We are all Chand Bibi

Every woman who has ever been dictated to by a self-proclaimed guardian of faith, every woman who has been told to adopt others’ views on what modesty means knows what it is to be a Chand Bibi.

What we saw last week on our TV and computer screens was not simulated. It was not a documentary of a time gone by, nor was it a Hollywood movie that can be dismissed as being Orientalist and thus biased.

The spectacle, unfortunately, was reality — a reality that we have ignored for too long: the fact that people with a very demented view of religion are spreading like cancer in our country.These are men who use religion to justify hatred and misogynism. The three bearded Pashto-speaking men, who hold down Chand Bibi, a 17-year-old girl, and whip her publicly because a neighbour accused her of walking out of her house with a man who was neither her father nor her brother, are not mentally stable individuals.And yet they continue to terrorise our nation, murdering innocent men, women and children in the name of our religion.

Too many of us have been in denial for too long, writing off these men as aberrant isolated individuals in the north-west who have absolutely nothing to do with our lives. We need to think again. Swat is only 100 miles from Islamabad. And retreating into our ostrich-like behaviour is no longer a luxury we have. For in one way or another, we are all Chand Bibis.Every woman who has ever been subjected to the scrutiny of a man’s gaze, to approval from a male, his validation or even physical presence, without which we are often not respectable enough, is a Chand Bibi.

It was us as a nation that these hateful men were trying to terrorise; it was us as a nation that day that lay crying in the dirt.We must stand up for Chand Bibi because, whether we realise it or not, we are all connected.

And it is this connection, this unity of all being or Wahdat al wujud which Ibn Arabi wrote about, that makes a crime against a human a crime against God.The concept of Wahdat al wujud is enshrined in the Holy Quran which says, in Verse 5:32, that “If you save one life you save all of humanity; if you take one life, you kill all of humanity”.It is the state of interconnectedness described in this Verse that explains the relationship between God and His creation, one if studied further teaches us what a grave sin we commit every time we harm that which He has created.

For if God made us in His image, called us his ashraf ul makhlooqat and asked His angels to bow before us, if our hearts are said to be a “reflection of the Divine”, judging and then seeking to destroy each other is an incalculable transgression of the Divine will.“Do not kill women and children or an aged, infirm person”, said the Holy Prophet.

“Do not cut down fruit-bearing trees. Do not destroy an inhabited place... Do not be cowardly.”And yet it is these very sins that these people continue to commit in the name of religion. It is the essence of the message of spiritual liberty, enshrined in the Holy Quran, that they continue to desecrate.To go back to the 17-year-old girl who was flogged without a trial in Swat, an act that is in blatant disregard of our religion, we must stand up for her. We must stand up for Chand Bibi because, as Martin Niemoller wrote once,

First they came for the Communists,

and I didn’t speak up,because I wasn’t a Communist.

Then they came for the Jews,

and I didn’t speak up,because I wasn’t a Jew.

Then they came for the Catholics,

and I didn’t speak up,because I was a Protestant.

Then they came for me,

and by that time there was no oneleft to speak up for me.

We must stand up for Chand Bibi because otherwise when they come for us, there will be nobody left to stand up for us.