A spate of so-called honour killings has once again cast the spotlight on Pakistan and the violence that has come to characterise the country in the minds of most people looking in from the outside.
These perceptions have a significant bearing on subsequent decisions of various governments and legislatures, especially in democracies sensitive to public opinion polls and electoral cycles. In doing so, they bring to bear their cultural and political perspectives on what is and is not desirable while their respective governments conduct relations with the government in Islamabad.
Opinions based on such superficial perspectives are as unfair as they are ignorant. The recent honour killings are a case in point. Viewed alongside news stories about terrorist attacks and the rhetoric of the political clergy, the gruesome murders were instantly misconstruable as violent acts of religious intolerance.
However easy it might be to swallow that storyline, it is not nearly as interesting as the process of socio-economic change the recent murders reflect.
Generally speaking, the victims of recent cases have been young women who had chosen to marry without the approval of their family, and were subsequently murdered by their parents and male siblings.
Their marriages had taken place with the approval of courts of law and the ceremonies of Muslim couples were performed by licensed clerics usually associated with conservative schools of Islamic thought. For example, in Islamabad, marriages are registered by clerics at the Red Mosque, a hotbed of hardliners and the site of a 2007 armed standoff with the security forces that sparked the Taliban insurgency.
Most of the families involved in the honour killings were Muslim, but not all. As such, the killings are a cultural phenomenon, reflected across Pakistani society in proportion to its sectarian demographics. They represent a resistance to a process of social change in Pakistan that has accompanied the emergence of a “youth bulge” over the past decade.
Most Pakistanis under 30, who comprise a sizeable majority of the population, have different perspectives on life to their parents and grandparents. They are far more likely to live in urban areas and to be high school graduates. They have been weaned on cable television and mobile communications. They are employed in the services sector or own small businesses, and are economically empowered to pursue their individual aspirations.
That often puts them at odds with elders from agrarian, clannish communities where the decision are taken by the patriarchs and matriarchs holding the purse strings. Their authority is derived from a premodern culture in which the extended family, clan and tribe lived under siege from cycles of drought, crop failure, pestilence and war. Mortality rates were very high – my stepfather was one of four surviving siblings out of 10 born into a financially stable farming family in the 1920s and 1930s.
Marriages between relatives were a matter of economic necessity, because they consolidated agricultural holdings and provided an interdependent workforce to ensure the survival of the unit. Marriages that took place outside the immediate family were arranged with members of the wider clan and tribe, so that land married land.
That social model has been falling apart across Pakistan since the mid-1980s, when the US-funded development programme of prime minister Mohammed Khan Junejo connected most rural areas to national highways via a network of farm-to-market roads, bringing with it electricity, basic health care and primary schooling.
Lower mortality rates meant larger families could no longer be sustained by small agricultural holdings, prompting a process of rural-to-urban migration as young people looked for jobs. Economic necessity dictated that both men and women worked, and that their children be better educated.
Social competition is seeing this process of change manifest itself back in the small towns and villages where the majority of Pakistanis still live.
The pace of change is slower in rural areas more distant from urban centres, but it is unstoppable. Violent resistance to marriages of choice and other rejections of rural social norms are a serious problem, but one that is diminishing as the economically empowered youth bulge asserts its legal rights under Pakistan’s young, fast-evolving democratic dispensation.
The change is further reflected in Pakistani society’s rejection of mob attacks by Muslims against members of religious minorities accused of blasphemy, a commonplace occurrence until a few years ago.
After a decade of Taliban insurgency, society as a whole has become intolerant of such abuse, and a powerful example was set recently when a Muslim businessman in Sindh province was arrested and charged with blasphemy for selling footwear bearing the symbol of a Hindu deity. So were the perpetrators of the recent spate of honour killings.
Overseas audiences, particularly those in the developed economies of the West, would do well to recognise the undergoing change in Pakistan. And before passing judgment, they might want to acknowledge that Pakistan is moving in the right direction, but intolerance is flourishing in some countries that claim to possess the moral high ground.
Tom Hussain is Asia-Pacific editor of The World Weekly