While the three-day Islamabad Literary Festival had quite a few panels on gender and women’s issues, not all were conducted as they should have been. Perhaps the only satisfactory session was the one titled ‘Women’s Protection: Yeh Bill Maangay More’, that discussed why religious parties oppose the Punjab Protection of Women Against Violence Act 2016 and whether they could legally oppose it.

Samia Raheel Qazi, who is the only woman on the Council of Islamic Ideology (CII), began by saying that although domestic violence was a reality, rather than focusing on the negative aspects of traditional families, the positive, “beautiful” relationships within families should also be highlighted. She said that the bill would only serve to break families apart.

“The West is also concerned about the breaking up of families, and we should take care that we do not break up our own”, she said. She added that while a husband is thought to be superior to his wife in Islam, the balance is restored when she becomes a mother, and her status is three times that of the father. To this, retired justice Nasira Iqbal asked whether the religious leaders in opposition think that the lawmakers who drafted the bill, and those who support it, are not Muslims. “They think they are the only Muslims,” she said.

From the women’s protection bill to education issues and projection in art, several sessions focused on gender-specific themes

Addressing the popular criticism that points out that only violence against women is tackled, she added that there were no bans on drafting similar bills for other vulnerable groups as well. “Religious leaders also object to interference in a house by the police. Why do they only object when it comes to protecting women? The police will only be interfering if there is a crime, just like they do in murder cases, robberies and other crimes,” she said.

Arfa Sayeda Zehra said that the bill did not call for anything un-Islamic as it talked about protecting a certain group. “The word ‘man’ or ‘mankind’ refers to our bodily form. What makes us ‘human’ is the way we think and feel and it seems like we have vowed to not give everyone their rights and [to] not be human,” she said.

Director of Lok Virsa, Fouzia Saeed, maintained that opposition to the bill should not matter because parties which are not part of the Punjab Assembly do not have a say in the matter. “Why is it that all of our bad actions like karo-kari are considered part of our tradition and culture, and all the steps taken for the betterment of a vulnerable group are said to be Western?” she asked.

“Why is it that all of our bad actions like karo-kari are considered part of our tradition and culture, and all the steps taken for the betterment of a vulnerable group are said to be Western?” she asked.

On the same day of the festival, what was meant to be a session on issues of land ownership and governance of the forests in Swat, turned into a session on the women of Swat — for which the panellists were not prepared, since the topic had been changed at the last minute. As a result, the discussion was incoherent and confusing, and did not seem to have a unifying theme.

On Sunday, the third and final day of the festival, Aawaz held a session titled ‘Barriers to Girls’ Education’, which was to discuss a recent study by the Society for the Protection of the Rights of the Child (Sparc). The study was carried out across three districts in southern Punjab and documented that most young girls drop out in primary school. The study further went on to reveal that even after dropping out, the girls who had attended school for even a short duration fared better than those who had never been enrolled. The young girls who dropped out went on to either take up embroidery and other craft work, or even became domestic help. Girls who are never enrolled usually ended up begging.

The report also identified the lack of basic facilities like toilets, furniture and security in schools as some of the factors that lead to young girls dropping out. Also of importance is the distance to the school and if the route was safe.

However, narrating the details of the study took a long time and the rest of the panellists as a result did not have enough space to make their arguments which would have been more interesting than details of the research. The findings could have been shared with the audience by distributing handouts.

Unesco Director Vibeke Jensen spoke about the need for making schools more attractive and entertaining for young children. Researcher and former joint education adviser at the Ministry of Education, Haroona Jatoi, said that there tends to be a gap between policies and legislation and this needs to be immediately addressed.

Professor at Quaid-i-Azam University A.H. Nayyar started off his very brief speech about identifying and separating the factors that cause young girls to drop out, from the factors which are applicable to all children. However, he was not allowed to complete his point because there was no more time left.

That the moderator did not stop Sadia Hussain from taking up three-quarters of the time that was to be shared by all the experts resulted in a boring, monotonous initial segment and a frustrating last 15 minutes because the audience wanted to know about the other experts’ viewpoints.

The last ILF session on women’s issues was a discussion on how women have been portrayed in art over time. The session was titled ‘Translating Gender’. Miniaturist Ayesha Durrani said women have always been depicted as an object of desire in paintings. “They have always been used for their lyrical embodiment of beauty, and to portray the perfection that is expected of them,” she said. Durrani said she paints silhouettes of women or mannequins without heads because women are considered less intelligent than men. “I thought women are not required to have heads, as long as their bodies are beautiful,” she said.

Educationist and artist Salima Hashmi said that the change in how women are being portrayed in art started in the late 1970s and early 1980s when women started raising a voice against the Hudood Ordinance and the “horrific” dictatorship of Gen Zia. “We live in a country where a maulana opposes a women’s protection bill saying that he is concerned that wives will return home at two in the morning ... no one speaks against children being sexually abused and about the high rate of incest,” she said. The change in how women are depicted, she said, was a way of raising a metaphorical voice against these “sufferings” that are in a way a consequence of Gen Zia’s regime.

Curator Aasim Akhtar agreed and said that the late 1970s and early 1980s was when the change in the depiction of women started to happen, if incrementally.

“Women were always painted either as waiting for a lover or as a courtesan, except for Hindu paintings where they were also shown as goddesses,” he said, while referring to art in the subcontinent. “The change that came about at the end of the military rule came as a way for women to rebel against the status quo,” he added. Another artist on the panel, Farida Batool, said she paints nudes to show the struggles of women and the effects their struggles leave on them. “I draw bodies because I grew up in a society where I was made very much aware of my body,” she said.

After this, the discussion then ended up being about how the government does not care about art in general and how it is deliberately sidelining arts from the school curriculum. The experts also discussed how they cannot discuss and criticise art in Urdu because the language has been sensationalised. “You can be comfortable when describing a figure in a painting as ‘naked’ but not when you use the word ‘nanga’,” said Batool.