Is this what Saudi Arabia wants?
Taslima Nasreen
No Country for Women - Humanism, Secularism, Feminism
It is amazing to see the lioness hunting. They work hard to bring food home. The lion sleeps and waits for food. Most men in the Indian subcontinent never visit a kitchen. They are just like lazy lions. They like to call themselves lions ( for muscles and strength) or powerful patriarchs.
”It is discouraging how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit.”— Noel Coward
Religious fanatics issue fatwas and demand the book banning of the writers who challenge them. Their demonstrations and processions end to a cul-de-sac or to a mosque.
But megalomaniac, misogynistic, macho male writers and their male dominated media are able to go far beyond mosques and can ban you, blacklist you, and banish from your land if you ever dare to challenge them. They are much more influential than moulavis and mullahs, much more clever and dangerous than idiot ignorant zombies.
Islamic fundamentalists in the Indian subcontinent can not ban books. It is the government who ban books to please the fundamentalists. They often fulfill the demands of fundamentalists for their own political interests. We know about politicians. Don’t we? But we expect writers and intellectuals to protest against banning and censorship. They do, but not always. If you are not submissive to big male writers and if you do not follow all the patriarchal rules of literary world, your life will be hell. They could not tolerate that me a much younger writer selling more books than them, and I was not scared to challenge their male dominated fake literary world full of lies and hypocrisy. They are powerful, because they control male dominated media and keep very good relation with corrupt corporates and people in the power.
They are lords. They can do anything they want. One of them was Syed Shamsul Haque, an abuser and a liar. He not only banned my book, he filed a million dollar libel case against me. What was my crime? My crime was I wrote what he told me about his emotional relationship with his sister-in-law and how he dishonored me. He knows very well that I will not be able to defend myself, the government does not allow me to enter Bangladesh and there is no one in the country who has courage to stand beside me, and he is in the land where no democracy but idiocracy rules, and in this situation, it will be very easy for him to file case against me and ban the book. He committed crime by banning the book in 2003. It’s 2012, the book is still banned. It was not banned by the government but was banned by the high court because of the law suit of SSH, the famous hypocrite writer, the supporter of banning and censorship. No trial took place. Only the heinous crime against the truth took place. What have the local human rights activists or women’s rights activists been doing? They love to keep silent. They are mostly power worshipers, anti-feminists, pro-religion.
Another famous writer from the West part of Bengal took initiative to ban my book. He is Sunil Gangopadhyay, a famous Bengali literary guru and the president of Sahitya Akademi. He was behind the banning of my book Dwikhandito in 2003 and was the supporter of my banishment from West Bengal in 2007.
It seems people in the media forgets what they wrote about the role Sunil Gangopadyay played to ban my book in 2003. Some proofs are here:
Sunil Gangopadhyay said to Inter Press Service, “The book has passages of tirade on religion which could incite riots. It is not literature. . . it is almost pornography. It should be banned as it misuses freedom of expression.”
‘Author Sunil Gangopadhyay, one of those who support the ban said, ..people who bother to read it will be disappointed.’ Another Indian newspaper wrote, ‘Several noted authors including the poet Sunil Gangopadhyay, the novelists, Dibyendu Palit, Nabanita Deb Sen, and Syed Mustafa Siraj, the Bangladeshi novelist, Sams-ul Huq, the singer Suman Chatterjee, as well as the Trinamul Congress leader and Kolkata mayor, Subrata Mukherjee, among others, have come out openly against the book and have supported the decision by the state LF government to get the book banned.‘ They just copied the news from CPI(M)’s mouthpiece People’s Democracy (07.12.03).
And a whole book (Nishiuddho mot, Dwikhandito poth) was published with all the historical documents related the banning of Dwikhandito, Government’s ban order, Sunil and other writers proposals to ban the book, and the High Court verdict to lift ban on the book. The book is available in Bengal. . 
It was all over Bengali media how the writer Sunil Gangopadhyay insisted to ban another writer’s book. He was a very good friend of former West Bengal government who finally banned the book. In his interview in Aajkal, a Bengali newspaper, he said in details how he played an active role to ban the book. aajkal1 , Aajkal2
Everybody knew how Dwikhandito, the 3rd part of my autobiography was banned. Here the journalist says, ‘Writer Sunil Gangopadhyay says that he finds the sexual content of the book “distasteful” but supports the ban only on account of two pages that harshly indict Islam. Commenting on Taslima’s discussion of her sexual relationships with eminent writers, he says, “Everybody knows that adults enter a sexual relationship on the basis of an unwritten pact, which is why they close all doors and windows. If someone breaks that trust then it is a breach of contract and confidentiality which is not only distasteful but an offence”.
I would not have reminded him about his role to ban my book if he did not lie that he was against the banning of any book and he protested against the banning of my book Dwikhandito.
While I was thinking of his lies, I shared my painful experience that he sexually exploited me once, and also many other girls and women. I was a well established feminist writer, if he did not spare me, then whom did he spare? Even though he said, ‘.. if she has been sexually harassed by me, which must happened long time ago. ‘, some media and some men try to blame me for ‘lying against the saint’. They are definitely angry with me. I must not accuse a famous male writer of any abuse or anything no matter whatever his crime is. The media financed by the political party that stands against his political ideas using my statement against him, for their own political interests. Does the anti-Sunil media supports me? Not at all. They are very much against my thoughts and ideals. Sex abuse issues are human rights issues, but human rights activists are silent as usual, they are silent because it is not politically correct to support me, who challenges patriarchy and religion, especially Islam. It is an unforgivable crime to speak against the status quo in the Indian Subcontinent.
Defenders of abusers are now asking why I am complaining now, why did not I do then when it happened? As if, if I don’t share my painful experience within a certain time,I should be disqualified. As if, if I complained then, something different could have happened, as if people could have blamed him! No, the same thing would have happened. I would have been harassed again by media and men for telling the truth.
For telling the truth I was thrown out of Bangladesh, my country. For telling the truth I was bundled out of West Bengal, where I settled to live for the rest of my life. For telling the truth I have been banned, blacklisted, and banished from the lands I was born and brought up or I chose to live. I am a social and political pariah, because I tell the truth. The male dominated Bengali literary world has been so far successful to blackout me. My crime is I have told the unpleasant truth about religion and I disclosed the secrets of those sex-abuser gurus who pretend to be philosophers and intellectuals, defenders of human rights and freedom of expression.
They want us to shut our mouth. If we don’t, they get very angry with us, and they say all the bad things about us, and all the lies about us. But thousands of silent women know that I am telling their untold stories. They are not coming out of the closet. But one day they will. I will not see that to happen in my lifetime, but I am trying to create an environment for them. In the meantime I will be violently abused, I will be deported, I will almost be killed by influential and powerful misogynists.
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As a child in Pakistan, I grew up observing the lives of the women in my father’s family. Members of a type of religious nobility who claim lineage from the Prophet Muhammed, they followed the traditions of the Prophet’s wives and segregated themselves from all men outside their own blood relatives – a system known in Pakistan as pardah or “curtain”. They wore burqas or chadors when travelling outside their houses, in cars with curtained or tinted windows. On the rare occasions they walked in the streets of the village the men were expected to turn their faces to the walls as they passed. They did not go to school and many of them were functionally illiterate. There was no question of school or jobs for them. Their sole function was to marry and produce children for their husbands, chosen for them from the many cousins in the family.
My father, academically brilliant and ahead of his time, didn’t agree with these traditions and he didn’t expect his own family to live the same way as his aunts had; my mother, a college graduate with a degree in psychology and a love of all things fashionable and modern, detested the harsh customs and made sure they had no place in our lives. In Karachi, the cosmopolitan port city where we lived, I went to an American school where I excelled in every subject; I read hundreds of books and played sports with children of all nationalities and both genders. My mother instilled in me the idea that not only would I receive the best education possible, but that I would learn to be independent so that I could support myself if I had to. My father went along with this, proud of his intelligent daughter but always fearful that his more conservative family members would disapprove of my upbringing.
But no matter how visionary or open-minded my parents were, they still had to make compromises for the restrictive environment in which we lived, and I was the victim of those compromises. When I went to , the seat of my father’s family in a rural part of Sindh two and a half hours’ drive from Karachi, I played and romped like the other children, running freely back and forth between the two sections of our family house, but as I grew older, I was not allowed to leave the walls of the “family” compound for the men’s section. My father no longer took me to his farm with him, as the “ladies” of the family were not permitted to be seen by the ordinary labourers who tilled the fields and kept the livestock.
As I approached adolescence, my clothing was restricted: I couldn’t wear anything but baggy shalwar kameezes, as my skirts and shorts were forbidden from me. Back in Karachi, I continued to excel in school but my social life was curtailed: I was not allowed to go to mixed parties or sleepovers; beach trips with friends were a no-no, and permission to go on school trips to other cities in South Asia were a hard-fought battle that I didn’t always win. Whenever I asked why I wasn’t allowed to do the things that I wanted, I was told “Because you are a girl.” And no amount of crying, pleading or begging could change that.
Thanks to my mother’s support and my father’s courage to break with tradition, I went to the United States to attend Wellesley College, a private liberal arts college in Massachusetts for women. I was the first women in my father’s family to go to university, let alone leave the country for an education. Officially I earned a degree in psychology like my mother, but I received an education of a different kind: I learned about women’s rights, the fight for justice and equality, and male privilege. When I came back to Pakistan, I had words for what had happened to me and what was happening to millions of Pakistani women every day: patriarchy, chauvinism, and misogyny. My eyes were opened and what was seen could never be unseen: I was aware and vigilant about a society that thought of women as inferior in every way to men. More than that: I was angry about the injustice, and determined to raise my voice against it as loudly as possible.
So I began to speak out, by writing about women’s issues. I wrote about the need for laws against domestic violence, the need to strengthen girls’ education, the need for economic independence for women, the need to reject hijab, burqa, chador and niqab as religious requirements. I wrote about the particular horrors enacted against girls and women in Pakistan: forced marriages, dowry, bride-burning, acid attacks. Today I’m an avowed feminist, thanks to my childhood experiences, my mother’s encouragement, and my academic education in the United States and my real-world education in Pakistan, where I’ve observed how religion, culture and society oppresses Pakistan women and I witness every day how women are fighting back against their oppressors. Feminism in Pakistan is a dirty word, a sign that you’re an atheist, a Western agent, a threat to the system. I’m neither an atheist nor a Western agent, but I’m proud to be a threat to this unfair and intolerant system and I’ll keep raising my voice against this system until it changes or I die, whichever comes first.
Khap is a powerful social institution. It exists in Jat Hindu community in some states of Northern India. Some elderly men set rules for everyone. You do not follow the rules, you get severe punishment. Khap does not allow people to marry in the same gotra or clan. It is believed that millions of people living in several neighboring villages are from the same clan and they are all brothers and sisters. So the holy fatwa is, no one is allowed to marry in their own or neighboring villages. If they want to get married, they have to choose someone from some far away lands where there is no chance to have the same clan.
It’s an ancient tradition but it still continues for people in the 21st century. It is illegal in modern independent India but it is widely practiced across some regions. Another bizarre rule that Khap makes, is child marriage. Children are forced to get married. Khap believes child marriage is a wonderful protection for boys and girls from being interested in marrying anyone in the village. But when the married children grow up, they may not get interested in marrying someone in the villages but they sometimes refuse to accept their child marriages. Santara Meena refused to accept her child marriage, but Khap wanted her dead or alive. She needed police protection. 
Men and women whoever marry same clan people get thrown out of the villages or get killed. Manoj and Babli got murdered.
It is not so shocking anymore that newlywed couples get murdered for having same clan marriage. And just recently Khap issued a fatwa against women: women below 40 are not allowed to go outside after sunset, they are also not allowed to have mobile phones and not allowed to marry the one whom they love. Khap banned jeans for girls. . Khap or Khap panchayat is loudly advocating misogyny and hateful patriarchy.
Millions of people practice whatever Khap asks them to practice. There is no reason to think that only the poor and illiterate people in the villages practice the bizarre barbaric system, the rich and literate people practice it too. No matter how many academic qualifications you have received, the truth is you get easily attracted to irrationality, superstitions, inequalities and injustices if you do not educate yourself with rationalism, humanism, secularism and feminism.
A movie was made to create social awareness against Khap but who cares!
‘Growing up in Lithuania, I was completely oblivious to feminism. I had no idea something like that existed, and I was blind to the fact that I lived in an extremely misogynistic country. It all changed somewhere around four years ago, not with a direct encounter with feminism, but with a website called TV Tropes.
Since that website is mostly about taking fiction apart and charting all the recurring patterns, they do end up mentioning feminist criticisms quite a bit. The more I read that website, the more I realized how awful the treatment of women in fiction was. Once I got to the “Double Standards” page and read through all the examples, I was pretty much a feminist.
That caused me to go through such an enormous shift in perception, that there isn’t really anything I could compare it to. And as the months went on, that shift in perception made me to not only look at everything I read and watched with feminist eyes, but also to look at the world around me in a new way.
When I was little, my grandmother would often tell me of how her parents one day told her that they found a husband for her, and that she’ll have to marry him or they will throw her out of the house. So my grandmother decided to stage a protest and spent a few hours sitting out in the front yard, butt-naked, in the snow, in the middle of winter. It didn’t really work, though, and she did end up marrying my grandfather, even though he was a complete stranger to her, and nine years older than she was.
As a little girl, I always found that story really boring, and it was only after I became a feminist that I suddenly realized that my grandmother was forced into marriage, and how appalling that was. And as I kept thinking more, I remembered how my grandmother would sometimes walk around with bruises on her face, and how some kind of wall in my mind prevented me from realizing that my grandfather was beating her.
And I started to look at my parents with different eyes too. I suddenly noticed that even though my dad is unemployed, he just sits around watching TV all day, and once mom comes back from work, he starts shouting at her, and insulting her, and telling her to make him dinner. I started to see how when she returns home from working the second shift, he follows her around telling her that she’s prostitute, because only prostitutes work so late.
I’m a feminist because I want women to be free of patriarchal oppression. I don’t want women to live lives as those that my grandmother lived and my mom still has to live, but I have to admit that I don’t have much hope for the country I live in, feminism is just as non-existent around here as it ever was, and when I tried to explain feminism to my mom, she just declared “But men and women are already equal around here!”, despite the fact that there’s no “equality” in her life at all.
If the women of the world ever become liberated, it probably won’t happen in my lifetime, but I’m optimistic enough to hope that, if I ever have children, then maybe at least they will live to see it happen’.
Yes, it happens in the Indian subcontinent every year. It is a big patriarchal festival celebrated by Hindus. Men and women of all ages, of all classes and of all castes celebrate Raksha Bandhan or the bond of protection. On this auspicious day, sisters tie a silk thread called Rakhi on their brothers’ wrists and pray to God for their health and well-being. Brothers make a promise to protect their sisters from all harms and troubles.
There is no such festival where sisters promise to protect their brothers from all evil and brothers pray for their sisters’ health and well-being.
Middle class is rapidly expanding. Educated people are emerging. Technocrats are everywhere. Women are becoming more and more financially independent. But everybody will celebrate Raksha Bandhan day after tomorrow. It has been celebrated for centuries but no one says, it is not necessary to celebrate Raksha Bandhan when women are becoming educated and independent and they can very well take care of themselves. Instead of encouraging women to be strong and courageous, people celebrate Raksha Bandhan which is a symbol of women’s vulnerability. The message is, women are weak and vulnerable, so they need to be protected by men.
In reality, sisters are expected to give their inherited properties to their brothers. Many sisters are forced to stay with abusive husbands because brothers are not ready to take care of their sisters. Many sisters commit suicide for being helpless. Many widow-sisters are abandoned by their brothers and flocked to Vrindavan, a holy city where they have no other alternative but to live a miserable life and wait to die. And it is not uncommon that brothers kill sisters to save family honor. If brothers protected their sisters, India would not have become the 4th most dangerous place for women in the world.
The celebration of patriarchy is the celebration of men’s superiority and women’s inferiority. The festival is getting bigger and more glamorous every year. It is alarming.
Taliban publicly executed an Afghan woman last week. The villagers cheered and shouted joyfully while watching the execution. The woman was accused of adultery. Her crime was she was either raped or she was in love with someone.
A lawmaker saw the video of the execution. She cried for the woman. She could not accept the cruel, barbaric, unethical and inhumane practices of religion.
The men who enjoyed the killing and the woman who blamed the killers are both humans. We will be unkind or kind depends very much on our upbringings. Little boys get brainwashed to become Talibans. They do not learn anything about love and compassion. All they were provided to learn was the Quran and the Hadith. All they were asked to become was the servants of Allah and the soldiers of Muhammad.
If we want to make the world a better place, we have to stop the system that forces our children to read the books of barbarism and lies and believe everything without asking questions. If we do not inspire our children to study science and have a thinking mind, we will see the crowds of ignorant people everywhere. If we do not encourage our children to study secularism and humanism, we will not be able to stop fanaticism, caste-ism,racism, sectarianism. If we do not let our children’s interests in feminism, women’s rights, equality and justice grow, it will be difficult for us to stop violence against women, rape, sex trafficking, sexual slavery, stoning or shooting women to death.
Once upon a time widows were burned alive on their dead husband’s funeral pyres. It was believed that if a widow burn herself to death soon after her husband died, her husband would go to heaven and all his sins would be gone with the wind. Suttee or sati (“good woman” or “chaste wife”) was the Indian tradition of a widow burning herself. The practice of Sutee was banned in 1829.
‘Suttee was sometimes committed voluntarily, but cases of compulsion, escape, and rescue are known. Scattered instances of it continue to occur, most notoriously in the case of Roop Kanwar, an 18-year-old widow who committed suttee in 1987. The incident was highly controversial, as groups throughout India either publicly defended Kanwar’s actions or declared that she had been murdered.’
Religion supports widow burning.
‘The most sacred of Hindu scriptures are the Vedas, and the Rig Veda, the oldest Veda, explicitly sanctions the custom of Sati. The following famous `Sati Hymn’ of the Rig Veda has been recited during the actual immolation of the widow . Rig Veda 10.18.7 : ” Let these women, whose husbands are worthy and are living, enter the house with ghee (applied) as corrylium ( to their eyes). Let these wives first step into the pyre, tearless without any affliction and well adorned.’
Rise, come unto the world of life, O woman — come, he is lifeless by whose side thou liest. Wifehood with this thy husband was thy portion, who took thy hand and wooed thee as a lover. (RV 10.18.8)
The Garudapurana favourably mentions the immolation of a widow on the funeral pyre, and states that women of all castes, even the Candalla woman, must perform Sati. The only exceptions allowed by this benevolent author is for pregnant women or those who have young children. If women do not perform sati, then they will be reborn into the lowly body of a woman again and again till they perform Sati. [ Garuda.Purana. II.4.91-100 ]
* A sati who dies on the funeral pyre of her husband enjoys an eternal bliss in heaven [ Daksa Smrti IV.18-19 ] [ Sm.Samu p.30 ] [ 1200, p.65 ]
* According to Vasishta’s Padma-Purana, a woman must, on the death of her husband, allow herself to be burnt alive on the same funeral pyre
* Yajnavalkya, the most important law-giver after Manu, states that sati is the only way for a chaste widow [ Apastamba.I.87 ] [ 1200, p.65 ]
* The Yogini Tantra enjoins upon Brahmana widows to burn themselves on the funeral pyre of their husbands [ Yog.T. II.303-308 ]. Vaisya and Sudra widows were also allowed to do it. It was prohibited to unchaste women and those having many children. [ 1200, p.67 ]
* The Vyasa Smrti gives one of the two alternatives for a Brahmana widow, ie. either to become a sati or to take up ascetism after her tonsure [ Vyasa Sm. II.53 ] [ Sm.S. p.362 ]
Further, the Vishnusmirti gives only two choices for the widow:
Vishnu Smirti.XXV.14 : “If a woman’s husband dies, let her lead a life of chastity, or else mount his pyre”
— [ Vis.Sm. xxv.14 ] [ Clay.13 ]
Brahma is one of the main Aryan gods, being the creator of the world ( later he was identified as an incarnation of Vishnu ). One of the Puranas is named after him, the Brahma Purana. Like other Puranas, it was composed after the Vedas ( Pandits hold 4000 B.C., Indologists 700 B.C.) This scripture also sanctions sati:
Brahma Purana.80.75 : ” It is the highest duty of the woman to immolate herself after her husband “.
Long life is promised to the sati:
Brahma Purana.80.76, 80.77 : ” She [ the sati ] lives with her husband in heaven for as many years as there are pores in the human body, ie. for 35 million years.”
— [ Br.P. 80.76, 80.77 ] [ Sheth 103 ]
Vishnu Dharmasutra XXV.14 contains the statement: ” On her husband’s death, the widow should observe celibacy or should ascend the funeral pyre after him.”
Remember Rudyard Kipling’s poem The Last Suttee?
Widows are excluded from society.
There is a ceremony during the funeral of husband. Widows smash their bangles, remove their vermilion, colorful clothes and all jewelries they have been wearing. Widows have to wear simple white clothes. They are forced to shave their heads. They are not allowed to eat fish, meat, eggs, milk, onions, garlic and many different kinds of vegetable, animal products and spices. They have to fast many times a month. Widows are not thrown on the funeral pyres these days, but they are thrown on some other kinds of pyres. That is not any less traumatic.
There are more than 40 million widows in India. Most of them are ‘living dead’.
A widow’s family members would be excluded from the society if they didn’t respect to the restrictions society impose on widows. A widow is considered a bad omen, she is excluded from all auspicious events. In some cases even her shadow is considered polluting or offensive to society.
‘In India, widows are an invisible community. Although many widows are treated less harshly nowadays, they still face discrimination and neglect. People treat widowhood not as a natural stage in the life cycle of a woman, they treat it as some kind of an aberration. People accept death but do not accept widowhood. “Because somewhere in the Indian psyche, the woman’s identity is with the man and the minute he’s not there, it’s something that cannot be accepted.” Women are not considered as separate human beings. Your husband is dead, you are dead. The suffering of widows is one of the brutal consequences of patriarchy.
Shunned from society, widows flock to Vrindaban and Varanasi, pilgrimage towns to die. Young widows are often sexually exploited. Older women beg at temple gates. Some go to Ashrams where they chant prayers. For a four hour chant they can earn a cup of rice and 7 rupees( 12 cents).’
‘Hindu widows are not supposed to remarry. With little social or economic status, many become destitute. The truth is, women do not lose their dignity and basic rights when they lose their husbands. But our anti-women society do not like to think about women’s basic human rights.
What happens when a man’s wife dies? Is he treated as a bad omen? Is he excluded from all auspicious events? Does he stop eating certain food and stop wearing colorful clothes? Is he sent to a lonely place where he has nothing to do but to wait for his death? No. Men don’t get abandoned, they remarry young women and start a new life.
You can always watch Water, a great movie. The story of an eight-year-old widow.
