard to convince women of the wonderfully equal opportunities granted to them by Islam when a body of scholars representing the religion has flatly and in all seriousness declared gender equality is a ludicrous and unattainable concept!