“The moral and physical suffering, the shame, the desire to die, that chaos in my mind when I returned along the path to my house to collapse onto a bed like a dying animal. I am able to tell Nareem what I couldn’t possibly tell my mother or my sisters, because all I have ever learned since a tiny child, has been—silence.”
Guilty by Association
Mukhtar Mai, In the Name of Honor, relates the author’s 2006 personal account as a young Pakistani woman’s horrid ordeal of public gang rape for her brother’s transgression of holding the hand of a girl from a rival tribe. The double punishment—of the boy, Nareem, and his virtuous sister, Mukhtar Mai, satisfied the tradition of a primitive tribal custom, alive today. The victim was an innocent girl punished for someone else’s “crime.” Her punishment was the humiliation of public gang rape. Had she been the guilty party, her punishment would have been public stoning.
Another Falsely Accused Victim
The ancient mantra of an “eye for an eye,” retribution for a crime, an insult, a mistake, is age-old. Ancient literature documents the punishment women suffered for adultery or rape—real or imagined—was public stoning. That event is characterized by the horrific punishment of another innocent young woman falsely accused of an infraction of “The Law.”
The smug satisfaction of a jealous neighbor who falsely accused the young woman, the self-righteous elders who fancied themselves “guardians of the law,” and the zealous local athletes whose accurate aim with the handy stones was a source of pride, all gathered to put the young woman “in her place” for her alleged transgression. The accused, affectionately called Habibi, would end her fifteen years shivering with fear, crouching on the rough, dirt ground to protect the soft tissue of her breast, her belly, her private parts. Soon that would not matter. There was no protection from the shock and pain of unrelenting pummeling of palm-sized stones. Her nude, crouched body made a small knot, an easy target for the well-aimed stones that would knock out her teeth, puncture her eyes, end her hearing, break her knees, and mercifully crush her skull, sending her into welcome unconsciousness and slow death while the accusers—and the young man who had touched her hand—stood silently at the edge of the crowd—watching.
When the stoning was over, the crowd went home, the proud marksmen dispersed to congregate, replay, and brag about their final, deadly blows, and the young woman’s frail, battered body, oozing with blood and body fluids, was exposed to the jackals and raptors. Soon—like Queen Jezebel, who died in 843 BCE—there would be nothing left of this innocent young woman but the clotted, bloody hair on her battered skull and the bones of her defenseless hands. “The Law” was fulfilled. The elders were satisfied. The accused was dead, her family was humiliated, and the people were warned.
From a thousand years before the time of Christ to the present, “the blood red fabric of tribal life” still clothes women whose people have not advanced up the ladder of civilization to see their laws as primitive, their behavior inhumane, and their women as human.
Dr. P.D. Sargent,
Power Women: Lessons from the Ancient World
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