Bengali women, equal rights and obscurantism

THERE are questions you need to ask today about the ruckus whipped up by men unhappy about women enjoying the same rights as they, in this country. And the first question that you need to raise, and expect an answer to, relates to the equality enshrined in the nation's constitution for women. Obviously, if you hold absolute faith in democracy and everything that gives it a definitive flavour of the modern, you will not deny that Bangladesh's women do have a place in the political and social scheme of things. The constitution may have been tampered with in many ways and has, through years of arbitrary government, been rendered emasculated at places. But one truth it has upheld is the esteem in which Bengali women are held, and will be held in the times to be. That being so, you go on to the next question.
And it is a simple question. If the government of the day has been bold enough to make public a women development policy, why did it have to take two steps backward only because a handful of obscurantists are unable, because of their blinkered vision, to come to terms with women being regarded as part of the human race?
Note the recommendations put across to the administration by an ulema committee relating to the provisions of the proposed women development policy. Each and every recommendation made by the committee militates against the moral and political values we as a sovereign body of people have strenuously tried to uphold in all these years since we liberated ourselves from foreign rule.
And if you, if we, if the government were to treat these recommendations with the seriousness they do not deserve, you can be sure that women in this country -- your mother, my spouse, your sister, my aunt, your woman friend and mine -- will steadily be pushed back into an area of pitch darkness.
Do not forget that there was once a body of wildly parochial men called the Taliban, for whom the religion of Islam did not go beyond a certain length of beard for men and an all-enveloping, stifling dress code for women, in an unfortunate country called Afghanistan. And now observe the attitude of the ulema committee to women in this country. It has suggested that six of the provisions in the women development policy be scrapped altogether and that fifteen other provisions be rephrased.
The rephrasing will, as you may have guessed already, render the policy altogether meaningless. The acting khatib of Baitul Mukarram mosque tells the country that several sections of the policy are "very objectionable." Now you cannot but raise another question: are those aspects of the women development policy objectionable because they threaten the impunity with which men, guided so long by a motivated interpretation of Koranic laws, have so far lorded it over their families and communities?
The acting khatib goes one disturbing step further when he informs this nation of secular citizens that "a woman cannot enjoy rights equal to a man's because a woman is not equal to a man by birth." That begs the question: how did this individual, and others of his kind, draw the inference that there is something about the birth of women which relegates them to a station below that of men? It is a bizarre proposition.
There are men who speak of religion all day long and will leave no stone unturned to tell us that Islam accords the highest respect to women. That is fine, for history remains proof that the Prophet of Islam went out of his way to ensure that women occupied a place of great honour in society.
You try going back to the history of Islam and you do not come across a single instance of the Prophet ever having pronounced judgment on the lowliness of women's birth. Women prayed in the mosques with men. They engaged in open dialogue with the Prophet. After the death of the Prophet, men unable to interpret his sayings consulted his wives, whose word was deemed to be final.
So why are these obscurantists around us taking upon themselves the responsibility of interpreting Islam for us and, in their skewed interest, busily going about whipping up hysteria about our world coming to an end if our women share the same pedestal of rights with our men?
The late khatib of Baitul Mukarram once inflamed the passions of his followers by openly declaiming that Bangladesh was in crisis because it was being dominated by two women. That was a silly thing to do, for it obscured the fact that many of the problems the country has been facing all these decades have had their roots in the depredations of some of its unscrupulous male ruling classes.
Let us face facts. And the first one of these concerns the very constitution of the ulema committee itself. Whoever first conceived the idea of referring the draft women development policy to such a committee, indeed of helping to set this committee up, should have known that nothing enlightening would emerge from it. And nothing has. That is made obvious through the emphasis on "just" rights that such a class of religious scholars has placed.
You know of justice and you know of equality. They have their own nuances and meanings. So why mislead people, in this day and age, through inventing a meaningless term and calling it "just rights?" But look at the issue in a deeper way. Advocating "just rights" is but another way of trying to maintain the entrenched, backward tradition, which has, so long, kept Bangladesh's women pinned to the ground, mud and all.
Recall all the ugly tales of men unable to contain their anger when Grameen and Brac initially undertook a campaign of women's empowerment in the villages. The bigots thought it was a bad idea, because the bigots have long looked down on women, placing them at a point where they have been nothing but sub-human.
The ulema committee has only echoed those primitive sentiments. We need to be able to forge the will and the courage in ourselves to put up strong, intellectual resistance to the committee.
It is a job that must begin through taking the initiative back from the extremist elements arrayed against our women, for the simple reason that Bangladesh's women have struggled long and hard to come by the rights that are now within their reach. Speak of CEDAW, speak of Beijing, speak of the feminist movementall of these have been steps towards the creation of an enlightened society in this country and elsewhere.
Every citizen in this country has taken intense, sustained pride in the determined way in which the movement for equality has taken shape and has forged ahead. Women in our civil service, in the labour movement, in teaching, in the armed forces and in politics have demonstrated an immense capacity to act as forces of change.
In the villages, in our small towns, in the cities, the social engineering that has gone into enabling our women to reach out for the skies must be allowed to go on without let or hindrance. The various tactics of intimidation currently being brought into play, indeed being refined, in order to thwart the march of Bengali women must be blunted through the concerted efforts of everyone who has striven for the establishment of a secular democratic order in this country.
This is no country for people who would prefer to hold one half of its population in disrespect and abject misery. And let it not be a place where men with wrong notions about life, with convoluted ideas about the scheme of things in the universe, determine for us the manners and modalities along which we will carry ourselves. We will restore the values of faith in our mosques by taking politics and extremism out of them.
We will reassert the principles of social behaviour that bring men and women on a par, in every sense of the term. Bigotry cannot, and must not, be allowed to mar the quality of life.
Just rights for women? Drop the idea, for nothing less than equal rights for them matters. Which is why a sustained campaign for an implementation of the provisions, all of them, of the national women development policy becomes an absolute and immediate necessity.

Syed Badrul Ahsan is Editor, Current Affairs, The Daily Star.