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This
morning I was reading an essay in the newspaper about
Mukhtar Mai, the woman from Meerwalla who was gang-raped
as “punishment” for a crime she never committed.
This story has received attention all around the world,
and has been the catalyst for some very important changes
in not only the area of Pakistan that she comes from,
but in Pakistani society in general. However, I was astounded
to read that some people consider Mukhtar a shameless
attention-seeker, who is using what happened to her as
a means of obtaining fame and money, as well as darkening
the image of Pakistan in the world media.
When Mukhtar Mai was gang-raped by
virtue of a sentence handed down by a jirga, a tribal
court that functions outside of the law, but is the basis
of most legal proceedings outside of urban areas in the
country, she had two choices, as she has explained many
times to the paper: she could either suffer in silence,
which would probably have led to her committing suicide,
or she could fight back. Some extraordinary courage in
her, some nameless fury and rage, made her choose to fight.
And fight she did, taking her rapists to court and obtaining
death sentences against several of them. But her fight
extended beyond revenge; she began to use the money and
gifts she was receiving as donations to build a girls’
school in Meerwalla and to bring a voice to the women
of her village, who had never dared to speak out before
against the injustices and cruelty they faced at the hands
of the sadists who double as “the powers that be”
in that part of the world. Next>
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