The Express Tribune:
Let’s temporarily come out of our latest feverish national dilemmas — whether the final word would be spoken by an elected or an unelected functionary of the state in the matter of the prime minister’s disqualification — and consider the significance of this question in other areas of our national life. This question deeply informs our smaller, personal choices that are much more important to our individual and family lives than larger-than-life national issues.
Consider, for example, the choice before a young Muslim parent of a girl child when she turns three: whether or not to arrange for her education. There was a time when the question was summarily decided by a professional religious adviser — in the negative. I have decided to use the past tense while writing the previous sentence but not without some reluctance, for just two weeks ago, I saw a small booklet being sold in Karachi’s Urdu Bazaar. The author of the booklet — a tiny part of an avalanche of recent Urdu publications on this and other important subjects — has no doubt in his mind that teaching English to your girl child is equivalent to letting her lose herhaya (‘modesty’), which is seen as the single most important — perhaps the only — value her life holds.
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Once the girl child turns an adult, her haya grows up into the family’s izzat which is to be protected by its authoritative counterpart, ghairat; both sacred words translated, rather inaccurately but interestingly, as ‘honour’.