A HUSBAND and wife in Pakistan can never be alone again. In between them sit the clerics of Pakistan’s Council of Islamic Ideology (CII). However small the space may be, the mullah in the middle would like to prescribe what is to happen between them. He tells the wife that she is secondary — an obedient child at best, a hostage at worst.

To the husband he hands a cane, and the licence to use it, and to the wife he hands some cloth — she can decide whether she wishes to use it to gag herself or do something worse. She must not talk too much; she must obey; she must at all times live an existence that is silent, secondary and submissive.

The council would never, of course, admit to the invisible cleric they would like to position between the wedded couples of the country. They have, however, announced their prescriptions loud and clear. In reviewing the Punjab women’s protection bill, a hallmark achievement that made the mistake of treating Pakistani women as (gasp!) full citizens, who must not be beaten by husbands or imprisoned in marriages, the council came out with a set of decrees that effectively makes marriage a union of three: the man, the woman and the mullah.

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