Mukhtar Mai

  b. 1972 | Pakistani political activist

At The Bottom

— 2002

By custom, the young woman would soon be obligated to take her own life.

“In the name of the Koran, release me!” the woman screamed.  Four men stripped the 30-year-old woman as a group of onlookers danced with joy.  All were members of a tribe in the remote Pakistani village of Meerwala, and they had been given permission by the village council to rape the woman as punishment for an affair her brother had been accused of having with a high-status woman.  (By custom, family members of someone accused of a crime or social transgression could be punished for those acts.)  After her clothes had been torn from her body, the victim, whose birth name was Mukhtar Mai, was   raped by all four men before being forced to walk home naked.  Hundreds of villagers witnessed her humiliation; all of them knew that by custom, the young woman would soon be obligated to take her own life.  In the tribal culture of rural Pakistan, a young woman subjected to such an attack was treated as an outcast.  Her stigma would follow her for the rest of her life, and she would never be deemed suitable for marriage.  As Mukhtar Mai wrote in her memoir, tribal culture allows men to treat women as objects of “possession, honor, or revenge.  They marry or rape them according to their conception of tribal pride.”  Rape, she explained, “is the ultimate weapon:  it shames the other clan forever.”