A Voice Against Slavery and Suffering

She pulls no punches when it comes to discussing how, aside from karo kari and watta satta, there are other practices that place girls at a huge disadvantage (especially in tribal areas of Pakistan). Often clannish jirgas marry young girls off to rival families in order to seal breaches between warring factions, sadly without taking into consideration the psychological and emotional toll this can take on a woman. At several points Osmany expresses great respect for the Prophet Mohammed’s (Peace be upon him) respectful and sympathetic stance towards the female gender and she is correct in noting that Islam has too often been deliberately misinterpreted in order to further unjustified patriarchal power.

But what perplexes me, given that Osmany appears to be a qualified woman and sincere writer, is one glaring omission in her work. She hardly touches upon the vital point that often, due to reasons related to economic disparity, social class difference and primal jealousy, women can be as oppressed by more powerful members of their own gender as they are by the male one. Certainly she makes note of how certain notable women (in the WHO and UNICEF) have fought tirelessly over the course of their lives in order to emancipate those women and children who are underprivileged, disenfranchised, and even downright endangered. But sometimes a woman’s greatest enemy is not a man—it can be a female member of her own family. During the bitter divorce of the late Princess of Wales’s (Diana’s) parents, the most damning testimony against Diana’s mother Frances came from Frances’s own mother, Ruth Roche. A friend of the late Queen Mother, Ruth was so fanatically pro-establishment that she vehemently opposed her own daughter’s divorce in spite of the undeniable misery that Frances had suffered at the hands of Diana’s father.

The tragic afore-mentioned scenario involves the upper classes, but such tensions prevail worldwide regardless of whether one is rich or poor, elite or common. Osmany laments that children raised in environments where women are abused by their husbands and partners often have to suffer both trauma as well as experience detrimental psychological confusion. Too often, moreover, she says, society harps on how women should protect themselves from rape, as opposed to actively teaching men (and boys) that rape is a serious violent crime, the consequences of which range from major injury to death. Given that Osmany is the current chairperson of War Against Rape (WAR), her arguments merit being given serious consideration by a wide audience and readership.

The Prophet Muhammad (Pbuh) elevated the status of women in Arabia (and eventually worldwide) through his supremely beautiful Hadith that “Paradise lies at the feet of mothers.” Given that every man is born of a woman, one wonders where and when humanity went drastically and horribly wrong insofar as injustices and crimes committed against women are concerned? A whopping 70 percent of women in the South Asian region experience domestic violence of some sort over the course of their lives, as Osmany notes. D H Lawrence’s eminently disturbing poem ‘Discord in Childhood,’ though a beautifully written creative piece, brings the realities of this ugly issue of domestic violence directly into fine literature through its chilling phrase ‘in a silence of blood.’ In the interest of justice, therefore, let us listen to what Scharmin Osmany has to say.