In 2007, 403 women were killed in her Pakistani province alone.
Stop Honor Killings reported:
In the male-dominated arena of Pakistani politics, one female legislator is making a name for herself by challenging the centuries old traditions of her rural constituency that she says are holding back progress.Nafisa Shah (pictured), 40, a legislator from the Pakistan People’s Party in Sindh province, is one of 72 women who were voted to Pakistan’s 342-seat National Assembly in February.
Her areas of expertise include honour killings and karo-kari, a traditional, feudal custom in which couples found in, or more often merely suspected of, adulterous relationships are killed by family members as a way to restore their honour.
The law takes a lenient view of this “crime of honour”, which often leads it to be abused.
In 2007, 403 women were killed in Sindh province alone, including 26 young girls and 196 women condemned under karo-kari, according to the Aurat Foundation, a Pakistani non-governmental organisation...
“Feudalism is holding back progress in the province,” said Ms Shah, a former award-winning journalist. “The way power is organised in Sindh must change; tribal identities force and reinforce the power of the chief.
Haris, or the landless tillers in Sindh, are badly oppressed, she said. “Murder, as a result of indebtedness, property disputes, and for honour, is a big issue,” she said.
...Her first detailed story on honour killings in 1993 won the All Pakistan Newspaper Society award, and became the focus for a postgraduate degree in social anthropology at Oxford University. She put that thesis on hold to campaign for the 2008 elections.
“It’s not enough to call this a cultural practice; honour killings are a form of power. These are not extra-judicial killings but fit within the framework of the law. Immediate kin have the right to negotiate, and the legal power to condone murder in the family,” Ms Shah said.
Ms Shah called for the laws that allow honour killings to take place to be repealed.
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ReplyDeleteGodspeed Nafisa Shah..
i will pray for her (and all those
caught in that uncivilzed web)..
==
That goes for me as well!
ReplyDeleteWell I ain't gonna pray for her! I'm gonna enlist!
ReplyDeleteWait....I've already enlisted five times.
ReplyDeleteOh well, too bad, cause I believe in honor killings! I believe that it's very honorable to shoot those bastards so someone new can come in and upgrade their culture to a civilized level.
Honor killings have always been a way of life in tribal countries and Muslim societies. Certainly, with a more Islamist government replacing Saddam in Iraq, there have been a flourishing of honor killings, especially in the south - Basra being a hot spot, but also in Iraqi Kurdistan.
ReplyDeleteFor those of you who don't know about Iraqi history, even Jews engaged in honor killing in Iraq likely up to the 1930s, mainly rural Jews who were Bedouinized.
For Urbanized Jews, who at one time constituted 1/3 of Baghdad's population - women who dishonored their families were sometimes thrown out on the streets or exiled to relatives. The Muslims of Baghdad resorted to harsher methods such as honor killings to deal with the women who had shamed their family.
The biggest shame was the lost of virginity before marriage.
Loss of virginity is a big no-no in stricter Islamic societies because of the concept of bride price. The bride or bride's family is paid an amount of money for agreeing to marry the man, in return she must be a virgin.
ReplyDeleteIn Afghanistan, it can be as much as 10 - 20 thousand dollars for a bride price, and considering the minimal standards of income, Afghani men don't marry until they are 27 or 28, which LOL means they are doing the Man-Boy love thing.
They're bonking their 13 year old and younger male cousins, because of course, women must keep their virginity.
So, women are treated a piece of property in these cultures - she gets money - the men get a virgin.
And virginity has to be proven.
Among the Jews of Baghdad, up until about the 1920s, the man would consummate the marriage and then run out of the bedroom with the symbolic bloodied white cloth to show both sides of the family members.
Of course this still happens with Arabs in Iraq today, and other Muslim countries - In rural Uzbekistan, they hang out like a bloodied white flag
post-Honeymoon - people have said it looks like the Japanese Rising Sun.