The chilghoza battle

Some days ago, an Islamabad-based religious scholar fired the first salvo of what can termed as ‘an online chilghoza battle’. Mufti Adnan Kakakhel, a social media savvy Deobandi religious scholar, explained by using pictures of three chilghozas that a good chilghoza is one that remains fully protected in its shell while a chilghoza with any exposure to the outside world is bound to be rotten.

Chilghoza, as most readers know, is the pine seed that is loved as a dry fruit in Pakistan. In this Facebook lesson, the chilghoza symbolised women since Mufti Sahib wanted to warn them against any exposure to the outside world populated by men like him.

Though Mufti Kakakhel used the technique of a modern manual to convey his message, there was hardly anything new in what he said. Food symbolism has been used for women since forever. When used rightly, this symbolism is not totally misplaced. As mothers, women are the source of a human being’s first nourishment – the one food  essential for survival. Food also symbolises flesh and fertility and is thus is linked to the power of procreation and temptation.

Food, however, has no agency – no control over itself; no power of thinking and acting. These linguistic weapons are not very hard to turn back on the wielder. After all, great muftis like Maulana Kakakhel and common sinners like me are all fruit of the tree called woman and we must learn to respect that tree of life. The pine cannot be reduced to chilghozas; the chilghoza is merely a generous gift from the pine.

How this mindset is hurting women has been well documented. Report after report shames us by putting our country at the bottom of the heap in terms of crimes against women and their socio-economic conditions. How this situation hurts the whole country has been debated much less.

A recent study of community cohesion in Britain links the economic backwardness of the Pakistani origin British with the condition of their women. Based on a year-long survey, the influential report, called the Casey Review (named after Dame  Louise Casey, a British civil servant who is the director general of the Casey Review Team) has found that people of Pakistani origin form the least developed community in Britain and the low economic activity of their women is one reason for their poverty. According to the report, more than 57 percent women of the Pakistani community are economically inactive compared to 25 percent white women.

The report states that the women in the community are “less likely to speak English than (their) male counterparts … less likely to be out getting a job … more likely to be in the home, and not necessarily … by choice.”

South Asian ulema have long asserted that the public domain belongs to men only and women must be protected from its polluting influence. Though Islamist groups (parties like the Jamaat-e-Islami) have made some concessions in this regard, the traditional fundamentalists (orthodox scholars of madressah tradition like Mufti Sahib) remain adamant on their position.

However, it is unfair to blame the plight of women completely on religious ideology or views of religious scholars. As Amina Jamal has noted in her recent wonderful book, ‘Jamaat-e-Islami Women in Pakistan’: “Pakistani Muslim women are confronting an opportunistic state, misogynist politicians and oppressive interpretations of Islam”. There are walls within walls that trap the powerless in a maze of exclusion and marginality.

The world agrees that if there is one group that needs to be protected from the harmful influence of the public space, it is children. The same people who hinder women from staking their claim in public life also insist on exposing children to public space by denying their childhood. Religious groups, for example, insist on the ‘right’ of underage non-Muslim girls to elope with Muslim men and convert to Islam.

How we treat our children or ‘their’ children to be specific because here I am referring to the children of the poor, was much debated last week due to the brutal treatment a ten-old girl allegedly faced at the house of a serving judge in Islamabad where she is reported to have worked and lived in slave-like conditions.

Hundreds of thousands or perhaps millions of children are employed at middle-class houses across the country and most of them face similar conditions. The reports of torture, murder and abuse that appear from time to time are only a tip of the iceberg as most cases are buried within the privacy of homes.

The plight of these children is rooted in the poverty of their parents, lack of health and education facilities and our own halal brand of the caste system. How a Muslim brand of caste system perpetuates exclusion of the majority has not been debated enough because the very idea of caste is brushed aside as something related to the Hindu religion.

South Asian Muslims have practised their own variant of the caste system for centuries. It broadly divides society into three tiers – an upper caste ruling group called Ashraf lording over the Ajlaf, the artisan groups and the Arzal, the lowest tier. The terms vary in different areas but the system is more or less the same across South Asia. It is not hard to guess about the caste affiliation of Tayyaba or her tormentors.

Muslim politics since the colonial period has been dominated by the Ashraf and it is also the Ashraf who have dominated the salariat class. Sir Syed minced no words in making it clear that his institution was meant for the Ashraf only. It is these Ashraf who have dominated all spheres of life and economy in Pakistan, though there has been some upward mobility from the Ajlaf to the Ashraf.

These Ashraf have ruled the country while propagating the myth that there exists a very small class of ruling feudals who are responsible for all the ills in the country. How these ruling Ashraf, led by the salariat, can get away with murder is clear not from with this case but also from the Mushtaq   Raisani corruption     case.

The raw deal that the poor get is clear from the case of Zahra Bibi, a sixty-year-old woman who died on the floor at Lahore’s Jinnah Hospital last week after the hospital could not even provide a bed for her. She had travelled from another district to Lahore in hope of getting treatment in the Samarkand of the Sharif dynasty without understanding that Samarkand does not belong to the poor.

Being poor and a woman means that she might be one of the 12 million women who do not figure in Pakistan’s democracy because they are absent from the voters’ lists, according to a recent report by the Free and Fair Election Network (Fafen). She was one of those pine trees who have been condemned to live and die like a chilghoza.

 

The writer is an anthropologist and development professional.

Email: zaighamkhan@yahoo.com

Twitter: @zaighamkhan