Tayyaba Raja walked on a road in Lahore to protest, that’s her right. She threw off her dupatta towards law enforcers as a protest, that’s her right. She told the law enforcement personnel that she protests, that’s her right.
One of the law enforcers dragged Tayyaba Raja by her hair and pulled her in their rank and file, in a mob of males practically. The men protesting on the other end ran to her rescue and thankfully couldn’t let them take Tayyaba Raja away. She later tweeted about the ordeal.
But wait. What we saw in the same video was also a ray of hope, a silver lining in the clouds of shame and doubt. We saw another female warrior desperately trying to jump in from a distance and save Tayyaba Raja while her male partner held her back for safety, apparently quite a struggle for she did not appear to stop or settle. The woman’s unsettling human natural response function to the mistreatment meted out to Tayyaba Raja needs to be cloned maybe or perhaps injected in the Pakistani Population at large—right now.
To instill something so simple and natural seems to be a far cry, because we have digressed a little too far. To us all inspiration is still handy and, in some cases, stored in our memories like a box of sweets—the beauty of each one of it charming us magnificently. The former handy inspiration on chivalry and gentleness towards women is Prophet Muhammad’s standing up for women out of respect. Whenever his daughter Fatimah used to arrive, Prophet Muhammad would stand up, greet her, and ask her to sit next to him. When the Prophet used to leave for travel, his daughter Fatimah was the last person he would bid farewell to, and she was the first one whom he visited upon his return.
Inspiration quite; No? The latter as to the box of sweets available in our memory banks for a re-visit, for once reminds me of Baba always closing the passenger door of the guests’ cars himself when seeing people off. I am sure your memory banks are equally rich and full of gentle experiences, chivalry, and grace. We all have our happy places to go back to, after all.
To close the loop and essentially to provoke thought on the law enforcers gone berserk with Tayyaba Raja: even if we are not sure if Tayyaba Raja is our champion in this story, but we must be cent percent sure that the woman with her unsettling natural response to the mistreatment of Tayyaba Raja surely is. The woman who reminds us of this time-tested quote by the Statesman Thomas Jefferson: “In matters of style, swim with the current. In matters of principle, stand like a rock.”
That’s not all, folks. In the recent upheaval of nationwide political protests, we saw disturbing mistreatments towards women. From harassment of inmates in houses during arrests for maintenance of public order to physical manhandling of a differently abled teenage girl protesting at Liberty Chowk Lahore who was pushed out of her wheelchair and literally dragged a mile by policemen.
We have lost all sense of proportion, chivalry, and sanity—to say the least. We can’t be a lost cause?! It’s time to dust off the code of conduct from the shelves of our conscience and see to it. Introspection is arguably the best way to go. We need to see what it is that we are doing wrong, we need to see what in our conduct is unbecoming of a decent human. In the process we would know how easy it is just to be. Let me leave you with this quote: “The healer doesn’t go around telling people that they are healers. They just are. The witch doesn’t hop over the hedge to prove she’s a witch. She just is. The medicine man doesn’t explain why the medicine cures. It just does. The shaman doesn’t claim to connect heaven and earth. It just happens. The way you alchemize a soulless world into a sacred world is to treat everyone as if they are sacred until the sacred in them remembers.”