Dr. Tariq Rahman
The Weapons of Patriarchy
Patriarchy refers to that set of values, attitudes, feelings and ways of thinking which value the male more than the female. This results in legitimizing male power in the family, in the system of distribution of wealth and power and, as such, makes it appear as ‘normal’ that men should be institutionally more powerful than women. While the word ‘pater’ means ‘father’ in Latin, the term patriarchy does not mean that every father in every family is individually more dominant or powerful that the female members of his family. While wives may dominate their husbands or mothers their sons in their individual capacities in particular families, the system taken as whole gives institutional power and higher value to the male. My contention here is that some forms of rape, especially gangrapes of the Meerawala type, are a ‘weapon’ or consequence of patriarchy.
If one reads such classics as Susan Brownmiller’s, Against Our Will (1975) one comes to feel that it is not merely because of suppressed sexual desire that men commit rape. It is also because violence, especially sexual violence, as a means of domination over women is the essence of patriarchy. In a sense, then, some forms of rape are not so much sexual as political---the politics of gender-wise distribution of power, or the distribution of power between groups, being the issue. The gangrape of a girl by the order of a tribal ‘court’ (a panchayat) is obviously that kind of rape. In the name of tribal honour a female had to submit to male power at its crudest. The male has asserted his power against the female; a powerful tribe has symbolically asserted its power against a less powerful tribe---patriarchy, which rests upon the maintenance of unequal power, has asserted itself.
Other forms of political rape are those widely reported in Bosnia and Kashmir. Here too it is by dishonouring the women of another male group that one male group asserts its power. In short, in some cases rape is obviously a weapon of asserting dominance---whether over a large group of ‘others’ or over the ‘other gender’ only.
In Pakistan rape has either become more widespread or, at least, gets reported more often than before at least since the late 1980s. Of course, everybody knows that most rape cases do not get reported out of shame but even so the number which are have become very high. In 1990 Simorgh (Womens’ Resource and Publication Centre) and Shazreh Hussein published a book entitled Rape in Pakistan in which it was pointed out that under the Hadood Ordinance promulgated by General Zia ul Haq’s government, a rape victim could be accused of fornication. This was not an unreal fear because women did get accused in this way and, even till this date, there are many women in jail on this charge---Zafran Bibi who was in the news a few months back being a case in point.
When this book was published the official cases of rape (on 8 September 1989) were 15000 in the Punjab alone. One does not know what the causes of the rape were but some cases were obviously those of what I call ‘patriarchical-political’ rape i.e. rape in order to humiliate women so as to assert the higher valuation of the male already prevalent in society. The Human Rights Commission Reports, published every year, give a number of cases of these kinds of rapes. They are very similar to the recent rape case in Meerawala. Essentially a dominant male, a family or a tribe feels it has been dishonored. The cause of ‘dishonour’ can range from insolence on the part of a social inferior to love affairs and sexual laison. In the latter two cases suspicion is considered enough to justify redeeming ‘honour’ by taking revenge. The revenge basically consists of two forms of violence: rape of women and dishonouring them by parading them naked; killing of men or beating them nearly an inch to death. It would be tedious to narrate the scores of cases of this kind reported in the press since 1984. However, the pattern remains basically the same. The people ordering the rape may not call themselves a ‘panchayat´ but the fact is that such incidents do not occur on the spur of the moment; they are not the consequence of uncontrollable lust; they are not produced by women’s irresponsible behaviour; they are not, in fact, acts of sexuality. They are acts of violence meant to assert dominance through the bodies of women. In short, to understand, the phenomenon of ‘patriarchal-political rape’ in Pakistan, one must understand the worldview of this society.
Let us first make it clear that, while the idiom of religion is used by those who talk of honour in Pakistan, the fact is that this concept of honour (izzat) does not exist in the legal theory of the Islamic Sharia’h so far as books by scholars of Islam suggest. Islam, in common with most codes of socially appropriate behaviour, condemns lust and promiscuity. The idea is to preserve family bonds and, indeed, to save people from uncontrolled sexuality. However, the condemnation of sexual acts outside marriage is the same for both men and women. There is no special injunction for women and legality is not described as being equivalent to male or tribal honour.
In Pakistan, on the other hand, female sexuality has been taken away from the domain of legality and placed in the domain of emotionality. The female has been made the repository of male honour. This means that she is less of a person with her own concept of selfhood and requirements of the self and more of an abstract entity---a symbol of mens’ honour. Since she is, as it were, a treasury or a vault where men’s ‘honour’ is stored away she is their property. She is to be guarded, of course, but only as a box of treasure is guarded---not for itself but for what it contains. This means that even her immediate family, the ones she turns to for comfort and safety, are not concerned with her essential self; her pain and pleasure; her right to happiness; even her right to exist. They are concerned with their ‘honour’ which rape, as well as fornication with consent, destroy for ever. This creates such an insensitivity at the collective level for women, at least in the more traditional sections of our society, that women are equally in danger of being shunned or even killed for having been raped as they are for having had lovers with their own consent. Thus, even before Zia ul Haq created laws which made rape equivalent to illegal fornication for women, the Pakistani male mind already failed to differentiate between the two. This is also evidenced by the large number of women abducted by both Muslims and Sikhs (or Hindus) in the riots of 1947 who were not accepted back by their own families when things settled down later. Basically, this denial of the female as being anything but male property is the basis of Pakistani behaviour towards cases of ‘honour’. Thus the police are not respectful towards the victims of rape; the judges treat rape as adultery; the tribal and village elders believe that women must pay for male transgressions.
This kind of thinking is very ancient. I am sure it has been prevalent in our part of the would before Islam and even Hinduism ever arrived. It is based upon colonization. The dominant males first colonize women and woe betide the rival male who wants to cheat the dominant male of his property. The human tribe then colonizes animals and henceforth they must live and die for the humans. Essentially, the core philosophy is that of domination. Religion has been appropriated to justify this domination. Thus, if religion clashes with domination and exploitation, the decrees of religion are disobeyed. They are dismissed as being too good to be followed or one pays mere lip service to them while sharpening the hatchet to kill the suspected woman. After all---patriarchy must endure. If religion or the law of the land clash with patriarchy the hatchet decides in its own unambiguous way which will prevail.
In theory such a state of affairs can change. The evidence that it can comes from our cities and Indian ones where, despite the talk of honour, the hatchet is not brought out; women are not exchanged to pay for the wrongdoings of men and, above all, rapes are not ordered by groups of hoodlums posing as a ‘panchayat’. Western values, new concepts of legality, interpretations of human rights, modern and urban interpretations of Islam---all dilute the traditional nations of patriachy. The dissemination of anti-patriarchy, pro-women, pro-human rights ideas seems to be one answer. But let us remember that our feudal culture and the jingiostic, militaristic, garrison state thinking in the countryside and the cities all privilege the male and all put a high premium on aggression and dominance. Thus, if we really want to put an equal value on all human beings, we would have to create a non-feudal, non-colonial, non-militaristic culture. That, of course, is a tall order given the fact that it goes against the interests of both the feudal and the military elites which dominate the country. This part of the demolition of patriarchy will not take place, I think. As for widspread schooling it can take place but only if the state is prepared to spend about 6 per cent of its GNP on education (and it is not wasted or eaten up). This too seems impossible given the expenditure on paying back past loans and paying for the military. In short, whatever little amounts are paid to poor rape victims and however many journalists visit isolated villages, women will continue to pay for male misdeeds in the foreseeable future in this country.