virginity – Brown Pundits

A Precedent note

The most important thing to understand about the Pakistani voices on this site is that they are centrists, not extremists. Kabir, El Khawaja, S Qureishi: none of them is a fringe figure in Pakistani society. They are roughly where a literate, urban, employed Pakistani sits, and that fact deserves attention.

It deserves attention because India, over the last decade, has stopped engaging with Pakistanis altogether. Visas have collapsed. Cricket is gone. Cinema is gone. Academic exchange is gone. The everyday oxidation of one society against another, the slow correction by which extreme positions get rounded down through exposure to people who hold different ones, has been switched off. What is left is each side talking to itself about the other.

Brown Pundits is one of the few places where that has not happened.

The thread that prompted this note will illustrate. A week ago, S Qureishi observed that the only downside of the Islamic Revolution was that “there is no OnlyFans.” We were deeply offended by this line seriously enough to write the next piece on counterfactual analysis of Iranian society. Q then returned, under another post, with a fuller thesis: female sexuality must be controlled to sustain a civilisation. Pressed on enforcement, he listed disownment, violence, lawsuits, vandalism. Finally when pressed on honour killing, he admitted it was “horrible” and “immoral.”

Three voices took shape on the thread. The most salient asked that the comment be deleted as misogynist.

We are not deleting it.

We disagree with Q on almost every line he wrote. The thesis that female autonomy is the load-bearing crack in civilisation is one we reject in full. The post on Virginity Policing that triggered this thread was our own. But Q is not a Taliban spokesman. He is a Pakistani who, when challenged in writing by other commenters, was forced to articulate his position, defend it under hostile examination, and concede that violence is wrong. That is not platforming. That is engagement. It is the slow work India has decided it no longer needs to do.

Continue reading Pakistani Centrists, Not Muslim Extremists

We were at our favourite Persian restaurant. A young woman two tables away, not Persian herself, was telling her Persian father about her female friend in continental Europe.

The friend was Pakistani-origin. She had started dating a Latino man. The Pakistani friend’s mother, somehow, had a dream. In the dream, her daughter had lost her virginity.

The dream was the trigger.

The mother went into a spiral. The father, it was said, lost his job. The mother had a nervous breakdown. A trip back to the Muslim homeland was arranged. The daughter refused to board until she saw the return flight in her hand. Only then did she get on the plane. When she returned to the Muslim country, they told her she wasn’t going back to Europe.

We lost the rest of the story, and, over the rest of the meal, we thought about Sana Cheema.

What Sana Cheema Saw

Sana Cheema was a twenty-six-year-old Italian-Pakistani who had lived in Brescia since 2002. She wanted to marry a second-generation Italian-Pakistani man of her own choosing. Her father took her back to Gujrat, in Punjab, under the pretext of a visit.

She was strangled the day before her return flight to Italy. Her neck was broken. Her hyoid bone dislocated. Her father, her brother, and her uncle were charged. They had buried her quickly, without autopsy, and told relatives she had died of natural causes. The body had to be exhumed on a magistrate’s order after Italian media forced the case into daylight.

Qandeel Baloch, in the Same Line Continue reading Why is Pakistani Culture obsessed with Policing Female Virginity?