There’s a guy in Pakistan who, according to some reports, has been holding drink and dance parties during Ramadan.
So the fuck what, you ask. So he and a woman were forced by police to walk naked to the police station.
Really. There’s this religious holiday, which requires participants to drink nothing (including water) and eat nothing from dawn to dusk. Some guy didn’t participate, therefore the cops humiliated him and some woman on the way to the police station. That’s some totalizing religion! No opting out. Don’t like it? Fine, take your clothes off, you’re busted.
The BBC’s Shahzeb Jillani says incidents of public dishonouring are not uncommon in Pakistan, but this incident is particularly shocking because it was carried out by police and filmed on mobile phones.
Last year, several men were arrested for stripping a middle aged woman naked and parading her round the village as punishment for her son allegedly having an affair with a woman in their family.
Shahnaz Bibi told the BBC at the time that her life had been ruined by the ordeal, and she could never go home.
Relentless everyday hatred and humiliation, casually trashing people’s lives for petty reasons or even to punish someone else. It makes me shiver with disgust.
Reports like this continue to amaze me, so thank you for posting it. It is shocking what awful things are done in the name of religion but I suppose I’m only surprised because I’m learning such things at FtB.
Wow, this reminds me, there’s a museum of medieval crime that I went to and it had a bunch of punishment devices for people who had committed crimes. You see, they didn’t exactly have prisons back then, necessarily, so what they’d do is lock an iron mask of shame on your head that you’d have to wear around for a certain period of time (as determined by your crime) and everyone would make fun of you.
So this is literally punishment out of the dark ages.
I mean, I’m not *surprised* really, I just find it interesting that there’s such an obvious example of how backwards these people are. Also if anyone is in Germany I highly recommend that museum, it was really cool, if kind of, shall we say, uncomfortable at times. My mom got pretty squicked out.
The video seems to indicate this happened at night. My understanding was wild parties at night go against the idea of Ramadan, but are technically allowed. The drinking would still be a problem, though.
There is no compulsion in islam, believers profess. It is forbidden because it would lead to believers who don’t really believe. And then – so the reasoning goes – hypocrites because they have no inner conviction have to resort to showing off their religious conviction outwardly. When they force others – so the reasoning goes on – they become true enemies of islam because they corrupt the very essence of islam which means ‘submission’ , not ‘being forced into submission and kept in check subsequently.’
Ah well, the practice of islam is somewhat different.
I read about this on BBC News a few hours ago. What chilled me was the last bit of the report, where they said that the man had been released on bail, but the woman was still detained by the police. Detained for what? What is her crime? I hope against hope that she is not being assaulted by the police in the lock-up.
The callousness of the comments on the same story in the Daily Mail also disgusted me. They came in a few flavours:
1. People demanding to see pictures of the naked people
2. People hoping the naked people were not old, fat or ugly: they were more concerned with the sensibilities of people watching, jeering and filming than about the people being abused
3. People saying they obviously deserved it as ‘the law is the law’
I’m not sure which is the worst. I know, I know, we can’t expect better from Mail readers, but some of the comments were horrifying even with my Daily Mail filter cranked up to maximum.
You think the police are bad in Pakistan? Here’s what one of their lawyers did last week. Shot his sister pointblank in the head in the middle of court proceedings. She had married a man of her choice.
http://gulfnews.com/news/world/pakistan/woman-in-disputed-marriage-gunned-down-in-court-by-her-brother-1.1058578
I know, I posted that in old B&W News. Horrible.
In Abu Dhabi and Dubai there are HUGE Iftar dinners and parties, but they are all after dusk so they are A-OK. Getting caught using a drinking fountain during the day will get you 10 days in jail. Dubai is a living contradiction: it wants to be a global tourist destination and an Islamic theocracy.