Daily Times

Tahrir Square was the focal point of the 2011 Egyptian revolution against the then president Hosni Mubarak. During the protests, the detained female protestors were subjected to forced ‘virginity tests’. The tests were intended to degrade the protestors. “They tortured me, labelled me a prostitute and humiliated me by forcing on me a virginity test conducted by a male doctor while my body was fully exposed and many security men watched,” says Samira Ibrahim of Egypt.

This came to mind with a recent misogynistic incident where the JUI-F did not allow female reporters to cover the ‘Azadi march’. In 2014, PTI women supporters were harassed in multiple gatherings during their ‘Azadi march’.

Historically, women are more inclined to furtherance and saving of life and less to destruction and cruelty. It is in Egypt where the oldest record of the world literature exists; it is the spurning of a governmental decree. Pharaoh ordered the midwives to kill all male newborn babies immediately on delivery. “But the midwives feared God and did not do as the King of Egypt commanded them but saved the man children alive.” This oldest instance of conscientious disobedience concerns a case of genocide. In our context, however, what is of interest is the absence of violence; the appeal to a higher duty is very clearly expressed.

A woman is also the main figure in the Greek prototype of civil disobedience. Antigone, who despite King Creon’s strict prohibition, buried her brother, who died as a traitor. There was no violence but an appeal to a higher authority. “Nor did I deem,” she affirms in the Sophocles tragedy, “that a moral man, couldst override the immutable, unwritten laws of heaven.” That both the cases involve heroines is not accidental, and if this has hitherto been neglected, it only proves that the male scholarly world has no eyes for it. Women are largely outside the power structure; on the whole, they belong to the oppressed class of this earth.

Historically, women are more inclined to furtherance and saving of life and less to destruction and cruelty

Lysistrata is a comedy by Aristophanes, which equals Shakespeare’s The Tempest in profundity, and excels it in ambiguity, or perhaps in un-ambiguity. As the war between Athens and Sparta goes on endlessly and senselessly, the women of the two cities conspire to abstain from intercourse with husbands until peace is concluded. At Birmingham, England, wives of motorcar workers on strike have been reported to shut out their husbands from their bedrooms in order to make them disgruntled and return to factories. Athenian women occupy the Parthenon, a temple where the public treasury with the war chest is housed, a kind of Fort Knox. It is the ‘first sit-in in history’. In this revolt too, the intention is to protect and rescue human values, and to call a halt to barbarous devastation. The women successfully ward off the police who try to eject them from the Parthenon. “What did you expect, you fool?” they tease the magistrate who led the attack on them.” Was it unknown to you that we women too can be raging?”

Twenty years after the Lysistrata, Aristophanes wrote The Female Parliament. The theme is that women are fed up with the male mismanagement of the city. They disguise themselves as men, and early in the morning, long before the bulk of men get up, appear in the legislative assembly. They move that the government be handed over to women and, of course, the motion is carried.

In his publication A Certain World, W H Auden suggests that males are so ridiculously jealous of one another that with modern machinery at their disposal this is now a real threat to the survival of human race. “Today out phallic toys have become too dangerous to be tolerated: I see little hope for a peaceful world until men are excluded from the realm of foreign policy altogether and all decisions concerning international relations are reserved for women.”

At the time of the partition of 1947, there was a single university in the entire united India that offered a PhD degree in music. It was the University of Punjab, Lahore. That music department was closed after the partition. In the 1950s, women could be seen riding bicycles wearing shorts in Lahore. But gradually, the milieu degenerated to a parochial and misogynist behaviour. Today, woman is an alien. Despite being active in almost all private and public departments, she finds herself marginalised. And it is this very behaviour that we witness in aimless dharnas or sit-ins where wily politicians with vested interests assemble naive people. It is a manifestation of the collective downfall of decency and gender equality.

The writer is a freelancer