A Rape In Pakistan

Nicholas Kristof has two Op-Ed pieces, one last Sunday and the other today, on the aftermath of the rape of a Pakistani doctor, Shazia Khalid. It seems like there has to be more to this story than Kristof reports: another side, perhaps, or more details that would make the reported actions and reactions of Dr. Shazia's family and government at least explicable, if not defensible. But if Kristof has told the whole story, those actions and reactions can only leave one with a sense of disgust, not simply at the individuals involved, but at the culture that would condone, even encourage, such actions.

To make a long story short, Dr. Khalid spent a night being repeatedly raped and beaten. When she "tumbled into the nurse's quarters that morning[,] 'semiconscious . . . with a swelling on her forehead and bleeding from nose and ear:'

"They told me to be quiet and not to tell anybody because it would ruin my reputation," Dr. Shazia remembers. One official warned that if she reported the crime, she could be arrested.

That was a genuine risk. Under Pakistan's hudood laws, a woman who reports that she has been raped is liable to be arrested for adultery or fornication - since she admits to sex outside of marriage - unless she can provide four male eyewitnesses to the rape.

When she "asked permission" to at least inform her family, officials drugged her and sent her to a mental hospital. Small wonder, since, given her family's reaction, she probably was "insane" to tell even them.

The family's patriarch, Mr. Khalid's grandfather, sent word that because Dr. Shazia had been raped, she was "kari" - a stain on the family's honor - and must be killed or at least divorced. Then, Mr. Khalid said, his grandfather began gathering a mob to murder Dr. Shazia.

Even so, Dr. Shazia persisted, with her husband's support, to seek punishment of her attacker. In response, her government

ordered them to leave the country, and warned that if they stayed, they would be killed - by government "agencies" - and that no one would even find their bodies.

When Dr. Shazia demanded that Adnan [her adopted son] be allowed to accompany her, the officials warned that there was no time and that she would be murdered if she delayed. Then the officials forced Dr. Shazia to make a video recording in which she thanked the government for helping her. And, she said, they warned her that if she had any contact with journalists or human rights groups, they would strike back at her - or at her relatives still in Pakistan.

Today, Dr. Shazia and her husband are living, without their son, "in a one-room dive in a bad neighborhood in London, while applying for asylum in Britain."

I am reading Robert Bork's puritanical screed "Slouching Toward Gommorah" -- struggling through it, actually, since I can take his sanctimonious, vitriolic, condescending moralising only in small doses. The basic tenet of the book is that the demise of religious authority and traditional morality and the substitution of a belief in individual liberty and equality (Bork puts the modifier "radical" in front of each, of course) has caused America to collapse into decadence and degeneracy. Well, Mr. Bork, we have in the story of Dr. Shazia something of a case study in the kinds of "benefits" that flow from obdeience to religious authority and traditional notions of morality. Frankly, if that is really my choice, I would prefer Gomorrah.