Is Pakistan primitive?

Over the last month, in order not to be Islamophobic, a line was surreptiously moved. The proposition that women should be confined to the home and kept out of higher education stopped being an outrage to be dismantled in public and became a “perspective” to be weighed.

Silence on the right of a woman to leave her own house, and called the silence respect. A space loud for one liberty and mute on another has not been even-handed; it has been captured. That is the moment the emperor lost his clothes and the courtiers agreed not to mention it.

How a country starts eating halal

RNJ consistently brings up Nassim Taleb’s seminal piece on “The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority.”

A society does not turn to halal or kosher food because the majority converts. It turns because a small, inflexible minority will eat only one way, the flexible majority does not greatly mind, and it is cheaper for the caterer to feed everyone the strict diet than to run two kitchens. The intolerant minority sets the menu for all. Taleb called it the dictatorship of the small minority, and he was right that the most intolerant party, not the most numerous, decides the rule.

This is what happened to our comment section, and it is the smaller copy of what happened to Pakistan. A vocal faction that will not bend establishes the terms and to object to it is to be rude to your hosts.

Restricting a woman’s right to pursue higher education

Are we are tarring a nation with one man’s words? Q did not call for banning women from education. He called for severely restricting it, through quotas and the withdrawal of public funding, on the reasoning that most women in lecture halls are squandering a fertility they owe to children.

It is the drawing-room translation of an arrangement already in force across much of Pakistan. His opinion is the polite, exportable form of a structure that tens of millions of women already live inside.

Elites will continue educating their womenfolk

The Ashraf families would never accept for their own daughters what they prescribe for everyone else’s.

We sat beside one such table a moment ago. The Pakistani elite, in Karachi and in London alike, has done something that earns a cold sort of admiration: it has persuaded a population to feel the confiscation of its women’s liberty as devotion, and to hear the naming of that confiscation as blasphemy.

The men defending the arrangement here are not defending a constraint they themselves endure. They are defending a culture, upheld by women, whom they will never meet.

Patheticstan?

Barely half of Pakistani women can read and write. In the tribal areas the figure for women falls below ten percent. Pakistan carries the second largest population of out-of-school children on earth, after Nigeria, and keeps its girls out at a higher rate than its boys.

Across much of the country a woman cannot move from one place to another without a male relative to transport her, not as a courtesy but as a condition of her safety and her name.

None of this is a slander against Pakistani women. It is the footprint of a structure pressed onto them. We are describing what is done to people, not what they are.

Islam?

Then comes the defence that absorbs all the others: this is simply Islam, and a Muslim society is bound to arrive here.

Take Iran. It is more clerical than Pakistan, governed by jurists, and it enforces a veil Pakistan has never imposed. By the Islam theory it should sit at or below Pakistan on every measure of a woman’s life. It does the reverse. Iranian women are the majority of the country’s university students and outscore the men on entry and in the hall, and female youth literacy runs near ninety-nine percent against Pakistan’s barely-half.

The detail that closes the case is this. The Iranian clergy grew so alarmed at women out-graduating men that they imposed quotas and barred women from whole faculties to hold them back, and the women stayed the majority regardless.

Hold the religion constant and vary only the policy, and the outcomes part completely. The variable was never piety. It is whether the state and the family will let a woman build a self they cannot later repossess. Iran spent decades trying to cap a rising tide of educated women and could not reverse it. Pakistan arranged matters so the tide never came in.

The verdict

We will use the word K warned us was colonial. A structure that confiscates the liberty of half its members at birth, by choice and not by necessity, and trains them to call the theft holiness, is primitive. The word falls on the arrangement, not on the people held inside it, and the arrangement has earned it. Conservative, traditional, devout: these are the camouflage the structure wears, and we decline to hand it the camouflage.

Kabir’s closing defence is that a country cannot be so backward if a woman may run it, and he offers Benazir Bhutto and Maryam Nawaz. They prove the reverse. They are daughters of dynasties, and a structure that crowns a Bhutto’s daughter while leaving half its women unlettered has not raised women. It has raised a handful of surnames, which purchase their own women an exemption from the rule that still binds the rest. That is the engine of our last essay restated, the few ruling the many, in a sari this time.

Mera Jism, Meri Marzi

One slogan gathers the rest. The Aurat March marches under “mera jism, meri marzi,” my body, my choice, and K clarified, that the Urdu jism carries a sexual charge the English “body” lacks, so the country hears a demand for licence where the marchers make a claim to selfhood. Grant the mistranslation entire.

It changes nothing, because even were a woman demanding the right to sleep with whomever she chooses, she is owed it. An adult answers for their sexual life to herself and to her maker, to no committee, absent a marriage or a contract they entered freely of their own accord.

A culture is not weighed by its skyline or its arsenal. It is weighed by whether it lets its adults govern their own destinies & bodies.

How to deal with an Ugly Idea

We let Q’s argument stand in the thread, because a space that cannot look an ugly idea in the face cannot defeat it, and the Commentariat took it apart far more thoroughly than deletion would have. But letting an argument stand is not the same as letting it set the tone.

We spent two months so careful not to wound the faith that we forgot to defend the women, and the Female Admin Team now holds the gender threads for exactly that reason: so that the next time the intolerant minority reaches for the menu, the pen is in the hand of someone with skin in the question.

The patriarchy survives empires. We said so ourselves. Let us at least make certain it does not survive on our good manners.