A woman can be a mother, a sister or a wife, and Allah prescribed that men and women are equal. We live in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan which should be an Islamic state but regular news of women being tortured, brutally murdered with bricks and gang raped makes me think that Islam is not practiced in my country. Cruelty against women is an old phenomenon, where women have been subjected to brutality and inexplicable exploitation for one reason or another. In this male-dominated world, she has not been treated better than a commodity, a puppet in the hands of her so-called ‘protector’, be he in the form of a father, brother or her husband, but Islam changed all this and gave women dignity and respect.
As a mother, a woman bears a child, gives birth and nurtures that child. Most men claim to love their mothers, respect their sisters and honour their wives, but reality and cruelty shows another side of this picture. I would like to know who these men are, who kill pregnant daughters and sisters with bricks, and the monsters who rape very young children? Where do they come from, and were they not taught that women need to be respected and not abused? Do they not think that the child they assault is also someone’s child? It is about time we had some awareness programs for such mentally sick people in our society or pointed them out, so that they could be treated.
I am sure many families have such sick people, but it is very hard to defy them and there is no state protection for women who want to fight abusive men. We also need punishment for such crimes or they will grow and there will be more cases of such heinous crimes.
SYED OMER NADEEM,
Karachi, June 5.