I have thoughts and realizations hitting me almost every hour that I'm spending in Pakistan. The impressions of so many concepts that I grew up with and carried on with me all the way through my twenties are now being shattered in front of me and I like it. I feel like I had such rigid concepts of certain things and now I see the nuances .. it almost seems like i was either sleeping last time I was here(3 years ago for just 3 weeks) or too naive and inexperienced to see the broad picture of things. Or immature.
Allahu'alim but I feel like it is making me grow.
I feel a pain somewhere inside me for some things which are so painfully clear once you stay away from Pakistan for a long time.
The honor and rights of women in general are fairly non existant. I actually interviewed the cleaning lady who works in my grandmother's house and some things she said were mildly shocking.
She has no goals in life. These are her own words.
Let that sink in. She has NO GOALS in life.
She is resigned to the fact that she must marry who her parents accept for her. Only boys get to pick. Girls don't.
Girls are physically beaten by their fathers, brothers, husbands, inlaws.
This(the physical beatings) may not be the case for the lower middle class or the middle class or upper middle class but the concepts about women, how they are viewed, their status, their value is not much different.
Sons are idiolized. In some clinics where they do ultra sounds for pregnant women, they refuse to tell the couple about the gender of the baby for fear that if its a girl, the family may make a scene at the clinic or demand an abortion.
This is not a story i'm narrating from some obscure village. This happens in the main city of Karachi, in one of the richest suburbs, and narrated to me by own sister.
Women on average are expected to live with their own inlaws. That is the norm. NORM. Not the exception. That is the NORM.
Pakistan in general is so down trodden, that most educated upper class people you meet almost always have their children living abroad after they finish their education abroad as well. And I'm not surprised.
I love Pakistan but in truth it's hard to love. I wish the people were not as jahil as they are about so many things. The masses are so jahil, superstitious, lack medical/health knowledge, and operate on alot of myths.
I wish i wish i wish.
I came to Pakistan as i wrote in my earliest post in search of familiarity after living in Egypt for two years. And I revelled in it for a week or so and then it neutralized and now I see the Pakistan that I wish it were not.
I won't be missing Pakistan once I return to Egypt. I'l be thankful I didn't marry a Pakistani. I'll be thankful I don't have Pakistani inlaws. I'll be thankful I live in a safe country. I'll be thankful for the izzah I enjoy in Egypt as a woman.
But I will miss familiarity. Even though....sometimes I have moments where I feel like I'm viewing the same experiences that I've experienced visiting or living in pakistan before through foreign eyes. So you realize that you change even when you think you're the same.
I thought I was so pakistani but when i come here, I feel like I'm looking in from the outside.
The interesting thing is that you don't get along with the secular educated people because they're not religous and you don't normally click and get close with people who have a different way of life. And you don't click with people who are religious but view alot of social values through the prism of their culture which is very narrow when it comes to women.
So that's life. Sometimes my sister and I feel like it would be nice to just be a typical(add nationality here) and not always have to be 'different'. You'd just fit in. You'd be the average joe happy with the values of your society.
Alhamdulillah that Allah showed us a different way. A Better way...the islamic way of life. And with that lifestyle you are always going to be a stranger.
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