Each year,15 million girls are married before the age of 18. That is 28 girls every minute – married off all too soon effectively endangering their personal development and wellbeing.
Being robbed of their childhood…
How and why does such a horrific crime occur in ostensibly civilized societies?
We need look no farther than our own federal capital, Islamabad for an answer. That city hosts the CII: The Council of “Islamic” Ideology. A non representative body of fundamentalist clerics whose sole occupation consists of a near messianic drive to take Pakistan beyond the dark ages.
This August” body headed by a rabidly obscurantist fanatic: Maulana Sheerani as the chair man, has tried its level best to ensure that female rights are utterly and callously trampled under his own brand of rigid orthodoxy.
While ostensibly paying lip service to the war against terror and talibanisation. This individual has single handedly done more to further the terrorists’ retrogressive agenda then the entire TTP ( Tehreek-Taliban-Pakistan) combined and its affiliates combined.
Amongst the gems that he has proposed are doing away with DNA evidence in rape cases effectively ensuring that rapists can do what they want… in peace.. Since according to this “learned” maulana a lady survivor has to produce four adult Muslim ‘eyewitnesses’ to the crime.
Exactly how she will do that is something he seems utterly unconcerned about. Neither is he concerned with the age of consent, since in his eyes a girl child’s guardians can decide who she will and will not marry.
He has also repeatedly gone on record to force parliament to pass laws that would allow a man to marry again without seeking the permission of his first wife.
Pressing problems such as karo kari and vain et el, that have plagued our society clearly seem beyond the purview of the council and its chairman, whose sole obsession seems to be with marriage and the sexual activity this union denotes.
Only a fortnight back he had physically assaulted a fellow member of the council for going against his desire to name all Ahmedis Murtid” and effectively promoting a mass genocide of that already harried and severely persecuted minority.
While hisis views on child marriages would put even the post primitive of Stone Age tribes to shame.
Time and again he has shamelessly advocated a man’s “right” to taking child brides, including multiple brides at the same time. Apparently, renting asunder, a child’s innocence and indeed taking away her very childhood is not an act of cruelty to him. But simply a matter of course.
Only yesterday a lady parliamentarian Ms. Memon tried to bring legislation to the table that would have ensured greater punishment for people who are involved in the dastardly crime of marrying children. But this un elected ‘representative’ of the people told her quite bluntly that to even dare try and bring about greater punishment for his crime is “sheer” blashemy and should be treated as such.
Utterly oblivious to the hate and loathing this man generates, drunk with sheer contempt for those whom he considers his religious inferiors. What to talk of lesser mortals. This self righteous individual has been known to physically assault those who dare go against him even in the council itself!.
The CII has nothing do with democracy. It’s a body over and above the elected representatives of the people. And as such has absolutely no right to exist in a democratic society. While its edicts are not binding to the state, but the threat of being publicly labeled “Blasphemer” by a man sitting in a constitutionally sanctioned office Is a matter not to be taken lightly, even by sitting parliamentarians. Since even whispering the word “blasphemy” is enough to destroy and even take lives.
As long as such blatant examples of the Taliban mindset continue to dictate state polity, then democracy would remain but a hollow mockery of the word. And the vast military operation launched against the hairy barbarians will appear to be nothing but a charade. The Taliban have not been defeated, they do not live under rocks and in caves, but like the Lal Masjid mullah (renowned for fleeing from his dying comrades in a burkha) and the chairman of the CII Maulana Sheerani, they live on state expense, right in the heart of the federal capital and therein help mould and indeed sway public policy. The black turbaned taliban have not been defeated. They are quite simply, part of the mainstream.
