http://www.thedailystar.net/story.php?nid=3D33298
Daily Star, Dhaka, Bangladesh
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
EDITORIAL
Bengali women, equal rights and obscurantism
By Syed Badrul Ahsan
THERE are questions you need to ask today about the ruckus whipped up
by men unhappy about women enjoying the same rights as they, in this
country. And the first question that you need to raise, and expect an
answer to, relates to the equality enshrined in the nation's
constitution for women. Obviously, if you hold absolute faith in
democracy and everything that gives it a definitive flavour of the
modern, you will not deny that Bangladesh's women do have a place in
the political and social scheme of things. The constitution may have
been tampered with in many ways and has, through years of arbitrary
government, been rendered emasculated at places. But one truth it has
upheld is the esteem in which Bengali women are held, and will be held
in the times to be. That being so, you go on to the next question.
And it is a simple question. If the government of the day has been
bold enough to make public a women development policy, why did it have
to take two steps backward only because a handful of obscurantists are
unable, because of their blinkered vision, to come to terms with women
being regarded as part of the human race?
Note the recommendations put across to the administration by an ulema
committee relating to the provisions of the proposed women development
policy. Each and every recommendation made by the committee militates
against the moral and political values we as a sovereign body of
people have strenuously tried to uphold in all these years since we
liberated ourselves from foreign rule.
And if you, if we, if the government were to treat these
recommendations with the seriousness they do not deserve, you can be
sure that women in this country -- your mother, my spouse, your
sister, my aunt, your woman friend and mine -- will steadily be pushed
back into an area of pitch darkness.
Do not forget that there was once a body of wildly parochial men
called the Taliban, for whom the religion of Islam did not go beyond a
certain length of beard for men and an all-enveloping, stifling dress
code for women, in an unfortunate country called Afghanistan. And now
observe the attitude of the ulema committee to women in this country.
It has suggested that six of the provisions in the women development
policy be scrapped altogether and that fifteen other provisions be
rephrased.
The rephrasing will, as you may have guessed already, render the
policy altogether meaningless. The acting khatib of Baitul Mukarram
mosque tells the country that several sections of the policy are =93very
objectionable.=94 Now you cannot but raise another question: are those
aspects of the women development policy objectionable because they
threaten the impunity with which men, guided so long by a motivated
interpretation of Koranic laws, have so far lorded it over their
families and communities?
The acting khatib goes one disturbing step further when he informs
this nation of secular citizens that =93a woman cannot enjoy rights
equal to a man's because a woman is not equal to a man by birth.=94 That
begs the question: how did this individual, and others of his kind,
draw the inference that there is something about the birth of women
which relegates them to a station below that of men? It is a bizarre
proposition.
There are men who speak of religion all day long and will leave no
stone unturned to tell us that Islam accords the highest respect to
women. That is fine, for history remains proof that the Prophet of
Islam went out of his way to ensure that women occupied a place of
great honour in society.
You try going back to the history of Islam and you do not come across
a single instance of the Prophet ever having pronounced judgment on
the lowliness of women's birth. Women prayed in the mosques with men.
They engaged in open dialogue with the Prophet. After the death of the
Prophet, men unable to interpret his sayings consulted his wives,
whose word was deemed to be final.
So why are these obscurantists around us taking upon themselves the
responsibility of interpreting Islam for us and, in their skewed
interest, busily going about whipping up hysteria about our world
coming to an end if our women share the same pedestal of rights with
our men?
The late khatib of Baitul Mukarram once inflamed the passions of his
followers by openly declaiming that Bangladesh was in crisis because
it was being dominated by two women. That was a silly thing to do, for
it obscured the fact that many of the problems the country has been
facing all these decades have had their roots in the depredations of
some of its unscrupulous male ruling cl*****.
Let us face facts. And the first one of these concerns the very
constitution of the ulema committee itself. Whoever first conceived
the idea of referring the draft women development policy to such a
committee, indeed of helping to set this committee up, should have
known that nothing enlightening would emerge from it. And nothing has.
That is made obvious through the emphasis on =93just=94 rights that such a
class of religious scholars has placed.
You know of justice and you know of equality. They have their own
nuances and meanings. So why mislead people, in this day and age,
through inventing a meaningless term and calling it =93just rights?=94 But
look at the issue in a deeper way. Advocating =93just rights=94 is but
another way of trying to maintain the entrenched, backward tradition,
which has, so long, kept Bangladesh's women pinned to the ground, mud
and all.
Recall all the ugly tales of men unable to contain their anger when
Grameen and Brac initially undertook a campaign of women's empowerment
in the villages. The bigots thought it was a bad idea, because the
bigots have long looked down on women, placing them at a point where
they have been nothing but sub-human.
The ulema committee has only echoed those primitive sentiments. We
need to be able to forge the will and the courage in ourselves to put
up strong, intellectual resistance to the committee.
It is a job that must begin through taking the initiative back from
the extremist elements arrayed against our women, for the simple
reason that Bangladesh's women have struggled long and hard to come by
the rights that are now within their reach. Speak of CEDAW, speak of
Beijing, speak of the feminist movementall of these have been steps
towards the creation of an enlightened society in this country and
elsewhere.
Every citizen in this country has taken intense, sustained pride in
the determined way in which the movement for equality has taken shape
and has forged ahead. Women in our civil service, in the labour
movement, in teaching, in the armed forces and in politics have
demonstrated an immense capacity to act as forces of change.
In the villages, in our small towns, in the cities, the social
engineering that has gone into enabling our women to reach out for the
skies must be allowed to go on without let or hindrance. The various
tactics of intimidation currently being brought into play, indeed
being refined, in order to thwart the march of Bengali women must be
blunted through the concerted efforts of everyone who has striven for
the establishment of a secular democratic order in this country.
This is no country for people who would prefer to hold one half of its
population in disrespect and abject misery. And let it not be a place
where men with wrong notions about life, with convoluted ideas about
the scheme of things in the universe, determine for us the manners and
modalities along which we will carry ourselves. We will restore the
values of faith in our mosques by taking politics and extremism out of
them.
We will reassert the principles of social behaviour that bring men and
women on a par, in every sense of the term. Bigotry cannot, and must
not, be allowed to mar the quality of life.
Just rights for women? Drop the idea, for nothing less than equal
rights for them matters. Which is why a sustained campaign for an
implementation of the provisions, all of them, of the national women
development policy becomes an absolute and immediate necessity.
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