Justice for Mukhtar Mai: Mukhtar Mai case reaches Supreme Court showdown

Taking back the night

Ever since the country was carved out of colonial India, there has always been a struggle in Pakistan between state institutions or laws and entrenched tribal customs. Nowhere is this conflict more evident than in the unfortunate string of events involving the use of rape or abuse of women as punishment for real or imagined (usually the latter) infractions of cultural rules. Despite Islam’s clear injunctions to eschew tribalism in favor of religious community, in certain areas of Pakistan tribalism has emerged victorious, subsuming Islam and allowing it only the role of casting a religious justification on what can only be described as barbarism. The latest such case is that of Mukhtaran Bibi, otherwise known in the Pakistani press as Mukhtar Mai (“respected big sister”), whose gang-rape at the order of a tribal council of elders in the village of Meerwala would be unknown if Mai had kept quiet, as hundreds of similarly-raped Pakistani women have done in the past several years. But, with the help of her local imam, Mai fought to seek justice and reclaim her dignity through the Pakistani civil courts, which (under the light of international media) tried and sentenced six men to hang for the offence. Afterwards, she took the settlement money she received and started the first girls school in her village. This would be a happy story if it ended here, but it doesn’t. An Islamic shari’a court overturned the ruling (really, who’s in charge here?), acquitting five and communting the death sentence of the one who pleaded guilty to the charges. But Mai – with thousands of Pakistani men and women, along with well-wishers around the globe – fought back. She led marches that called for justice and organized international pressure, which has resulted in the re-arrest of the rapists and the taking on of the case by Pakistan’s Supreme Court. But Mai has little faith left in the back-and-forth nature of Pakistan’s convoluted legal system. “There is another court. And that is the court of Allah,” said Mai, who despite being illiterate herself has proven to be articulate and media-savvy. “I will definitely get justice from Him.”

Shahed Amanullah is editor-in-chief of altmuslim.com.