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Opinion: Why Are Republicans Still This Loyal to a Mar-a-Lago Exile?

 By Peter Wehner

If they don’t disown Trump, he will continue to own them.

Five years ago, during a campaign rally in Iowa, Donald Trump famously said, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.” What no one knew at the time, but what the just-concluded impeachment trial showed in vivid and at times sickening detail, is that Mr. Trump was foreshadowing something worse.

The former president didn’t stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue; he stood in the middle of the Ellipse. He didn’t use a gun; the weapons he used were his words and Twitter account. Mr. Trump didn’t commit murder; instead, urged on by their beloved leader, a mob of hundreds of Trump loyalists “stormed and occupied the Capitol, disrupting the final electoral count in a shocking display of violence that shook the core of American democracy,” in the words of The Times. As a result of Mr. Trump’s actions a theoretical person on Fifth Avenue didn’t die; five actual human beings did, with many others badly injured.

But what Mr. Trump got right was in prophesying that he could act maliciously — and even seditiously — and still maintain the overwhelming support of both his base and Republican lawmakers. Representative Liz Cheney, who bravely voted to impeach Mr. Trump, correctly said that there’s never been a greater betrayal by a president of his office and his oath to the Constitution. The impeachment trial provided overwhelming, irrefutable — and in fact unrefuted — evidence that Mr. Trump was guilty as charged. He not only incited an insurrection; he delighted in watching it unfold in all of its violence, all of its devastation, all of its horror. For hours he did nothing to stop it.

Yet in the aftermath of that, the vast majority of Republican lawmakers stood where they always have for the last four years: shoulder-to-shoulder with Donald Trump. And precisely because they have done so, time and time again, we became inured to how troubling the alliance between Mr. Trump and the Republican Party turned out to be, with Mr. Trump’s senatorial defenders (or should I say praetorian guard) — Lindsey Graham, Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, Ron Johnson and others — not only shameless and remorseless, but belligerent.

So why did Republicans, with seven honorable exceptions — Senators Mitt Romney, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Pat Toomey, Bill Cassidy, Richard Burr and Ben Sasse — profess their loyalty to a sociopath who has been exiled to Mar-a-Lago? Why do they continue to defend a man who lost the popular vote by more than seven million votes, whose recklessness after the election cost Republicans control of the Senate, and who is causing a flight from the Republican Party?

There are different, sometimes overlapping explanations. For some, it’s a matter of cynical ambition. They want to win over the loyalty of Trump supporters, who comprise a huge part of the base of the Republican Party. For others, it’s recognizing that standing up to Mr. Trump might make life quite unpleasant and even dangerous for them, exposing them to hazards that range from primary challenges to physical attack. And for still others, it’s driven by such antipathy toward the left that they will not do anything Democrats ask them to do, even if doing so is the right thing to do. These Republicans would much rather “own the libs” than side with them against a corrupt, corrosive former president. There’s also the natural human reluctance to take a stand that puts you in conflict with your own political tribe, your colleagues, your friends. And there’s this: Over the course of the Trump presidency a lot of Republicans repeatedly — sometimes daily — quarantined their conscience in order to justify to others, and to themselves, their support for an unscrupulous man.

For people who are not themselves deviant to publicly defend a person who is creates cognitive dissonance and psychological conflict. It puts people at war with themselves. But over time, one step at a time, people condition themselves to make compromises. They twist themselves into moral knots as a way to justify their stance. They create a community to reinforce their rationalizations. And with each step down the moral staircase, it gets easier.

There is a reason that in the Trump era we keep returning to Eastern European analogues. Upon taking office as president in 1991, the Czech dissident and playwright Vaclav Havel said, “the worst thing is we are living in a decayed moral environment. We have become morally ill, because we have become accustomed to saying one thing and thinking another.”

For nearly a half-decade, Republicans became accustomed to saying one thing and thinking another. The impeachment vote was the last, best chance to break decisively with Mr. Trump. Yet once again most Republican lawmakers couldn’t bring themselves to do it. Mr. Trump still seems to haunt them, to instill fear in them. More than that, however: He has become them, weaving himself into their minds and communities so seamlessly that they are no longer capable of distinguishing their own moral sensibilities and boundaries from his, as they might once have done. After the disgraceful impeachment vote, the task for Republicans hoping to separate themselves from the Trump years, which was already hard, if not impossible, became harder still.

So for conservatives who are longing for a responsible political home and for those who believe healthy conservative parties are vital to the survival of democracy, what can be done to salvage the Republican Party?

To begin with, it needs leaders who are willing to say that something has gone very, very wrong. They don’t have to dwell on it, or make it the focus of their efforts every minute, but the next generation of Republican leaders cannot pretend that the last few years were politics as they ought to be. They need to acknowledge that a sickness set in and take steps to cure it.

From that should emerge a recognition that change is essential. That means putting in place a new intellectual framework, to do for the Republican Party in the 2020s what Bill Clinton did for the Democratic Party and Tony Blair did for the Labour Party in the 1990s, which was to break them of bad habits and modernize them. The situation is not exactly analogous (historical analogies never are), but there are some instructive similarities.

This is of course easier said than done, but Republicans need to move past cable news and talk radio. They must begin, again, to rely on think tanks and journals from various wings of the party to work toward a policy agenda to meet the challenges of the modern world, as they did in the 1970s and 1980s. Republican leaders need to change the way their party thinks about itself, and therefore the way the country thinks about the Republican Party. One way to do that is for different figures to put forward their vision for a new Republican Party, to see what gains traction.

For example, Senator Romney’s Family Security Act is an ambitious policy aimed at slashing child poverty and strengthening families by reducing penalties for marriage. (It would provide a monthly cash benefit for families, amounting to $350 a month for each young child, and $250 a month for each school-age child.) There are some interesting ideas in the area of national service, including this one from the Brookings Institution’s Isabelle Sawhill and Richard Reeves, encouraging a year of national service after high school as a way to foster national unity by bringing young people of different races, ethnicities, income levels and faith backgrounds together to work toward a common purpose, but also as a pathway to college. Yuval Levin of the American Enterprise Institute is focusing his attention on ways to encourage social solidarity as a way to combat social alienation. My Times colleague David Brooks has written about this intellectual ferment on the right.

Right now all this may seem aspirational or even unachievable, but this is what has to happen if there is going to be a responsible conservative alternative to the Democratic Party. A new, post-Trump Republican Party should put in place a political infrastructure that supports conservatives in primary races who are responsible, intellectually serious and interested in governing rather than theatrics. Republicans need to talk about the country’s needs, not just the threats posed by the left. Having spread conspiracy theories and served as a battering ram against reality during the last four years, the Republican Party needs to root itself firmly in the world as it actually is. It must defend itself against QAnon and its allies whenever and wherever they present themselves, not just every once in a while. It must challenge those who want to make the Republican Party the nesting place of lunacy. None of this will be easy, and it will certainly require developing new habits of thought after the Trump era. What is even more difficult is that it will require explicitly distancing the party from the irreconcilably anti-democratic and nihilistic element of Trump’s base. While post-Trump Republicans shouldn’t go out in search of a fight, this transformation cannot be accomplished without at some point confronting hard-core MAGA supporters who have made a living through lies and intimidation.

A new Republican Party won’t prevail if it enters this political battle defensively, halfheartedly, apologetically. The Kevin McCarthy model — weak, timid, unprincipled, cowering — is a loser. For Mr. McCarthy to have gone hat in hand to Mar-a-Lago was shortsighted, to say the least. Mr. McCarthy may have thought that currying favor would keep Mr. Trump on side with the party in crucial 2022 House races, but, as nearly everyone can see by now, Trump’s team has only one member: himself. Whomever he does not dominate, he undermines or betrays; if Republicans do not disown him, he will continue to own them.

On the flip side, over the last few weeks, we’ve seen Representative Cheney, Senator Sasse and even Mr. Trump’s first U.N. ambassador, Nikki Haley, distance themselves from Mr. Trump because they recognize that his destructive narcissism can never be managed or contained.

That said, even if all the things that need to be done are done, and done well, the base of the party may still be too radicalized, too consumed by grievance, too enmeshed in conspiracy theories, too enamored with politics as blood sport — in a word, still too Trumpified — to reform. But because we’re only in the very early stages of the post-Trump presidency, as in one sense his acquittal demonstrates, it’s too early for fatalism. It would be irresponsible not to search for embers in the ashes. For half a decade, there have been far too few figures within the Republican Party who were willing to challenge Mr. Trump, to speak the truth people knew privately but hid publicly. But with Mr. Trump in temporary exile and the impeachment trial over, we’re about to see whether the Trump presidency was an aberration or a precursor, a parenthesis or part of a pattern. Was Mr. Trump’s acquittal the end of the Trump era or the beginning of something worse? Could this be the timid start of a new, post-Trump phase for the Republican Party?

I am not sure what to think, but I know what to hope.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/14/opinion/trump-impeachment-trial-republicans.html

#valentinesday2021 - Valentine's Day Special Song Feat. Sameer Dattani & Raima Sen

ہیپی ویلنٹائن ڈے -- #valentinesday2021

ضیاالدین یوسف زئی

 

ہر سال 14 فروری کو ویلنٹائن ڈے منایا جاتا ہے۔ اس کے تاریخی پس منظر کی سب سے معروف اور مقبول روایت یہ ہے کہ سلطنت روم کی دوسری صدی عیسوی کے سینٹ ویلنٹائن ایک نیک، پرہیزگار اور بزرگ مذہبی پیشوا تھے۔ ہوا یوں کہ اس زمانے میں روم کے بادشاہ کلاڈئیس دوم نے سوچا کہ غیر شادی شدہ نوجوان ہی بہترین سپاہی ہوتے ہیں۔ اس لئے اپنی حربی اور دفاعی قوت کو مضبوط بنانے کے لئے اس نے ایک شاہی فرمان کے تحت نوجوان لڑکوں کی شادیوں پر پابندی عائد کردی۔

لیکن بشپ ویلنٹائن نوجوانوں کے اس بنیادی حق کے حامی تھے اور انہوں نے نوجوانوں کو جنگوں سے بچانے کے لئے ان کی خفیہ شادیاں کرانا شروع کیں۔ شادی شدہ جوڑوں کو پھول وہ اپنے باغوں سے دیتے تھے۔ اس لئے پھول ویلنٹائن ڈے کا سب سے خوب صورت تحفہ ہے۔ بادشاہ کو جب پتا چلا تو شاہی حکم عدولی کی پاداش میں سینٹ ویلنٹائن کا سر قلم کر دیا گیا اور یوں وہ تاریخ کے صفحات میں امر ہو گئے۔ تاہم ویلنٹائن ڈے کا باقاعدہ طور پر ہر سال منانے کا آغاز چودھویں صدی کے آخر میں ہوا۔

اس مختصر کہانی کے پس منظر میں جو بات یقینی ہے وہ یہ ہے کہ ویلنٹائن ڈے کسی بھی صورت بے حیائی کا نہیں بلکہ شادیوں، محبتوں اور امن کی خوب صورتیوں کا ایک حوالہ اور علامت ہے۔ اب ویلنٹائن ڈے کے مقابلے میں اسی دن کو حیا ڈے کے طور پر منانے کا کیا تک بنتا ہے؟ کیوں کہ اس دن کی تاریخ اور پس منظر کا بے حیائی سے کوئی تعلق نہیں بلکہ سینٹ ویلنٹائن نے اسے ایک فطری اور جائز رشتے میں بدلنے کی شعوری کوشش کی تھی۔ اس لئے ہم کہ سکتے ہیں کہ یہ بے حیائی کا نہیں بلکہ محبتوں کا عالمی تہوار ہے۔

دل چسپ بات یہ ہے کہ دنیا بھر میں کسی ایسے دوسرے تہوار کی مثال نہیں ملتی جس کے رد عمل میں کوئی ریلی نکالی جاتی ہو یا اسی دن کو مزاحمت کے طور پر کسی دوسرے دن کا نام دے کر منایا جاتا ہو۔ مثلاً کرسمس، ایسٹر، دیوالی اور ہولی جیسے اہم تہواروں پر ہمارا اجتماعی رویہ خاموشی اور تعظیم کا ہوتا ہے۔ اور اسی طرح دنیا بھر کے دوسرے مذاہب کے لوگ ہماری عیدوں کے تہواروں پر یا تو ہمارے ساتھ شریک ہوتے ہیں اور یا ہمیں مبارک باد دیتے ہیں۔ آپ ذرا سوچیں اگر کل کوئی دوسرے مذہب کے لوگ ہماری مخالفت میں عید الاضحیٰ کا دن جانوروں کی قربانی کی بجائے جانوروں کے تحفظ کے دن کے طور پر منانا شروع کردیں تو ہمارا رد عمل کیا ہوگا؟

جو قارئین میرے یہ خیالات پڑھ رہے ہیں وہ میری ذات کے بارے میں رائے قائم کرنے کی بجائے، ویلنٹائن ڈے کے مقابلے میں اسی دن ”حیا ڈے“ کے منانے پر ضرور غور کریں۔ میری نظر میں اگر ویلنٹائن ڈے مغرب کی اندھی تقلید ہے تو اسی دن ”حیا ڈے“ منانا اندھی نفرت کا مظہر ہے۔ میں ذاتی طور پر محبتوں میں اندھی تقلید کو تعصب سے بھری اندھی نفرت سے کہیں بہتر سمجھتا ہوں۔ اس لئے آج کا ویلنٹائن ڈے میری بیوی تور پیکئی اور آپ سب کو مبارک ہو۔ ہیپی ویلنٹائن ڈے۔

https://www.humsub.com.pk/375834/ziauddin-yousafzai-12/ 

#Pakistan - Making Arabic compulsory

Pervez Hoodbhoy

IN every school of Islamabad every child shall henceforth be compelled to study the Arabic language from Grade 1 to Grade 5. Thereafter he or she shall learn Arabic grammar from Grade 6 to Grade 12. By unanimous vote, that’s what the Senate of Pakistan has decided. Introduced on Feb 1, 2021 as a private member’s bill by Senator Javed Abbasi of the PML-N, the Compulsory Teaching of Arabic Language Bill, 2020, will become an act of parliament once approved by the National Assembly. Thereafter it is likely to be applied across the country.

Should we citizens celebrate or be worried? That depends upon whether desired outcomes can be attained. Let’s therefore see what reasons were given by our lawmakers for the bill, one that will deeply impact many generations to come.

First, the bill states that proficiency in Arabic will “broaden the employment and business opportunities for the citizens of Pakistan” in rich Arab countries. While attraction to Arab oil wealth is understandable and has long been pursued, this reason is weak. Jobs and businesses go to persons with specific skills or those who have deliverables to offer.

Forcing students to learn Arabic won’t make them virtuous but setting good examples of moral behavior might.

Just look at who gets invited to GCC countries. Westerners having zero familiarity with Arabic but high expertise are most sought after. Indians are a distant second, getting only about 10 per cent of high-level jobs with the rest performing menial and unskilled construction tasks. Pakistanis stand still further below with only 3pc at higher levels. This is because of low professional and life skills. With the Pakistani schoolchild now to be burdened with learning yet another language, achievement levels will further deteriorate.

If the Pakistani job seeker could use his school-learned Arabic to communicate with Arabs, would it improve matters? This is unlikely. Graduates from Pakistani madressahs seeking to understand the Holy Quran spend their lives trying to master classical Arabic. And yet they have zero job prospects in the Middle East. Present enrolment in Arabic language courses and university degree programmes is therefore very low. In fact, after starting such programmes over 20 to 30 years ago, some universities later closed them down.

For the boy now in an Islamabad school compelled to learn classical Arabic, communication with Arabs in their Arabic will not be easy. In fact, the poor fellow will be quite at sea. Only modern versions of Arabic are spoken in various Arab countries, not classical Arabic. Imagine that a Pakistani lad trained in ye olde Englisch — the “proper English” of Shakespeare or the Canterbury Tales — was to land up in today’s England. He might be a source of merriment but getting a job would be tough.

Second, the bill claims that school-taught Arabic will enable students to understand the Holy Quran better and so become better Muslims. Are the bill’s sponsors not aware that, beginning with Persian in the 10th century, the Quran has undergone translation into all major languages? This was necessary because it is extremely difficult for non-Arabs to understand the Quran’s wonderfully rich and nuanced classical Arabic.

Many scholars have spent entire lives performing such monumental translations, knowing that words have meanings that subtly change with time. But even so, no two translations completely agree and sometimes different interpretations emerge. Given these difficulties, absorbing the contents of the Quran through an Urdu translation is surely much easier for a Pakistani school student.

Deeply puzzling, therefore, is the statement from the minister of state for parliamentary affairs: “You cannot understand the message of Allah, if you do not know Arabic.” If true, that massively downgrades most Muslims living on this planet. The entire Muslim population of Indonesia, Malaysia, Bangladesh, Iran, or Turkey cannot be made to understand or speak Arabic. And what of those long dead Muslims who tried hard to follow the teachings of Islam but never learned — nor tried to learn — the Arabic language?

That knowing Arabic — any version — can make one a better person or create unity is a bizarre thought. If true, the Arab states would be standing together instead of several rushing to recognise Israel even as it gobbles up the last bits of Palestine. Has the Arabic language made Arab states beacons of moral integrity, parsimony, and high thinking? Are our senators claiming that today’s Arabs are paragons of virtue?

But truly, it would be wonderful if teaching Arabic to kids, and further jacking up the religious content of education, could change students for the better. Just imagine! Future Pakistani lawyers would not be rampaging goons who destroy court property and randomly attack patients in hospital emergency wards; our students would be reading books rather than noisily demonstrating for their “right to cheat”; our political leaders would not be looters and our generals would no longer have secret overseas business franchises.

While some chase such delusions, others nervously search for their civilisational roots in some faraway land — Saudi Arabia earlier and now Turkey. Thus quite a few are drawn to Arabic. But curiously, Arabs show no interest in reviving Arabic. Their new generations are hell-bent upon modernising and moving towards English. Now for several decades, an energised Arab world has been luring American universities with large sums of money to open local campuses in GCC states.

Part of that investment is paying off. The success of Al-Amal, the UAE spacecraft that entered orbit around Mars some days ago, was officially celebrated as an Arab Muslim success. While one feels happy at this, it is really the triumph of Western technology harnessed by a few forward-looking Arabs who have learnt to speak the language of modern science. A thousand years ago that language was only Arabic. But in our epoch it is only English.

In forcing kids to learn Arabic, all those sitting in Pakistan’s Senate — with just a single exception — forgot that they are Pakistanis first and that Pakistan was made for Pakistanis. Rather than behave as snivelling cultural orphans seeking shelter in a rich uncle’s house, they need to take pride in the diversity and strength of the myriad local cultures and languages that make this land and its people.

https://www.dawn.com/news/1607107/making-arabic-compulsory

#Pakistan - Compulsory Arabic? Arabic compulsory will not be in the interest of our students and country

 

Dr Tariq Rahman

The Senate’s recent passing of a bill to make Arabic compulsory in the state schools of the federal capital raises several questions.

The Senate of Pakistan recently passed a bill which, if finally approved as law, would make the teaching of Arabic compulsory in the state schools of the federal capital. There are several questions which need to be answered in this context: which variety of Arabic will it be? what is the purpose of teaching it to the children? Will the children be overburdened if they learn a new language or not? Will they really learn Arabic well or not? How many children will learn it and who will teach it?

Let us take the first question. Arabic has several varieties. Ordinary Arabs in all Arabic-speaking countries speak their local or demotic variety of Arabic. These varieties are used in speaking informally but are not considered standard. The standard variety of Arabic, called Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), is based on classical Arabic but uses new terms, created in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to express the realities of modern life. It is based on classical Arabic which is the language of the Quran. MSA draws its vocabulary from Arabic roots (hatif, that is, caller, is used for telephone and sayyara is car) or borrows from European languages (internet and film pronounced as intarnit and feelm are borrowed from English). It is used in academia, schooling, printing, media, law and legislation. It does not vary according to the country and it is nobody’s mother tongue. Everybody has to learn it at school. In Arab sources the MSA is called al-lughat al-Arabiyyah al fusah al-Asr while the language of the Quran, classical Arabic proper, is called al-lughat al-Arabiyyah al-fusha al-turath. The short form is al-fusah. What is taught in Pakistan’s madrassas is mostly classical Arabic (al-fusah). Even the MSA is not taught much as the aim of the madrassas is simply to enable the students to read the foundational texts of Islam which are in classical Arabic. And, of course, nobody teaches demotic Arabic at all. I take it then that the type of Arabic which will be taught in schools will be classical Arabic.

Now we come to the purpose of teaching it. If the purpose is to equip the children with a skill which will enable them to converse with Arabs in the UAE or Saudi Arabia or wherever they go as adults, then they will have to learn two varieties of Arabic: the MSA and the variety of demotic Arabic spoken in the country of their sojourn. Our teachers of Arabic do not know demotic varieties of Arabic at all and they are not fully conversant with the MSA either. They know only the classical Arabic of the Quran. So, is the purpose then to enable them to understand the Quran in the original Arabic? If so, it will not be served fully. The interpretation of the Quran requires a degree of knowledge of Arabic which takes a very long time and effort. Unless one is studying only Arabic, one has to fall back on the interpretation of one’s teacher. How will the state ensure that the teacher will refrain from giving an interpretation that has a militant implication? Words like fitna, for instance, may be interpreted differently. One exegete calls unbelief fitna while another calls persecution fitna. So, if the child is told that unbelief, being fitna, must be fought till it is eradicated, how will the state prevent young people from joining groups at war with the world and even with Pakistan? Even if the children do not fall into the hands of a radical cleric, they will be exposed to much more religious controversy than they are at the moment.

Clerics, like all ideological thinkers with investment in their ways of thinking, are concerned with criticism of the beliefs of their competitors. Their concerns are with heterodoxy, error of judgment, the right beliefs, sin and heresy. We all know what happens when the concerns of the clerics are passed on to the public: focus on religious controversies takes on a new life, sectarianism increases, sub-sects and their differences become the subject matter of fresh debates, the ‘Other’ is perceived with reference to religion and sect making the lives of minorities difficult and increasing anti-India sentiment predisposing the public towards war rather than peace. Has anyone in the Senate looked at these possibilities?

Will the children be overburdened? Learning any language is an additional burden on the learners. It should only be imposed upon them if it has long-term dividends in the future. Arabic is a difficult language which takes a long time to learn and, if one does not use it and revise it constantly, one loses it in a short time. The time spent on it, or for that matter on other languages, will actually hamper the intellectual growth of children at a time when they need time and energy to study other subjects. Keeping in view the fact that school bags have been growing heavier and heavier every year and teachers give far more home-work than ever before, it would hardly be in the best interest of the children to burden them with another language to cram and forget after school.

Will teaching Arabic mean that it will actually be learned? The experience so far shows that no language the children are forced to learn is learned very well. After the language riots of Sindh in July 1972, the non-Sindhi-speaking students were asked to study Sindhi but even now they study it, if at all, only to pass the examination. This happens not only with compulsory languages the students do not really consider necessary but also with their chosen options. Even when they opt to take Persian, Arabic or some other language at the bachelor’s level, they only memorise a few passages and some words to pass the examinations.

The indigenous languages of Pakistan, which were introduced after much effort as optional subjects in schools and colleges, became means of getting easy marks. In the civil service examination too, they serve the same purpose. There is no doubt that the intention to enable students to learn the languages of this land was excellent but the execution did not match the intention. It quickly degenerated into a way out for teachers to gratify the students and ensure that their own jobs remained safe. And, for the students, as mentioned above, it was a way of improving their grades (CGPA). It is well-known that students with good marks in BA Arabic and Persian cannot read or write anything except what they crammed for their examination. And, of course, even their teachers cannot order food in an Iranian or an Arab restaurant because they are not taught modern Persian or demotic forms of Arabic.

This brings me to the last question: will all children study it or only the federal government school ones mentioned in the Senate bill? As it is, the Punjab already has a policy about teaching Arabic in government schools. As yet, KP, Sindh and Balochistan do not have a clear-cut policy in this regard. However, all seem to have agreed to the implementation of the Single National Curriculum which already imposes Arabic in some form on all schools. This means that a really large body of teachers of Arabic will be required. Where will they come from? Probably from the madrassas.

While I am all for giving employment to as many people as possible, the problem with this venture would be that all schools will have people who will regard the way of dressing up, speaking, behaving and worldview of many of our students, alien and offensive. Will the room for a lifestyle which is not dictated by conservative values decrease? Ask yourself and give an honest answer. I am sure a number of female students and young faculty will feel insecure under the frowning gaze of the quasi-clerical Arabic teachers on the campus. Moreover, this will cost a lot of money which, as we know, the education system needs in order to support better teachers of other subjects, books and up to date infrastructure.

In short, evidence suggests that making Arabic compulsory will not be in the interest of our students and country. Such solutions are kneejerk attempts by our rulers to hide behind the façade of religiosity to conceal their lack of any real vision for the people who voted them in. What we need is not a new compulsory language but better teaching in the languages we have always taught but always so badly that our children cannot express themselves in any of them with ability.

 https://www.thenews.com.pk/tns/detail/788970-compulsory-arabic

Girls Not Brides: Putting an End to Child Marriages

 

Tilyan Aslam

This story is for all those women who are grieving in silence, whose voice remains unheard, it is dedicated to every woman who goes through unbearable pain, persistent violation, gender biases, incessant oppression, consistent refusals, and battles for daily survival.

This is a heartwrenching story of an innocent young girl, Sarah who should have been aspiring for her future and enjoying her adolescence.

A tragedy led her in deep throes of miseries. This twelve years old girl belonging to Turbat, Kech – the city that I live in – fell a victim to child marriage.

Child marriages are a very common practice in Balochistan, especially in the tribal and rural areas. Disturbingly, most of the people in many societies around the world still consider marriage as the ultimate goal of a girl’s life; denying her to enjoy her youth and aspire for her bright tomorrow.

According to stats, Pakistan has the sixth-highest number of absolute child brides; women married or in a union before the age of eighteen in the world. Child marriages are reportedly more prevalent in rural areas of Pakistan.

Early marriage is a prominent cause of girl’s high dropout from schools and high death ratio who do not have enough physical strength to give birth to a baby but lose their lives.

However, what can one expect for a child without a father in a society like ours? The little girl – Sarah was raised by her single mother in her maternal grandparents’ home. Her father died when she was about five years old ever since Sarah and her mother lived with her grandparents.

A man, in his mid-thirties, sent a marriage proposal for her –  three times older than that of her age. Rishta systems are also a very common custom in many societies across the globe including Balochistan where men send proposals for girls/women through the older members of their families to arrange marriages.

As Sarah’s grandfather was bearing her expenses of food, school, and everyday living, so just to recede his burdens, he decided to accept this proposal. Sarah’s mother didn’t have a say in this matter since she was dependant on her parents and she couldn’t go against her father. No one asked or even informed Sarah about this either. Until later.

After all the rituals were done, she was married off to the elderly man. She was prone to the battle of attrition. Sarah’s carefree and insouciant childhood changed into blind panics and fears.

The terror and pain of a physical relationship after her marriage changed this normal girl into an unstable and mentally ill child. She couldn’t bear the pain of being in a sexual relationship with her husband after her marriage who three times older than that of her age.

Martial rape – an act of sexual intercourse with one without the spouse’s consent – is not even considered violence in many parts of the society, but to see the little girl’s scenario, it can be summed up as a case of domestic violence and marital rape.

The little girl couldn’t stand any of this trauma and all this led her to a major mental instability. This little girl is presently suffering from severe mental disorders. On a monthly basis, she is taken to a psychiatrist. She lives a recluse life.

In the real sense of the word, marriage (early marriage) ruined her life. It robbed her of childhood pleasures and the dreams for her youth turned into myths.

The so-called social contracts put a halt to her mental development at a very early age. She isn’t the only one, but there are so many untold stories yet to be told. There are many Sarahs who undergo this pain.

Women are chosen as the favorite scapegoat in the name of so-called social norms. Atrocities for a woman are as changing as alternating seasons, each comes with a unique range of scent and blossom.

Every day we come across an incident where either a girl is denied to go to school, or married to a man older than her, either she is a victim of violence or is killed in the name of honor. Be it anything,  we have witnessed women being treated mercilessly, we have seen women being denied and the list goes on with the atrocities that every woman undergoes.

It is high time that we stand against such traditions which have been immiserating women’s life for over centuries. It is high time that we accept the fact that a woman has a life too and she should have the freedom to live her life fully. Every woman deserves a life free of intimidation, violence, and miseries.