Bangladeshi Muslim women are virtual slaves

Press, 14 October 1976, Page 14

Bangladeshi Muslim women are virtual slaves

By

CHRISTOPHER SWEENEY

' in the “Guardian”

Dacca For endless generations the women of Muslim Bangladesh have lived in a fog of religious and traditional prejudice.

There is no Azan (call for prayer) at her birth, a symbolic recognition that her life has less meaning and worth than her brother’s. For most of her life she lives in seclusion inside the walls of her husband’s or father’s house, or sheltered from the eyes of strangers behind the tall bamboo screens that are erected around every village hut. On the streets of the decrepit capital, Dacca, there are few women — those that do appear glide along like oversized umbrellas, completely enveloped in black burqahs, overgarments that cover the body with a slit of netting at eye level. On the rare occasions they leave the village, the women travel in grotesque rickshaw carriages, inside cabins curtained off from the world by heavy drapes. On the muddy brown canals, the women are paddled from their villages in special boats with small huts of bamboo matting, without windows, erected on the deck.

In a country on the very edge of the Malthusian nightmare, the average Bangladeshi woman is still likely to have 11 or 12 pregnancies in her life. “The women have little control over their own bodies, the decision to have children is totally her husband’s,” observes Professor Rounaq Jahan of Dacca University. “She might have one or two miscarriages, two or three of her children might die young, and she might have six or seven surviving children.” The social and economic position of the. woman is geared to having male children, since only then will her husband accept her fully. And with two or three surviving sons, she also guarantees her own security and protection. If her husband dies, then they at least can support her. SAD SIGHT On the filthy streets of Dacca there is no sadder sight than widows, some still in their twenties, forced to beg to support the undernourished children following limply behind them. “A widow without sons finds neither comfort nor respect in a society that condemns the free movement of any

female,” Jean Ellickson, a sociologist, notes. From their childhood women are taught two virtues, patience and self sacrifice — and the fatt that the male members of the family get automatic preference. “If the family can afford meat or milk, then it is the father and the sons who get the first and major share; Whatever little is available — food, education, health facilities — is always first offered to the men,” Professor Jahan observes. In village life the women always feed the men, the mother-in-law, and even the children first before finally sitting down to their bowl of meagre rice and salt. Even in the comparatively sophisticated urban middle classes, the clear distinctions are apparent: professional men with graduate wives would barely think of taking them on social outings. At the co-educational universities, women students sit in separate rows, usually at the front of the class. There are separate reading and rest rooms and, according to one professor, young women can pass through tertiary education without exchanging more than four words with their male colleagues. “In fact it is better for her reputation if she does not.” But for the 95 per cent of the population living in scattered villages, even that meagre emancipation is frowned upon. In villages the houses are completely screened off by bamooo fences. If the women go outside to collect water from the rich farmer’s well, they cover their faces with cloth. The men or older sons do all the shopping: in the teeming market

places the only women are Hindus, who make up about 8 per cent of the population of Bangladesh. At the age of puberty, girls end their days of free ■ movement. They are then conned inside the house or the periphery of the bamboo screens until their marriage. From then on, they follow the same rigid Muslim system of seclusion in their husband’s house. The only exceptions are the poorest of the poor, wives of landless labourers who must work , themselves as labourers to ’ support the family. For mile : after mile along the roads of Bangladesh they stand along-

side little patches of rice spread out on the bitumen "waiting for it to dry. IN PURDAH But above this level, the Purdah system is enforced. A recent Ford Foundation study found that virtually all the women actually aspired to it—as family incomes rose and the women’s earning capacity became less important, the seclusion became tighter. In rich Dacca families, the women usually live totally secluded lives, in separate sections of the house itself, cut off from contact with the men. They have their own rooms and bathing I facilities and never go out

except on the two or three days of Naior when a woman has the right to visit her father’s house once or twice a year after his death. Though Muslim law lays down that the women agree to the choice of the marriage partner, in practice this isi rarely observed. The first! sight of her equally nervous! teenage husband is on the wedding night. From then on, she becomes part of her husband’s household, occupying the lowliest of positions and unsure of her security until! she can produce a son. And since she has to be sure that some sons at least will survive, until the age of 25 or so, most Bangladeshi women are almost continually pregnant. The mortality rate for children under five is about 25 per cent, according to the Health Ministry. Since there is a fifty-! fifty chance that a pregnancy! will produce a girl, the mother must keep on producing children till she has two or three healthy sons. The dreadful burden of constant childbirth in conditions of severe malnutrition and a total lack of medical facilities, has produced a female mortality rate strikingly higher than the male. At less than 48 years, her life expectancy is one of the lowest in the world. The burdens are evident in the women themselves: by age of 30, by then themselves grandmothers, they are usually regarded as old women by the rest of the community. One problem perhaps peculiar to Bangladesh also restricts their lives. With a literacy rate of just 4 per cent in the local language, Bengali, there are few women outside the cities who can even read the Koran, the Muslim holy book. According to Zafrullah Chowdhury, who has established the first “barefoot doctor” scheme in the villages, this ignorance has deprived the Bangladeshi women of even the meagre protection offered through Muslim Sharia laws concerning marriage, divorce, and inheritance. In village societies, none the less, the social pressures on women from the religious traditions make them often virtual slaves. “Her husband

and his in-laws can treat her as a free servant, someone whom they do not even bother to talk to,” Dr Chowdhury says. Any woman resisting her husband is a social outcast — her father will not welcome her i back as a divorced women i brings disgrace on the famlily. SUICIDE ATTEMPTS In Dr Chowdhury's small clinic, about 25 miles from Dacca, they have treated 11 I cases of attempted suicide by married women in the last 18 months. But they suspect that the total num-; ber of such cases is far, higher. On most occasions the family will try to hide the fact. It would again bring disgrace on the husband to seek treatment since then the other villagers j would hear of it. Though the successive Governments of Bangladesh have paid lip service to emancipation, little has been done. Under the constitution of January, 1975, women were given 15 separate seats in Parliament but they were to be elected not from the female electorate numbering more than half the 37 million voters but by the 300 male members of Parliament. While women through the Islamic world traditionally occupy a restricted and inferior position, what makes the position of women of Bangladesh so desperate is the poverty, a hopeless sweltering poverty that provides no relief or escape. For most, the lack of any urban amenities, from electricity to running water, means that during the avail-

able davlight hours they are . constantly busy, more so - than their husbands or . brothers engaged in the • cyclical pattern of nee and jute production. Because her role is socially circumscribed as wife and mother, only 21) per cent of girls are sent to school at all. Only in socially and economically established families are they given any continuing education — and that according to the 1961 census consists of four or five years elemen tary education and learning how to recite the Koran. According to another Ford Foundation study, just over , one per cent of rural women are enrolled in schools above the age of 15, compared to 20 per cent for men. Again, according to Professor Jahan in a recent book on Bangladesh, the major reason for female education is marriage. “Educated men prefer wives who can at least read and keep basic accounts. Respectable rural families give their - daughters some schooling so they can be married to educated men employed in the urban areas,” she notes. Female literacy is less than 5 per cent — the nat- . ional adult rate is 18 per cent, according to the World Bank. The most immediate result is that birth control programmes are at a virtual standstill. A recent study in a progressive region of Comiila, regarded as the most forward looking province, revealed that only 4 per cent of the married couples were using any form of birth control.