The essay that became Aurat Raaj. Which story do you tell, when every side already believes its own?
When I started writing about the Pakistani social media star Qandeel Baloch for a German audience, I didn’t know which narrative to share. The one I believed before she died — a young, lonely, bored woman in a Karachi room, posting ridiculous videos, promising a “striptease” if our cricket team beat India? A jester entertaining the salivating men of Pakistan?
Or the one I learnt after she was strangled by her own brother — allegedly incited by a popular religious scholar whose lecherousness she had exposed weeks earlier? The story of an abused girl from rural poverty who transformed every misfortune into a bold, liberal feminist taking on the hypocrisy of the men hiding under the guise of “muftis”? Or the one I learnt even later: that her real name was Fouzia Azeem, married off at seventeen to a man who abused her, took her son, and left her no choice but to run. Or the story my own family believed — that she was a “slut” who dishonored Pakistan, Islam, family, and deserved to die. Or the one where friends called me dishonorable for fighting her case — loudly at dinner tables, quietly on my Facebook.
Her story was a sieve through which the “shameful” and the “shameless” of a whole country were sifted.
Everyone believed their own narrative, because her story kept evolving — ricocheting from victim to villain and back. No one knew which act was “shameless,” but we fought each other like crazed animals for days. Then, like always, both sides were quieted by another bomb blast, another rape, another killing horrific enough to make hers look like a deep, peaceful sleep.
But her death put Pakistani women like me in a psychosis. The more her narrative progressed, the more this “dishonorable” woman appeared to be exactly like us. The five-star coffee shop where I wrote every day is where the waiters told me she sat too. I found pictures of her in a red bikini at the pool I swim in — in my covered, modest black burkini. On TV, in a swimsuit and a dupatta I’m sure the channel forced on her, she asked the pot-bellied host eyeing her: “I like to bike — what’s so wrong with biking?” We were both invited to the Lux Style Awards. Her on stage, me behind it. Our trajectories the same, our haunts similar — yet I was her “storyteller” and she had become my “story.”
My good luck was affluence: good schools, trusted chauffeurs, private gyms — and a father whose “honour” doesn’t require protection by his daughter. I am alive because I led my revolution through a lacey veil of hypocrisy.
Strip those privileges away — I too would be a story like Qandeel.
Her real fall from “grace” came when she walked into the hotel room of that religious scholar, mockingly put on his cap, and paraded with a selfie stick — a complete exposé no one had managed in decades. The religious cried conspiracy. The liberals cheered. Feminists like me sat confused, unable to box her: revolutionary, or setback with exposed thighs? Before anyone had an answer, we woke up to news of her honor killing. She was 26.
Suddenly there was beautiful artwork of her defiant eyes. Bold women posted that they too were sexual and proud. The other side shamed us for making “a slut” our role model. But this killing reminds me: women like Qandeel are not silenced in Pakistan by outsiders. They are silenced by those closest to them. She could be alive today if her story went untold, the hypocrisies uncovered went covered, the mullahs went unshamed. But that’s not the woman she was. And that’s the woman I hope to be.
The one silver lining: the state invoked Section 311, so her legal heirs could not pardon her brother — the rare case where the police, not the family, became the complainant. As the documentary maker Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy told me then: when a father kills his daughter, his wife forgives him; when a brother kills his sister, his parents forgive him. Not this time. I hope her brother does not become the forgiven, her frail father the forfeited — and Qandeel’s story does not become forgotten.
read the bbc's coverage of her murder →
condensed from the essay written for Kulturaustausch, october 2016 — three years before Aurat Raaj & RAAJI reached 200,000 women and girls. back to about →