Some in Pakistan enjoy measure of freedom, education, basic rights

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan – Shabab Naqvi has a little problem with
her husband. Here she is, working at her government job all day,
raising five kids, doing all the cooking and cleaning, and taking
care of her 90-year-old mother-in-law, and does he help?

Get real.

“Whenever I need him, he is gone,” she said, raising her
hands and rolling her eyes heavenward as she voiced the classic
lament of the working woman.

Except that this is Pakistan, a predominantly Muslim
country where – according to stereotype – women don’t work. Nor do
they go to school, leave the home or have opinions that contradict
their husbands’; opinions that would be muffled, in any case, by
the enveloping burka beneath which they supposedly live.

Put that scenario to some Pakistani women, and then step
back – you’ll need to give them room for a belly laugh.

“It’s a real misconception,” said Aisha Nafees, 21, a
business student here in Pakistan’s capital city. She tossed her
hair in indignation as she spoke – hair that was not, by the way,
covered by a veil. Like many women here, Nafees wears a length of
chiffon draped across her throat, its ends trailing over her
shoulders and down her back. “I pray five times a day. I recite
the holy Koran. I do not need a veil.”

There’s the stereotype of the constrained Muslim woman. Then
there are women such as Naqvi and Nafees.

They coexist in this part of the world, which has become
central to the Bush administration’s campaign against terrorism.
The treatment of women in neighboring Afghanistan, which harbors
suspected terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden, has become part of
the debate.

Afghanistan’s ruling Taliban imposes many rules on women,
such as requiring them to be fully covered and forbidding
education for girls older than 8. Taliban opponents in the
Northern Alliance depict themselves as more progressive, for
example by allowing education for some women.

Pakistan, home to about 2 million Afghan refugees, is 97
percent Muslim. But within that populace, contrary to popular
belief, limitations on women vary from city to city and
neighborhood to neighborhood.

Recent reports by agencies as varied as the United Nations,
the U.S. State Department and the Progressive Women’s Organisation
paint a bleak picture of life for Pakistani women.

The U.N. and the State Department, in reports written in 1999
and 1998, respectively, found domestic-violence levels as high as
90 percent. The State Department said a third of the women in
jails in the Pakistani cities of Lahore, Peshawar and Mardan faced
adultery charges.

That report also found that only about 2 percent of the women
in rural areas such as Sindh and Baluchistan, in southwest
Pakistan bordering Afghanistan, can read. Nationally 50 percent of
men are literate, twice the rate for women.

“Yes, you find that in the villages,” said Younas Khalid,
director of the Baluchistan office of the women’s rights group
Audad. “Our religion gives them rights. Our constitution gives
them rights. Our job is to make sure they know about those rights.”

In a different way, that is Farida Nigar’s job, too.

Nigar is a vice president and branch manager for First
Women’s Bank Ltd., founded in 1989 to help women manage their own
financial affairs. At noon Wednesday, the bank, in a fashionable
area of Islamabad, was crowded with customers, all waiting to
speak with one of the women – all the bank employees are female –
sitting behind a dozen desks that formed a horseshoe in the
office. The clients included everyone from stylishly dressed women
like Nigar to women so heavily veiled that only their eyes were
visible. Several men also waited for service.

“This is a commercial bank, so we take accounts from gents
also,” Nigar said. “But we have special arrangements for women.”
Those include a credit program for women who want to start, or who
already own, businesses, and loans to businesses that have at
least 50 percent female partnership and whose chief executives are
women.

“The women are not treated with importance in other banks
where men are working,” Nigar said.

First Women’s Bank tries to help women learn their financial
rights and how to stand up for them. It holds seminars in money
management and gives computer training.

But instilling a belief in those rights is a struggle, she
said.

“Generally,” said Nigar, “even when a woman works, her
husband controls her money.”

Audad, also, tries to apprise women of their rights.

Audad – Urdu for “women” – was founded 15 years ago. Last
year, President Pervez Musharraf founded the National Commission
on the Status of Women. Just this year, Musharraf’s government
ruled that 33 percent of all seats in local elections must go to
women. “This is a landmark in Pakistan,” said Khalid, who said the
group’s next goal is to have the same requirement for the national
elections next year.

Meanwhile, Audad – much like women’s organizations in the
United States – mostly helps women with legal matters.

Divorce is legal in Pakistan. Men don’t have to prove
cause; women, however, do. The husband usually gets custody of the
children. And few women know they can receive alimony, Khalid
said. Article 25 of Pakistan’s constitution states that no citizen
shall be discriminated against on the basis of gender, religion or
ethnic background. Audad’s job, said Khalid, is to make antiquated
laws comply with the constitution. There is a poster on his office
wall: “My wife does not work. But then – whose work provides the
time for the man to drink with his friends, smoke his hookah, gamble?”

Khalid’s wife studies for a master’s degree in education (she
already has a master’s in math) while raising their young son and
daughter. Far more unusual – especially in Baluchistan, where
women are rarely even seen on the street – she drives.

“I do believe that if male members of society understood the
rights of women,” Khalid said, “that the women would not be
deprived of their rights.”

Under Taliban rule in Afghanistan, those rights are more
tenuous.

Sitting in a guest house in Peshawar, a 22-year-old Afghan
woman quietly recalled a lashing she witnessed. It happened when
she entered a shop near her home in the capital city of Kabul, she
said. She wore her burka as required.

“Hard to breathe or to see,” she said. “Sometimes it gets
caught under your legs so you can’t walk. And in summer? Very
hot.”

Inside the shop, she reached the jackets. She found one she
liked, but the shop was too dark to see. Not many people were
around. She pulled up the burka for a peek.

A Taliban man then entered the shop holding what she
described as a short, thick whip resembling a riding crop. He
raised it.

“The Taliban was hitting the shopkeeper” – punishing him for
the woman’s transgression. “I said: “It’s not his fault. It was my
fault. Stop hitting him.’ The Taliban said: “Shut up.’ Then he hit
me. I covered my face and went home.”

She left for Pakistan, seeking more freedom. Yet here, too,
Islamic fundamentalism is strong. Some Taliban leaders got their
start here in religious schools.

“We are afraid of the Taliban,” she said, asking that her
name not be used. “Even sometimes here, the Taliban will say:
“Cover your face.'”

But she usually doesn’t. “The law of Islam says men and
women have equal rights. We want to be free, as free as women in
other countries.”

Some of that freedom can be found in Quetta’s narrow,
high-walled side streets, not far from Audad’s office, at Allana
Iqbal Open University, which offers courses over the Internet.

Nuzhad Rajbud is a student counselor there, and she gets in
your face fast if you suggest that some people in the U.S. think
Muslim women are oppressed.

Half the students at Iqbal Open are women, she said, adding
that the distance-learning format appeals to mothers with young
children, and women in more conservative areas such as Quetta
where purdah, a tradition where women appear in public rarely and
only under heavy veils, is practiced.

“This way, if they are used to purdah they can complete their
education,” she said.

Rajbud is one of six sisters to obtain a university
education, on insistence of their mother, who was widowed when the
girls were young. Rajbud said her mother believed, “You have to
live, you have to work, you have to fight.”

Then Rajbud, who had spoken animatedly of her pride in her
work and love for her job, leaned across her desk to confide. At
age 29, it was time to marry. Soon, she was to meet a professor
from Virginia, back home in Pakistan for a six-week visit.

They would decide whether they were compatible. If so, they
would marry in three months, and she would return to Virginia with
him.

But what if she didn’t like him? Could she say no?

Rajbud frowned.

“But I like everyone,” she said. “I like all human beings.”

No, no – what if she didn’t think he would make a good
husband?

Again, the frown, and a shrug.

“I will like him, inshallah,” she said – God willing.

“I will not compromise. But I will make it work.”