Malali Bashir
In 1774, Breshna, a woman from the Nasar tribe who is today
popularly known as Khadai, got married to someone from the Slaimankhail tribe.
After her marriage, a man, from her tribe, named Beeda Bara Khan
Nasar didn’t let her go back to her in-laws. This infuriated the
Slaimankhail tribe and they gathered an army of four thousand people and fought
with the Nasar tribe in Zhob in southeastern Afghanistan. The feud
started on the second year of Timur Shah Durrani’s reign and lasted for
almost two centuries (1774-1951). The feud that was started by men because of
men, today after two centuries, is blamed at Khadai. Khadai is considered the
source of bringing bad luck, adversity and shame to the families involved, and
is identified as the cause of the feud. And that is why when the Afghan
mothers swear at young daughters for misbehavior, they often call them
“Khadai”. Her story is an example of how Pashtun women have suffered from the
social guilt of something called bringing shame to the family. Among Afghans,
this phenomenon is called sharam.
Sharam is the English equivalent of shame
or disgrace. This term has usually been used in cases where honor is involved
in the Afghan society. When the honor of a person, family or tribe is
jeopardized due to any kind of conflict of interest between individuals, the
person causing the disrespect might be declared an outcast. The family or the
tribe might disown such a person or not treat him/her a part of the family. To
avoid bringing sharam to their families, men are usually expected to not
involve in crimes such as theft, fraud, murder, and other criminal or negative
behavior. An example can be sexually harassing women, such as by staring at
them or following them; this might result in complaints from the victim’s side,
and the harasser could thus cause disgrace to his family.
The culture of avoiding shameful acts has backfired in different
matters on the very people who abide by it. A person’s fear of causing sharam
for his/her own personality and his family or tribe has limited or almost
blocked the ways for people to liberate themselves and express freely that they
have suffered from injustice, in most cases, with the hands of their own
relatives.
Often times, women are the primary targets of this culture of sharam,
a culture comprised of two sides of the same coin. A woman who speaks up
against the injustice she has to endure or may have experienced is looked down
upon in the community for either complaining or for being too “liberal” or
“shameless” (be sharam) by disclosing the realities that should have
remained secret. These be sharam women include those who say “no” to a
forced marriage or choose husbands for themselves, women who confront their
husbands over infidelity or second marriages, widows choosing to remarry out of
their deceased husbands’ families, women who ask for their part of the property
shared with their male relatives, women who choose not to live with their
in-laws while their husbands are away abroad to earn living for the whole
family, and women who ask for divorce. Such women’s names, such as Khadai’s,
who is considered to be the cause of a two-centuries-long feud, are used as
negative metaphors or as examples for cautioning young girls. On the other
hand, if a woman silently bears all the injustice, especially domestic
violence, and ignores her basic rights, she is praised for being a woman of
character, tolerance and source of pride for her male relatives. A Pashtun
woman is called asli Pustana-real Pashtun woman when she goes through
much in her life without complaining and opts for not changing her own
situation when she has an opportunity to do so.
There have also been instances of the lives of women in my village
where they have been praised for keeping calm and quiet when faced with
injustice from their relatives. People praise and refer to them as asli
Pashtanay i.e. real Pashtun women, when they not only quietly suffer in
their lives but also show being content during their adversities. Wana (not her
real name) died of a heart attack in 2003 when, after trying in vain to become
pregnant for fourteen years, her husband decided to remarry. Even though she
did not like the fact that she had to share her whole life and most importantly
her husband with another woman, she was celebrated as a heroine throughout the
village for going out to ask for the hand of her husband’s second wife. Wana
was a victim of depression, anxiety and finally a heart attack that took her
life, just so she could keep the honor of her family, the name of her father,
and the respect of her husband and be called an asli Pushtana.
A twenty-three year old man from Kabul in Afghanistan who lived and
worked in another city said that he was angry at his father for his decision to
bring a second wife home. When the man’s mother came to know that he was angry
at his father for remarrying, she called him and asked him to not only call and
talk with his father but also send him the required amount of money so he can
hold his second marriage ceremony. The man says his mother argued that it was a
huge sharam for her and the whole family to start a brawl within the
family because of her husband’s second marriage. She had told her son that
there were so many enemies of her husband and his family and people were
jealous of his status and position in the society; in order to maintain that,
she could endure the miseries and disloyalty of her
husband-of-more-than-two-decades and not bring sharam upon the family
that could cause their jealous enemies some satisfaction of witnessing distress
and conflict among the members the envied family. She was ready to deny her own
rights and let her husband exploit her stand regarding the people jealous of
her and her husband’s life and position.
Apparent
from the above examples, women are held responsible for anything that goes
wrong within relations and families. They therefore are very cautious about
their status and character in the household and in the tribe so as not to cause
any harm to the name of their families by being the reason of sharam for
them. This is the main reason of discrimination and acceptance of violence
against women in the society, the reason for nurturing social stigmas and
paving ways for incidents of violence, such as rape, that go unreported. Moreover,
women have been denying and sacrificing their own basic human rights in order
to save the honor of their families in the society. They have created an
environment where quietly becoming a victim is deemed noble. They are
lured into believing that they are honorable and decent if they tolerate
injustice, that they are responsible for the honor and good name of their
families, that they are, in fact, the ones to be blamed when anything goes
wrong in family matters.
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