Pakistan has a pretty lousy image for the oppression and brutality visited on its women. Recently the country responded by passing new legislation, the Protection of Women Act. Now a religious/political organization, Majlis Tahaffuz-i-Hudood Allah (MTHA) has called for a general strike for December 15th to protest the reforms.
MTHA says the new law "violates Islamic values and harms the Islamic identity" of Pakistan.
At a rally on Sunday, Pakistan's National Assembly opposition leader said the government acted at the behest of the UK and US in making amendments that violated the Quran and Sunnah.
The reforms do away with outrages such as the rape laws requiring a woman to produce four witnesses or risk being convicted of adultery.
Pakistani lawyer and Harvard Law School grad, Babar Sattar, explained the fundamentalist furor over the legal reforms:
"The debate about the amendment act isn't inspired by the fear of collectively violating Allah's laws but by the fear of modernisation and westernisation. This is not a debate about Islam but culture. The argument in a simplified form is this: amending laws in a manner that makes it hard to file complaints of illicit sexual activities will encourage deviant sexual behaviour, lead to proliferation of promiscuity in the public realm, lure the morally weak and the young and turn Pakistan into an animal farm. This argument is flawed on many levels.
"Hudood laws are seen largely as commandments aimed to serve as deterrents and instil fear among people. What is less appreciated is that Quranic prescriptions aim to create a balance between individual and collective rights in the society, with a view to protect the privacy, chastity and reputation of people. The whole concept of qazf underlines the need to weed out slander and the imputation of immorality without direct concrete evidence. Moral weakness is for God to judge and punish. Only when it becomes so blatant that it becomes public and starts to impact the society is the state required to take action on the testimony of four eyewitnesses.
"Islam certainly does not require us to snoop on others in the society or be their moral guardians. The fear of many regarding growth of promiscuity in the society is exaggerated as actions are often guided by the desire to act in accordance with one's accepted moral code rather than by fear of punishment. And then if fear of punishment or hudood laws could act as moral cleansers, Pakistan would have become heaven on earth over the last 27 years and sex crimes abolished. So if Qazi Hussain Ahmed is so tormented over the prospect of a free sex society, let him march from Mansoora to Lahore's Heera Mandi in order to enforce morality instead of travelling all the way to Gujrat. Charity begins at home."
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