Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is sad that the young Mahsa Amini lost her life in police custody a couple of weeks ago. Like him, everyone in Iran and around the world is sad, for Amini lost her life for the “sin” of not wearing her head scarf in a “proper” manner.
The fate of women, especially in Muslim or Muslim-majority countries, remains a tentative affair. Where you have an outfit called “morality police,” there you have a condition where women are reduced, through blatant male chauvinism and medieval politics, into not just second-class citizens but into near irrelevance as people.
Since the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979, Iran’s women have paid the price for being women. The chador, decreed by the ayatollahs and enforced by the Revolutionary Guards, will be doffed by Iranian women at risk to their physical well-being.
There can be little issue with women who voluntarily opt for a dress code for themselves, especially when the decision is individual in nature. But when it is the state which decrees what women can or cannot wear, how they can or cannot carry themselves in public, it is governance which gets to have a bad name. It is politics in distortion. When there is a vigilante squad designated as morality police, it is outrage which arises among educated sections around the world.
Which reminds us of the tribulations women went through in Pakistan in the Ziaul Haq era. Unabashedly anti-women acts, notably the Hudood Ordinance, reduced Pakistan’s women into insignificant specimens of humanity. The laughable provision of a rape being witnessed by four persons before it could be dealt with by the law remains one of the more crude of moves by the Zia regime. One cannot be certain, though, that Pakistan’s women -- despite the end of the Zia dictatorship -- have ascended to a stage where their rights will not come under threat or challenge anymore.
Women in our part of the world -- and we speak of Bangladesh -- remain for certain classes of clerics the staple of discussion in their regular sermons. A recent complaint on social media indignantly referred to a cleric who spent as many as 20 minutes of his Friday sermon on the need for women to clothe themselves in decent attire. The anger is understandable. Where the cleric ought to have deliberated on the finer points of religion, he veered off into sermonizing, which took the discussion away from faith.
And that is not all.
Our young women, who recently returned home triumphant from a football tournament in Nepal, have been facing some rather ludicrous questions in a spate of interviews for the media, which related not to their performance as sportspeople but to their behavioural instincts as women. Don’t these women footballers engage in arguments and fights when they are together as a team? That was one of the asinine questions put to them by their male questioners.
Sexist bias was thus part of the interviews. Asking women footballers if they have any fights among themselves flies in the face of decency and journalistic ethics. The journalists who put those questions before these footballers had clearly not been briefed by their media management on the approach they needed to take in their conversation with the young women. No one asks Bangladesh’s male sports-people if they run into trouble with one another. But there you have that old condescending male attitude toward women, refusing to go away.
In these post-modern times, it is not proper that women remain relegated to second class status. There is something even worse, if your point of reference is Afghanistan, where women -- in political, constitutional and humanitarian terms -- simply do not exist. With a ministry for the promotion of virtue and the prevention of vice in operation, it is basically women who become the targets of gun-toting Taliban on the streets of Kabul and around the country. Afghan girls cannot go to school; Afghan women have been thrown out of their jobs; Afghan women must cover themselves from head-to-toe in public.
That is the predicament women find themselves in, particularly in countries in the region. Saudi women cannot drive; a young woman, part of royalty in the Gulf, has remained confined to her family home for years, with no links to the outside world, because she had decided to go out in the world on her own.
Mahsa Amini’s death in morality police custody was a clear reflection of a state operating in unmitigated callousness. When religious obscurantists in Pakistan shot Malala Yousufzai some years ago, it was action motivated by their disquiet over women and girls acquiring education that would have them come level with the modern world.
Malala Yousufzai may have achieved renown in the West, but the threat to her life remains. She is unable to return to her country because governments in Pakistan have not demonstrated the courage to neutralize the danger to her and have her come home.
Which takes us, here in Bangladesh, to the inevitable question of how we have all failed to come to the defense of Taslima Nasreen, enough to make it possible for her to come back to her homeland. Surprisingly, male chauvinism is yet the weapon wielded against her writing in a good number of instances.
Men continue to come down hard on her articles and books, which is fine and can be taken as part of a debate based on an expression of literary points of view. But for successive governments and for the nation’s literary personalities and for its public intellectuals to ignore, in fact forget that Nasreen exists, that she is in exile and needs to come home is a shame.
Back to Pakistan, where the murder of Qandeel Baloch, an actress and model, by her brother in 2016 speaks of the threat to women who so much as express a desire to break free of fetters clamped on them by society that remains feudal in form. Likewise, the stories of honour killings, of young women forced into marriage against their wishes by their families are yet horrific in content and theme.
Reports of young women being gang-raped in Bangladesh, of the corpses of many of them either vanishing or turning up long after they have gone missing continue to be a source of grave worry for all of us. At the height of the coronavirus pandemic girls of 13 to 15 years of age were married off by their parents. In public transport, women are yet a helpless lot.
The future for women, their security and independence, remain a grave worry for enlightened classes in countries where bigotry and an application of rusty feudal attitudes remain an impediment to the rule of law.
When morality police and vigilantes menacingly patrol the streets, the danger to women, indeed to societies, remains stark.
Syed Badrul Ahsan is a journalist and biographer.