OFF WITH HIS NOSE !

It does not improve Pakistan`s reputation for a judge in the historic city of Lahore to order the nose and ears chopped of two men who committed the same act on a woman who refused to marry one of them. But I have to say bravo!

The status of rural women remains low throughout Pakistan, emphatically in the North West Frontier Province, but also in Baluchistan and Sindh. And the saying ` a woman`s place belongs in the home` might even have been invented on the Frontier, the tribal homeland of some 10 million Pathans.

The 17th century Pathan warrior poet, Kushal Khan Khattak, summarises the local male attitude in the following lines:

`…Soft and beautiful on the outside

They are venomous serpents within.

Speak of them no more Kushal Khan;

It would be better if they had never been.`

The treatment of women in the NWFP and in the lawless Tribal Areas, is personified by the pseudo-religious concept of the burqa, the all-concealing garment women are forced to wear.

Here a woman is simply a possession like a table or a truck. She is totally controlled by her husband, and if he forbids her to go outside the family compound, that is her lot. A woman aged 42, whom I met in Chitral District, told me she had never been outside her garden.

Honour killings remain common in the NWFP and there was the recent horrific tribal punishment of gang raping for a woman accused of committing adultery. Less well known is the traffic in Sindhi girls, kidnapped and sent to a life of sexual slavery and domestic drudgery in villages, never to be heard of again.

Misogyny exists in most Muslim countries, but nowhere more so than in Pakistan and if the courts order a few more noses and ears to be chopped off male criminals, then so be it.

c.Christine Osborne

Images: Tim Gurney

Source: www.copix.co.uk

SUDANESE WOMEN WHIPPED FOR WEARING TROUSERS

In 1993, I was invited to a WTO conference in Bali, but was refused admission at the door because I was wearing trousers. Not just any old pair of trousers, but a fashionable trouser suit. As a result I did not attend at all, because I had brought no dresses on the long flight from London.

Now I`m appalled to learn that the well known Sudanese journalist Lubna Ahmed al-Hussein is to be flogged for wearing trousers in a restaurant in Khartoum. And that women whipped earlier this month included some from the animist and Christian south where the Muslim north's sharia law does not apply.

Sudan is not high on most lists as a holiday destination, but potential women visitors should take heed. Remember, too, the British teacher Gillian Gibbons, arrested in 2007 for calling a toy bear Muhammad.

Is it any wonder that regimes such as that of dictator Oman al-Bashir give Islam a bad name?

His own punishment should be to be brought forcibly to London to see the shortest of shorts being worn this summer. Perhaps he would suffer a heart attack when the world would have one criminal less.

More power to your arm Ms.al-Hussain. I shall watch your trial with interest and wish you all the best.

c.Christine Osborne: former editor Two Niles/Sudan Airways flight magazine.

Image: Scene in Omdurman, Sudan

Source: www.copix.co.uk