Trying to Change Rules of Engagement in Pakistan

Shamaila and Wamiq fell in love and decided to wed despite her parents’ objections. One hot day in May, she and her sweetheart signed the formal contract that is the centerpiece of the Muslim ritual of marriage.

It should have been the beginning of a happy union between the 19-year-old Lahore student of nursing and the accountant eight years her senior. But it wasn’t.

In one of the handful of hotly disputed cases about a woman’s right to wed the man of her choice now roiling overwhelmingly Muslim Pakistan, Shamaila Munir’s father has gone to court to insist that under Islamic custom, his daughter, although legally an adult, must marry a man he approves. And so far the judges have agreed.

On Sept. 26, Wamiq Mumtaz, the unhappy bridegroom, was arrested and thrown into Lahore’s squalid Central Jail, accused of kidnapping Munir “for the purposes of sex.”

His bride, five months pregnant, pale and suffering from low blood pressure, has fled to the safety of a women’s shelter.

At a time that should be among the most joyous in her life, the young woman fears that her parents will try to abduct her and abort her unborn child.

“Every time my parents come to see me, they tell me, ‘See things our way or we’ll not only have Wamiq kept in prison but beaten up,’ ” said the gentle, soft-voiced woman. “According to the idea I have of Islam, I haven’t done anything wrong at all.”

For Pakistan’s small but vocal--and courageous--band of women’s rights activists, Munir’s case and similar marriages being disputed by the brides’ parents are a benchmark issue that bares the generally second-class place of women in this society, whatever the laws on the books say.

“If we are to go by the court’s position, it would make women the slaves of men,” said Shahtaj Qizilbush, one of the founders of the Lahore-based Women’s Action Forum. “We women in Pakistan have come to feel that for every two steps forward we achieve, we are then forced to take two steps backward.”

Pakistan has a female prime minister, Benazir Bhutto, a female ambassador to Washington, a woman in charge of state television and prominent women in numerous other fields. Yet the lot of most women here remains one of decided submission to parents or husbands.

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The marriage cases have been seized upon by some Muslim mullahs in Punjab, Pakistan’s most populous and politically important province, as a vehicle for pushing their vision of a genuinely Islamic society. Under proper Muslim practice, they contend, a woman of any age may marry only with the consent of a wali, or male guardian.

A woman’s father, or even her brother, should decide the best match for her, even if she is legally an adult, fundamentalist clerics and their sympathizers contend. “The house of a father is always the safest place for a daughter,” Malik Mohammed Nawaz, an attorney in a case similar to Shamaila Munir’s, told a Lahore court earlier this year.

“It is the duty of a father to feed, educate and arrange for suitable partners for his children,” Nawaz said. “A marriage without the consent of the guardian should be regarded as an invalid one.”

Such an interpretation is flatly at odds with Pakistani law, women’s rights activists say, and also may have no justification in Islam’s holy texts.

Enacted in 1961, Pakistan’s Muslim Family Laws Ordinance allows any woman 16 or older to marry and makes no mention of a wali or the necessity of his approval. According to Muslim scholars, Imam Abu Hanifah, the 8th century founder of the school of Islamic jurisprudence that is followed in Pakistan, likewise decreed that an adult female could marry any person of equal social status without her parents’ blessing.

Some other Muslim jurists, citing the hadith, or reported sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, have ruled that a wali’s consent is a must for a woman of any age. But Abu Hanifah decided that those hadith referred only to minors, professor Rafi Ullah Shabab, a Pakistani scholar, noted in a recent article in the Friday Times weekly newspaper in Lahore.

Lahore’s wali marriage cases have once again underlined Pakistan’s difficulty in reconciling modern concepts of sexual equality and human rights with traditional social mores and an increasingly militant undercurrent of Islamic fundamentalism.

In neighboring Afghanistan, the Taliban, the Islamic militia that now controls most of that country, have enacted measures that bar women from working or studying. “These things only encourage the mullahs in our country,” Qizilbush said.

In most Pakistani families, marriages are still arranged by the parents. More likely than not, the intended bride and bridegroom do not know each other and have no opportunity to become acquainted before their wedding. The bride’s formal consent is required, but few daughters, if any, dare oppose their parents’ choice.

According to Munir, her father, an employee of Pakistani state railways, originally engaged her to Mumtaz but changed his mind and wanted her to marry someone he thought was a better prospect.

By then, however, the two had met and fallen in love. So they decided to elope.

On April 25, a Lahore magistrate recognized the couple’s right to marry, and the sweethearts sealed the marriage compact before a Muslim priest May 2.

Infuriated at such defiance by the oldest of his five children, Munir lodged a complaint with the police over the supposed kidnapping of his daughter and the commission of an act of sin. To escape the police, the newlyweds hid out in stifling heat in a friend’s single-room apartment on the top floor of a Lahore house. They then stayed with friends in the southern seaport city of Karachi and later in Murree near Islamabad, the capital.

On Sept. 26, when they appeared in court in Lahore, Mumtaz was arrested. Three days later, a judge ruled that their union had been a “runaway marriage” and that Mumtaz kidnapped the younger woman for purposes of “moral turpitude.” The judge refused to grant bail.

Today, Munir is gnawed by worry and guilt over her husband’s uncertain fate. “I’m in a nice place and living comfortably,” she said during an interview in the pleasant suburban home that houses the Dastak women’s shelter. “Poor Wamiq is in prison. I have tried to persuade my parents that what has happened has happened. But I didn’t succeed.”

The day of Mumtaz’s arrest, the Lahore High Court ruled that investigations of adultery launched against two other Muslim women, Shabina Zafar and Ayesha Ijaz, who also married without the consent of a male guardian, had been “rightly” filed and that police could carry them to their “logical conclusion.”

If convicted of adultery under laws enacted by the military regime of former dictator Gen. Zia ul-Haq as part of his campaign to “Islamicize” Pakistan, the women could be sentenced to 100 lashes with a whip and then stoned to death. According to human rights activists here, however, such a sentence has never been carried out.

The wali controversy exploded earlier this year when Saima Wahid, the 22-year-old daughter of Abdul Wahid Ropri, a wealthy Punjabi industrialist and leader of a right-wing Muslim sect, eloped with a college lecturer.

They were married Feb. 26. When her parents found out, Wahid said, she was beaten, injected with drugs and confined to her room for two weeks. Yet her love for the man she married, she said in a statement faxed to Pakistani journalists, remained “more important than money or anything.”

Wahid, a star student who had begun studying for a master’s degree in business administration, managed to escape over the wall of her parents’ home and took a taxi to the office of a prominent human rights lawyer, Asma Jahangir, another founder of Women’s Action Forum.

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In April, the bride’s father, uncles and several armed companions showed up at Jahangir’s firm and tried to drag her away, but they were stopped by police.

“They preached Islam, but their own acts were against the teachings of the religion,” Wahid told Pakistani journalists. A Lahore tribunal later ruled she could live at the Dastak shelter while her case was being decided, but it barred her from seeing her husband.

According to Wahid, her rich and influential father arranged for the arrest and incarceration of her husband for four days. “They also secured Arshad’s [her husband] signatures on divorce papers at gunpoint,” she told local journalists. “The paper was written by my father.”

Beena Sarwar, the weekend editor of the News, a Rawalpindi-based daily, has written, “In the final analysis, [Munir’s] rebellion is a threat not just to her father but to all parental authority in a traditional, conservative milieu, just as it is a threat to all those families who want their women to conform to values that threaten the universal principle of gender equality.”

Wahid, like Munir and several other young Pakistani women who married without their fathers’ consent, is now in matrimonial limbo, waiting for the courts to rule on whether her marriage is legal.