In 2016, Pakistan was rocked by the ‘honour’ killing of its first internet celebrity. Sanam Maher’s book, extracted below, tells the story of a poor village girl who, in death, has become a defiant symbol for women’s freedom.
It takes a little over two hours to drive from Multan, a city in southern Punjab, Pakistan, to the village of Shah Sadar Din, and the first time the journalist Sanam Maher made the journey, her eyes widened at every turn. In Dera Ghazi Khan, a town close to the village, none of the faces of the women she saw on the streets were visible. Some wore what looked like black ski masks with slits for their eyes. Others were covered by burqas with no eye-slits at all and so extensive that she felt half naked under her own dupatta (scarf). A thin funnel rises from the top of this kind of burqa: a device to allow air inside so that the wearer does not suffocate. Her contact in the town, noticing her staring, mentioned a place not far away, where the tribal belt of Balochistan province starts: the women there, he told her, were not given shoes. She was confused. Why not? “You’ll never look at any man if you’re scared of where your naked foot might fall when you leave your home,” he replied impatiently, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world.
Maher, who is based in Karachi, was in Shah Sadar Din to investigate the life and death of Fouzia Azeem, AKA Qandeel Baloch, Pakistan’s first social media celebrity and the woman some like to describe as its Kim Kardashian. Baloch was born here, the daughter of a poor family, and when she was murdered on 15 July, 2016, her body was supposed to end up in the village’s brown river, a spot well known for being the final resting place of women who have died at the hands of their relatives in so-called “honour” killings. On the day in question, however, there were too many people around to manage this (another villager had died; crowds of mourners were gathering). Baloch’s mother found the body at home; her father informed the authorities. When the police arrived, Baloch was still lying where she had been drugged and asphyxiated, in a bedroom at the small house that she rented for her parents in Multan. She was just 26.
“Visiting Shah Sadar Din was a huge culture shock for me,” says Maher, whose book about the case, A Woman Like Her, is published in the UK next month (it has already caused something of a sensation in south Asia). “The women were so completely covered: I’d never seen that anywhere that I’d lived or worked. But it’s important to say straight off that, though this is typical of south Punjab, it has nothing at all to do with religion. These [dress codes] are cultural diktats, just as honour killing and other forms of violence against women are cultural diktats. This is men wanting to control how the women around them live.
”Maher had become interested in writing about Baloch because she felt that her life was a good, if rather extreme, example of the tensions that currently exist for the young in Pakistan; of the difference between where they find themselves in society, and where they would like to be. As she puts it: “My generation is connected to the world in ways that previous generations never were, and because of that we aspire to live and to behave and dress in certain ways. Yet we’re also rooted in a physical space that doesn’t necessarily allow for those aspirations.” But now, in Shah Sadar Din, she saw something else. “I was amazed by Baloch’s gumption. When I went to her village, it struck me almost for the first time just how big a deal it was for a woman to get out of that situation.
“I didn’t want to put her on a pedestal in my book; I want people to make up their own minds about her. But I remain amazed by her, and it is very cool to be getting messages from readers across Asia telling me that, though they’d begun by wondering why I wanted to write about someone they saw as trashy, they now have real compassion for her.”
Qandeel Baloch first came to public attention in 2013, when she auditioned for the reality singing show, Pakistan Idol. Though she wasn’t chosen by the judges, who mocked her high-pitched voice, her performance – and the tears she supposedly shed on being eliminated – soon went viral. Thanks to this, she began to pick up occasional media work: modelling jobs, appearances on chat shows, gigs plugging products on her Facebook page. But how to sustain people’s interest? As a young woman with few contacts, no money and not much obvious talent, her only option was to exploit social media, something at which she turned out to be highly adept. In 2015, for instance, a scrappy but rather pert 20-second video she made of herself known as How I’m Looking? resulted in her inclusion in Google’s list of the top 10 most searched for Pakistanis online.
There are more than 44 million users of social media in Pakistan, but the addicts among them are (this is the same the world over) easily bored. People scroll and scroll, and then move on. Baloch had no choice but to repeatedly up the ante if she wanted her followers to keep talking about her, and if this meant pushing against the boundaries of what was acceptable in Pakistan, it was a risk she was willing to take; opprobrium, after all, was just another form of fame. In October 2015, when Imran Khan, the former cricketer who is now Pakistan’s prime minister, announced the end of his second marriage, Baloch launched an online campaign to become wife number three (every TV channel screened her “press conference”). The following February, she released a message in which she denounced those conservatives in Pakistan who regarded the celebration of Valentine’s Day as un-Islamic. In March, she offered to perform a striptease for Shahid Afridi, the captain of the Pakistani national cricket team, if the side beat India in the World Twenty20 Cup. Finally, in April, she appeared on a comedy news show with a 50-year-old mullah, Mufti Abdul Qavi.
The cleric, something of a media star himself, did not rise to the bait offered by the show’s presenter, who asked him what he thought of her offer to Afridi (he also wondered aloud if striptease might not be a useful weapon in the national effort to deradicalise Islamic militants). But Qavi did say that he would like to meet Baloch again the next time he was in Karachi, where she was living by then. It isn’t clear, now, which of them made sure his seemingly throwaway request became a reality, but what we do know is that in June, Baloch released images of a meeting with the cleric that had taken place in a hotel room. In one, she poses in Qavi’s distinctive cap, her mouth open in a wide ‘O’ that suggests a certain disrespectful naughtiness on both their parts. In a short video, meanwhile, Qavi can be heard announcing that he intends, in the future, to offer her religious guidance.
posted by f.sheikh