Aisha Fayyazi Sarwari

Imran Khan has never has let a chance pass to flaunt religion, which he conveniently wore on his sleeve: the multiple prayer breaks from the dharna (sit-in) stage, the excessive call for religion in politics, the statement about the Taliban being our brothers, the same Taliban that stand to wipe out women’s rights and girl […]

Pakistan’s foreign office has reacted to the hit US televison show Homeland rather negatively for calling the country a “hellhole”. It has also reacted to the atrocious killing of 100 and more of its children in Peshawar by asking the national media to show more palatable stories on television, especially during bedtime. A lawmaker explained […]

“The common thing between the reactions to these events is our humanity,” Naela Chohan, Pakistan’s High Commissioner to Australia, said this in Canberra. A few feet away, hidden behind a small crowd of residents of this city and their children, I stood holding a candle, Allama Iqbal’s Lab pey ati hei dua (a prayer on […]

Although twice as more men commit suicide in Pakistan than women, it is almost with certainty that one can say the women that do are married. This is according to the ‘The pattern of suicide in Pakistan’ by Murad Moosa Khan and Hashim Reza in the journal, The Journal of Crisis Intervention and Suicide Prevention. […]

Junaid Jamshed has been left very confused. On the one hand, being part of the Tableeghi Jamaat and being an evangelist is about being as misogynistic as possible, in fact it is the cannon fodder for all talks, moots and sermons: the status of women being well below that of men, the ways to enforce […]

If you have not been slapped, punched, shoved or physically threatened by a male relative or even a stranger, you are one of those one in 10 women who just escaped being part of a harrowing epidemic in Pakistan. Go celebrate. Go celebrate that you will never know what it feels like to leave your […]

When a report comes out naming the worst perpetrators of oppression of any sort, expect Pakistan to take a sizable share of the cake. Picture this: 2,058,200 has been the number revealed by the 2014 Global Slavery Index of Pakistanis under modern slavery. Can we take a moment to imagine how many oppressors that makes? […]

Some 150,000 schools across Pakistan commemorated I Am Not Malala Day. Walks and press conferences lit up the educational landscape of this country. It blacked everything else out though. It darkened everything that Malala stands for: education of the girl child, education for all, books over terror, peace and diplomacy over war, awareness against drone […]

Walking the streets in Georgetown, DC and looking at the immaculate taste in shop fronts, the energy of young students and the general order, I feel so far removed from its grandeur because of what recently happened back home: brick kin workers Shyman Bibi Urf Shamar, her husband, Sajjad Nasir Zurjah Nazir Nasir and their […]

As if it were not bad enough that Pakistan has always shown a dismal performance when it comes to the gender gap, there is more bad news: it is getting worse, not better, over the years. Either these indicators are being ignored by the people responsible for this sector or there is no will to […]