They say despair gives courage to the coward. True to form the Council of Islamic Ideology (CII) has paired convenience with their churlish conviction that men are now, finally, under attack.

After the passage of the Punjab Protection of Women Against Violence Bill 2016, which gives recompense and sanctuary to battered and abused women, the bearded and bigoted amongst us have demonstrated a bravura of frustration and tyranny.

First they opposed the bill, stating a detachment from core family and Islamic values in our kosher culture of rape, honour killings, acid crimes and, now, online trolling and abuse.

So many unadulterated strains of piety and devoutness to conserve and protect.

The freedom by which the male libido and ego marched unconstrained throughout the land was being cautioned and terrorised. Something just had to be done!

They thumped their chests and raised their voices, the dilemma of being made to accept fairness and equality betrayed by the 14 shades of rage seen on their unshaven faces.

But the tide of civil society swelled and conquered, the inescapable need to nudge the condition of Pakistan’s women into a slightly less dingy corner of the social spectrum prevailed and we managed to grasp the first few strings of a more equitable contingency.

Women were finally given recourse: the registration of FIRs against aggressors was given priority, helplines were to be setup to aid victims of domestic and other abuse, restraining orders were to be issued, women-only shelters were to be established and stricter punishments for tormentors were promised. It was going to be a good day, a momentous occasion for the wretched female franchise in Pakistan, a moment of fleeting glory.

Maulana Sherani, the head of the CII, announced that all hell would break loose upon the morals of our fragile society.

Others feared the humiliation of Pakistan’s unblemished men, the weakening of male-female relationships built upon the threshold of dominance and suppression.

His cries and those of many others like him were candidly cold-shouldered; for once the mullahs had lost.

Not to be deterred, the CII is now moving for the passage of a men’s protection bill, a piece of legislation that will give men ‘equal’ rights in a country where as many as 8,500 women face some sort of extreme violence annually; where one province - Punjab - alone accounts for a staggering six women being murdered or facing such attempts every day; where four women are raped daily; and where, till the passage of the women’s protection bill, their rights had been annulled from bettering their circumstance.

In detailed disconnect from the realities of comparison, men in Pakistan face a few tawdry disownments, some scant efforts towards public embarrassment and have scarcely ever heard of domestic abuse.

The CII, however, feels that with the coming of more agreeable rights for women who are sufferers of abuse, men, too, must be shielded from being “tortured” and “forced out of their homes”.

These labels of baloney are only being placed in the ring to lay the groundwork that puts men and their needs above those of the women of this country yet again.

All it does is look to overshadow their paltry accomplishments, the misery with which they live their lives and the dejection by which they are told to accept their fates.

The CII’s robust predilection for unfettered male abandon and their exemption from accountability looks to backhand the choking, spluttering progress women are making in this part of the world.

The mullahs in the CII know all too well that men do not face the cross-hairs of degradation and brutality in the way and volume that women in Pakistan have agonised through for decades.

They know that they will never feel the dehumanisation of their gender in this counterfeit culture of hypocrisy and deviance.

But they do know that they need to drown out the noise, whitewash the joy and blind us from thinking ahead, striving for more and expecting real and unquenchable progress in this battle for the perseverance of our gender.

The men who occupy the man cave that is the CII know all too well the consequences of acceptance and tolerance.

They know that if they let this little victory be, there will be more battles and more dissent against this Machiavellian pact men drew up centuries ago between primitiveness and perversion, these parallels of sanctity and sin.

The Pakistani woman must not be content with merely not being abused. She must not be appeased by the hand that neglects to slap her but is permitted to grope her. She should never be grateful for only the small victories.

The CII can foresee this rising crescendo and it scares the whiskers off of them. That is a grand feeling indeed.

The toot tooting about the men’s protection bill is a huge compliment for women across the backwoods of Pakistan; it means we’re scaring them and that means we have something on them.

What men need protecting from, unfortunately, seems to be themselves.