Women Under Islam: Pakistan's "Compensation Marriages"
04 Jul, 2007
Most Muslim
marriages involve becoming firstly engaged, followed by an official marriage.
Such
betrothal should involve partners who are able to give consent.
However, in the Indian subcontinent, there are cases where families force
children to make binding marriage vows. In
May 2006 in
In
This custom is known in
Punjab and Sindh province as "vani", and in the tribal areas of
In
November 2005 a panchayat in the
Vani marriages can be
ordered against girl children who have not even been born. In Dera Ghazi Khan,
Punjab on
April 7, 2006, a case of vani came to light where a council
ordered that four as-yet unborn girls from one family should be promised as
compensation for a murder committed eight years earlier.
A few days later Naheed
Akhtar, a 24-year-old woman from Mianwali in
In the same month
(April), a jirga had
ordered a family in
On
April 17, 2006, it was reported that two girls from Mianwali,
aged 12 and 7, had been ordered as vani for an affair carried out by their
brother. The 12-year-old was to be given to a 28-year-old man, and the
7-year-old to an 8-year-old boy. A Muslim cleric had performed a marriage
ceremony without the girls present, but no marriage papers had been filed.
In
May 2006, a 9-year-old girl from Dera Ghazi Khan petitioned to
have her father sued under Islamic law for marrying her off in a vani deal. Her
brother had engaged in an affair with a girl from the family of her "husband".
Her husband, Shaukat Hussain, had forced her to engage in sexual intercourse.
The petition stated that an Islamic cleric, Manzoor Hussain, had been bribed to
falsify marriage documents to claim that she was 18. A court petition was also
launched by the girl's brother against the cleric, the girl's "husband" and
father-in-law.
Vani and swara marriages
are abuses of young girls' human rights. In
May
last year an 11-year-old boy was strangled after being offered as a vani
marriage partner to a family who had earlier kidnapped his elder sister. In
June
a local government minister in Sindh province was named as one of the members of
a jirga which gave a girl away in vani marriage. Dr Sohrab Sarki of the
Pakistan People's Party was a former member of the national parliament.
The denial of a child's
rights was highlighted in
June
where a man from
At the
end of June
2006 a nine-year-old girl was given away in vani marriage to a
60-year-old man, to pay off the cost of an 880 pound bag of rice owed by her
father. Maulvi Nek Mohammad, the Muslim cleric who solemnized the marriage, was
under police interrogation. In
July 2006,
a jirga ordered that a 9-year-old girl be married to a 58-year-old man,
and her 10-year-old sister should be married to a 50-year-old. The girls'
parents refused to comply with the ruling, snatched their children back, and
called the police. In the same month in
In
August 2006
in North-West Frontier Province, a Muslim cleric, Umer Saeed, was among others
arrested and charged after presiding over a swara marriage involving
two baby girls aged three and eighteen months. By this time the laws against
compensation marriage had been in force for 19 months. Officially, the maximum
sentence for vani/swara is 10 years' jail, but no-one had been convicted. After
Pakistan's then-Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry ordered a police
inquiry into a jirga apparently attended by a PPP local minister in Sindh, and
the marriages of five children were annulled in
June 2006
the reporting on cases of vani diminished in the Pakistani press. However it
seems that to this day not a single person has been convicted under the vani
laws.
Though Muslim clerics
have approved vani marriages, even when those they married were too young to
talk, let alone be old enough to know what marriage entailed, vani and swara are
tribal customs, not Muslim customs. Tribal councils - jirgas and
panchayats - were given authority over local "justice" by the Islamist
dictator General Zia ul-Haq who ruled
Allowing jirga justice to
decide issues has progressively eroded women's rights. The most famous abuse of
such justice came in
June 2002,
when a 28-year-old woman from the
Mukhtar Mai was awarded
compensation, which she used to build a school. She became a leading advocate of
women's rights in a country where 72% of women are illiterate. On
March 8, 2006, Mukhtar Mai led 3,000 women in a march for equal
rights. Six of the men who were involved in her rape were convicted with firstly
two, then five of these, sentenced to death. On
March 6, 2006
however, the five appealed against their convictions to the High Court and won.
Mukhtar Mai said: "My life is in danger, I am receiving death threats but I am
more worried about my family. I and my family need government's protection."
Shortly
after this, Mukhtar Mai claimed: "The traditional landowners want
me dead. And the government doesn't want me around either."
Rape as a punishment
continued. In
April 2006 in the same region where Mukhtar Mai had been
gang-raped, a woman was kidnapped and gang-raped because her brother had
allegedly ran off with a member of another clan. Gang-rape is common in
Islamic Laws That
Encourage Rape
Sharia Law is derived
from the Koran and the Hadith (traditions of Mohammed). Sura 24:4 states that
anyone who accuses a woman of adultery, and cannot provide four witnesses, shall
receive 80 lashes.
As a result, Iran's law
on adultery, implemented in July 1991 states: "Article 74: Adultery, whether
punishable by flogging or stoning, may be proven by the testimony of four just
men or that of three just men and two just women. Article 75: If adultery is
punishable only by flogging it can be proven by the testimony of two just men
and four just women. Article 76: The testimony of women alone or in conjunction
with the testimony of only one just man shall not prove adultery but it shall
constitute false accusation which is a punishable act."
In
The notion that a raped
woman should be punished is, to Western minds, unthinkable. In Islam, such
behavior is "justified" by Muslim clerics. In
In
In
The Hudood laws were also
used to discriminate against Christians. Between 1986 and 2004, 2,000-2,500
Christians in Sindh and nearly 5,000 in
In such a climate, where
rape victims were too scared to report their attacks, lest they be charged with
adultery, rape cases proliferated. Rape was also used as a means of forced
conversion to Islam. In the fall of
2005
a 12-year-old Christian girl named Sara Tabasum claimed that she had been
abducted and raped by 16 Muslim men, who tried to force her to convert. It was
subsequently
revealed that her family was being threatened in an attempt to
have the case withdrawn.
Twenty-two-year-old
Christian woman Riqba Masih from
Hindus were also
subjected to rape as a means of conversion. Three sisters had been kidnapped and
raped before they became Muslim, and their claims were sent to the Supreme Court
in
December 2005.
In
September 2006 the US State Department criticized
A month later, a
report by the group
Sahil claimed that from
January to June 2006, 213 girls had been gang-raped. Nearly 1,164 children were
abused, with 401 cases of girls being abducted.
In May 2006,
The plans to amend the
Hudood laws were greeted with stiff opposition from the six-party coalition of
Islamist parties, the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal or MMA. This coalition has 65 of
the 344 seats in the National Assembly. After Musharraf announced that bail
restrictions would be lifted on jailed women, he asserted at the end of July
that he would repeal the Hudood laws. At the start of
August there were mass protests in
The government had
intended to replace the Hudood laws with a law entitled the Protection of Women
Bill, 2006. On
November 14,
this bill was finally introduced. It allowed a woman the right to choose to be
tried under secular law if accused of adultery, and to choose to pursue charges
of rape without being herself jailed under Islamic ordinances. A compromise was
made in a vain attempt to satisfy the Islamists. A new crime was added to civil
law, under Section 496B in Clause 7 of the Penal Code. This forbade "lewdness",
offering a maximum penalty of five years and a fine of 10,000 rupees ($165).
The government also
agreed to a clause in the Penal Code which stated that the teachings of the
Prophet Mohammed would have effect "notwithstanding anything contained in any
other law." Asma Jahangir of the Pakistan Human Rights Commission called the
amendments "the nail in the coffin.... They have hoodwinked women into believing
that this is a law for the protection of women. It is a law for the protection
of religious extremists."
For the Islamists of the
MMA, the amendments which had been introduced to appease them were
unsatisfactory. Maulana Fazal-ur-Rehman of the MMA said: "This is an attempt to
create a free sex zone in
Two months later,
Islamists from the Red Mosque in
If Islamic law dictates
that the testimony of a woman is only worth half that of a man, then women are
not equal under Islam. Where people are not regarded as equal, they are open to
abuse.
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Adrian Morgan, aka
Giraldus Cambrensis
Western Resistance is a British based writer and artist. He also writes for
Spero News,
Family Security Matters and
Faithfreedom.org.
Martin
Wednesday July 11, 2007
10:11:08 -0700
We are told to be tollerant of Islam, but EVERYTHING in Islam is considered a crime in the west. Islam is a virus infecting the world. Islam is the most cruel, barbaric and inhumane religion on earth. Islam is a CRIME. Islam must be crushed.
Death to Islam
Thursday July 12, 2007
04:44:01 -0700
To accept Islam, one must be a true vermin. Islam is the worst religion.
Abdurrahman
Monday August 13, 2007
21:03:09 -0700
Well.........I love and believe in Islam and have heard that hadeeth where the beloved Messenger of God is supposed to have said NOT to cut severly.......and it is my understanding that he later completely prohibited any "female circumcision".In Islam it is considered cruelty to cot anything on a female...and it is not a MUSLIM practise.As was said correctly,it is an ancient African practise and therefore perhaps the prophet gave converted Africans and south Yemenis time to understand and accept/realise how wrong and odd it was to cut girls ritually.I hate the practise and refuse to accept it is part of Islamic tradition.It is NOT.God-willing soon our Somali brothers and sisters will disguard of such an ugly practise too.Don`t blame Islam.....blame ancient African tradition and see it for what it is.