After I wrote last week’s column - which dealt substantially upon the adultery epidemic in urban Pakistan - a female friend critiqued that I had overlooked the degree to which married women, too, are participants in this epidemic.
Now, I’m glad I’m not a judge. Because I’ll be the first to admit that I tend to be ridiculously biased against men in how much I attribute responsibility for marital failures, or social decline in general, to them. Even then, consider this: there is a concept that the discipline of social psychology is entirely based on. It’s called ‘the fundamental attribution error’ - “the finding that people are predisposed towards attributing another person’s behavior to individual characteristics and attitudes, even when it is relatively clear that the person’s behavior was a result of situational demands.” (Stanford psychologist Lee Ross, 1977)
So when people raise the concern of how many women are being unfaithful, I hesitate to attribute that as necessarily coming out of a declining sense of female morality. Yes, that may well partly be the case, but likely more powerful by orders of magnitude is what has come out of the fact that Pakistani society as a whole has always had, and continues to have, the penchant of being too adventurous, too self-confident in their sampling of the treats of the (infinitely more complex) First World. We expected that we could benefit from exposure to Western culture (and there is surely a lot to benefit from) - most immediately, by Hollywood - and maintain our more Eastern values by virtue of sheer will; no need was acknowledged whatsoever to counterbalance the afore with a rigorous, even exclusively social science education; something which would enable us to identify that various aspects of Western culture (think: women who’re convinced life in the kitchen is ‘holding them back’) are incompatible with our conventions not so much because we are ‘bound by the shackles of patriarchy’ but because we are genuinely more human than them.
As a consequence, quite unequivocally now, the affluent classes of Pakistan are drowning in the mass culture of the West. I’ll address this more insha’Allah in a future column The Inevitable Sexual Revolution in Pakistan, but for now, I want to assert: the women of this generation have been thrown to the wolves of the First World. Some of our own have become wolves in their own right. I once made the mistake of attending a literary event at LUMS, only to witness the female moderator wholeheartedly encourage new writers amongst the audience to throw in ‘more sex and rebellion.’
Such endorsements are absurd more than just in their audacity. Any woman who’s either truly been in love, or anyone of either sex who’s sufficiently read evolutionary psychology, can attest to the fact: when a woman falls in love with a man proper, there is one and often only one thing on her mind: “Him, me, and babies.” Women are, with no lacking scientific evidence, naturally monogamous. For them to be unfaithful is actually incongruent with the most basic of their psycho-biological drives; going back to the fundamental attribution error, to base the trend of unfaithfulness in our women as free from situational influences (think: personal and social contexts) is questionable to say the least.
But that’s just the half of it.
Now, while my ever-present need to absolve women does not translate into feminism, I’ve learned there are other, more sophisticated and more powerful measures that can be taken to shepherd one’s marriage. And as a young man myself, I recognize that those measures are being neglected, and quite often spurned altogether, by the cigarette-smoking, Bollywood-watching, potbellied Average Jibraan.
“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.” (Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning)
Quite simply, the husbands and husbands-to-be amongst us are at war, and we need to make some serious changes. We are at war with the great philosophers of the West, such as Scarlet Johansson, Gwyneth Paltrow and Bill Maher, who have declared monogamy ‘unnatural,’ supposedly because the liberated woman’s needs for love and romance can’t be met through a marriage. We have to pull-up our socks (or bellies), and beat them at their own game. Sorry to break some over-charitable hearts, but having a certain haggardly philanthropist as your role model is not going to cut it. We need to embrace The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance I wrote of in my piece Khalis: From Classic to Romantic. We need to be erudite like scholars, built like athletes, and the living embodiment of Disney’s princes all in one. We need to figure out everything down to which light source to ideally work under for stress management (think: bulb, not energy saver), to what to eat ideally (think: olive oil, barley, dates) to what position to sleep in (think: right side), to what toothpaste to use (think: meswak.)
The Art of Husband Maintenance.
And, when in the midst of this challenge your life is as delightful, the wife may just want to quit the job she took up out of sheer boredom and come aboard to what - you saw it coming - is her true calling. Now, you two are a team in a war ongoing, and her being unfaithful to you is inextricably tied to her own failure as caretaker of her beloved motorcycle. Or husband.
And, not the least, if you haven’t already figured, as a byproduct you get to pick up on the Sunnah of the Holy Prophet (SAW), because the vast amount of research you’re going to do is going to direct you to his lifestyle. Which is only fitting, because he reportedly once said, “All games are futile except three: archery, training your horse, and romancing your wife.”
So get your dates, your barley and your meswak, just as you likely recover from acne, obesity and the onset of half a dozen diseases thanks to the fact that you’re fasting (which American health researchers such as Mark Sisson are preaching as possibly the single most powerful measure you can take to optimize health and beauty) because, after all, you’re fighting this war out of only the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, and we’re obligated to participate in the world’s most health-promoting ritual out of social pressure.
And, for good measure, perhaps you’ll substitute your sports-watching needs from football or cricket to mixed martial arts, the greatest competitors in which are invariably fighters with backgrounds in wrestling. Yet again, I have to be fair and mention: Muhammad (SAW), when he was reportedly around 50, was once challenged by the greatest wrestler of the Arab world, Rukaana. I won’t be able to do justice to the delightful incident here so let me just sum it up: the challenge was accepted on the spot, and our Prophet (SAW) threw down the (then undefeated) Rukaana in a single swift movement, repeating the feat twice. Wrestling is your backyard.
Never mind womanizers on the local scene, if even the Johnny Depps, Rafael Nadals and Cristiano Ronaldos have anything left on us to make our wives swoon on them, then it should suffice for them to consider: they come near our wives, and we’ll ragdoll those pretty boys!
The author runs Scholars by Profession, a local research-initiative.
Facebook: facebook.com/scholarsbyprofession Twitter: @HarisSeyal