Saeen

Ever since Ali Gul Pir made the hysterical video “Wadera Ka Beta” (Son of Feudal), there’s been an increase in the popularity of the Sindhi phrase “Saeen tau saeen” (saeen is an honorific or title of respect that Sindhi men use for each other, denoting that the person is a gentleman, but has been mistaken as synonymous with feudals, the social class of landowners in the rural areas of Sindh, or even crudely, a king) in the country.

The Sindhis say the phrase “Saeen Tau Saeen” as an in-joke; this phrase is used when someone’s acting high and mighty and you want to jokingly call attention to their high-handedness or delusions of grandeur. But ever since the video came out, non-Sindhis have become familiar with it too, and are using it with much glee to express their dislike for Sindhi feudals and their ways.

On Twitter,  I’ve noticed that people are using the phrase with me when they don’t like what I have to say, the implication being that because I’m from a Sindhi feudal family, I refuse to brook any argument.

I’ve also been called “Wadera Ki Beti” (daughter of feudal) but anyone who knows my background knows that this is no insult to me.

I believe that while the video of Wadea Ka Beta is hilarious and clever (Ali Gul Pir was a student of mine at SZABIST, and also Sindhi, although not a feudal), it’s opened the doors for a lot of people to channel their class hatred and in some cases their anti-Sindhi racism in a socially palatable way.

Class hatred is a worldwide phenomenon. It exists in Pakistan, in India, in the UK, in any society where there is a division of classes and little social mobility between them. In Pakistan, it plays out as hatred of “elites”. (Read Ayesha Siddiqua’s excellent column, “What is Pakistan’s Elite” for more background on this subject). People in Pakistan have good reason to hate their “elites”. But some “elites” are more hated than others, and the Sindhi feudal definitely falls into that category.

When I said as much yesterday on Twitter, making it clear that I wasn’t ashamed of my Sindhi landowning background or my own “feudal” family, I was met with a barrage of tweets attacking me for “defending” feudalism. My jaw dropped as I saw the depth of people’s ignorance and misinformation coming alive. “Are you in favor of marriage to the Quran?” “Why do you make haris (sharecroppers) sit at your feet?” “What’s your stance on karo-kari (honor killing)?” “Why do you keep your haris so poor and uneducated?”

My stance on all these issues has been clear for years. You can read my thoughts on feudalism here. And my stance on honor killings here. As for “making haris sit at your feet”, whoever thinks that has never been to the interior, where waderas and haris alike sit on the floor at occasions such as funerals.

What are we talking about when we talk about feudalism? The agricultural system of Sindh, or the culture of excess and abuse of power that has sprung up around it over the decades? Every class and every subclass of Pakistan’s society has a culture, an attitude, a behavior. Sindhi feudalism’s culture isn’t exemplary. Abuses of the poor take particular iterations in the interior, such as bonded labor, village girls being kidnapped and raped, honor killing, and blood feuds (you can easily think of the equivalent of these abuses happening in a factory in Faisalabad, or a tribal village in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa or Balochistan, or even on the streets of Karachi, I’m sorry to say).

Its scions do commit excess, therefore Wadera Ka Beta. The Sindhi feudals need to face up to those realities, and do some soul-searching about whether this is really the legacy they want to hand down to their children. It’s definitely a system that thrives on ignorance and illiteracy.  Education and industrialization, when and if it happens in Pakistan, will reduce the influence and power of the feudals as has happened in other countries around the world. Yet this particular system sprung up out of the vacuum that successive governments left in Sindh by refusing to allocate funds for its development or to provide the services of education and healthcare that were Sindh’s due for the last 60 years.

But I’ve found that the worst of the stereotypes against the Sindhi landowning classes have been spread for decades by a sensationalist media, and that people remain willfully ignorant of both the business of agriculture as practiced in the interior, and any of the strong cultural traditions of the interior, besides a very superficial acquaintance with Sufism as imagined by Salman Ahmad and Rumi. I directed one of my Indian Twitter detractors to read my article on feudalism but he said he “stopped reading” when he got to the part about the feudal code of honor. It’s closed-mindedness like this that allows the hatred and misunderstanding to flourish.

I was asked why, for example, haris touch the feet of the zamindars. I explained that there were many Hindu traditions that have continued in Sindh. Namaste is one of them, pau-pheri is another. “But why don’t the feudals touch the feet of the haris?” I was asked. I couldn’t decide whether this was real naivete or faux naivete, but I answered it on face value. “Because it’s like when a child touches his mother or father’s feet in the Hindu culture. Does your mother or father touch your feet? The zamindar is like mother and father to his people.”

(This symbolic comparison, I’m afraid, was taken out of context and bandied about on Twitter as proof that I’m defending feudalism. I’m familiar with this sort of smearing. It happened before, when at the first Karachi Literature Festival that quote “I’ve been in a rickshaw” was used for months afterwards as proof of my elitism and disregard for the poor.)

And yet, YES, the zamindar is like a parent to the villagers on his land, because he provides them with protection against the larger forces in the interior: people from rival tribes, the police, dacoits (bandits), so on and so forth. Anyone who doesn’t believe this doesn’t understand much about what a wilderness the interior really is. They continue to harbor dreams about the farms being like some kind of Bollywood movie, where if only the poor villagers were liberated from their evil landlord, everyone would sing and dance in the fields and the hero and heroine would be free to love without fear…

People don’t want to hear much about any good qualities or practices or traditions Sindhi landowners might have. They don’t want to hear about the hospitals, schools, jobs, operations, scholarships that landowners have provided to their people, without fanfare or advertising. That’s just dismissed as “noblesse oblige” or exaggerated benevolence. They want to stick to their imaginings of feudals as bloodthirsty bastards who beat and abuse their haris and steal land and are worshipped as false gods by their poor, ignorant villagers.

In short, they only want a monolithic monster that they can hate with a clear conscience, a combination of Darth Vader and Don Corleone with cartoon-like mustaches and a gaggle of daughters married to the Quran.

Nudity, the Niqab, and the Illusion of Free Choice

A young woman blogger in Egypt (shown above) posted a photograph of herself, naked, as a symbol of resistance against the patriarchal conservative forces that are threatening to overwhelm Egypt.

Today, I read what are possibly the most beautiful opening words of any essay or opinion piece ever. It went like this:

 “When a woman is the sum total of her headscarf and hymen – that is, what’s on her head and what is between her legs – then nakedness and sex become weapons of political resistance.”

This comes from a powerful essay by Mona Eltahawy in the Guardian, called “Egypt’s Naked Blogger is a Bomb Aimed at the Patriarchs in Our Mind” (Eltahawy was recently sexually assaulted and beaten by police in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, her left hand and right arm broken by the force of their blows).

The background is that a young woman blogger in Egypt posted a photograph of herself, naked, as a symbol of resistance against the patriarchal conservative forces that are threatening to overwhelm Egypt in the post-Mubarak era.

The response has been incendiary; read it for yourself. But it proves that women’s bodies are still seen as public property, to be violated by soldiers, discussed and debated on by men as if they were the experts on women and their feelings, thoughts, sensations, inclinations. Our minds are seen as weak, unable to reason, to think for ourselves. Instead of believing that women have moral agency, we are seen as morally inferior in every way to men.

 Is the real war against terrorism, or against patriarchy?

What men do to women on a daily basis, demeaning, insulting, patronizing, and physically and mentally hurting them, IS terrorism, plain and simple.

It reminds me of a news clip I saw several days ago, in which it was declared that Saudi Arabia might enact a new law in which women who are deemed to have “tempting eyes” and “tempting faces” would be forced to cover them up.

Why?

Because one of the men behind this bill saw a woman with “tempting eyes”, felt attracted to her, and ended up having a fight with her husband. Then he stabbed the man in the hand. The logical conclusion was that the woman who tempted him with her eyes was at fault, so such eyes can and should be hidden away from view.

I brought this up on Twitter, adding my own comment that perhaps it was the men who should be covered up instead of the women, so that they couldn’t see the tempting eyes, faces, hands, and perhaps the entire existence of women on this planet to avoid being tempted by them.

A young man decided to take up this argument with me, accusing me of being against women choosing the hijab and niqab of their own free will. He said he was sure that the majority of women who take up these coverings do it voluntarily. I decided to respond by asking this man if he would consent to covering himself up to avoid arousing the lust of homosexual men. He wouldn’t answer.

My point: why do men believe women are so willing to choose the bars of their prison so happily?

What justifications have taken place in their mind to make them believe that women are not coerced into wearing the veil? After all, coercion takes many forms: Legal. Physical. Mental. Emotional. Social.  Many people use blackmail to convince women to wear hijab or niqab: you won’t be a good Muslim, you’ll go to hell, you’re pleasing God, you’ll be subject to harassment and molestation if you go outside without a veil. By playing on women’s vulnerabilities, by bringing up the imagery of women being sexually violated or bringing shame upon their families by walking around unveiled, by implying a woman’s morality is linked to how she dresses, women are coerced into believing they are making a free choice in the thousands and millions, every day of their lives.

The hidden pearls. The precious jewels in velvet boxes. The sweets that attract flies without a wrapper. The metaphors used to convince women that their worth is higher if they remain covered makes clever use of a great deceit: that women are objects to be kept on shelves, their value directly correlated to their shininess, their newness. When are people going to realize that women are not objects or things or possessions? That we are human beings with as much autonomy, independence, sovereignty as men? That we must be left alone, to make our own decisions about what we do with our lives, our bodies, our selves?

The truth is that mental, emotional, physical, social or legal coercion over the issue of the veil immediately takes away the “freedom” of the “choice.”

Men have no right to exercise control over women in any way, shape, or form. Their opinions have no validity in what concerns women’s bodies and lives. Recruiting, paying, or giving some women a portion of the patriarchal privilege in order that they may influence and coerce other women over the issue of the veil, whether by “gentle persuasion” or out-and-out blackmail, is merely another trick men use to exercise control over and dominate women.

Here’s what freedom of choice really looks like when it comes to the niqab, the hijab, the burqa, and the abaya:

“Nothing happens if you wear it. Nothing happens if you don’t wear it. Now, it’s up to you.”

Then stand back and let the woman decide for herself. And stay out of it, for good.

And for those of you who feel a hijab or a niqab or a burqa or an abaya is not a prison, but a symbol of empowerment, I want to ask you why a piece of cloth on your head or face has so much sway over your lives that it transforms you from a whore into a virtuous woman.

Remember that in Pakistan, even the prostitutes wear veils.