A Cultural Separation

Over the course of this week, I have been racking my brain over my project. Up until now, I had always thought that going to Pakistan and collecting folktale stories was enough. I wanted to promote a culture that wasn't well recognized. But recently, I discovered a TED video that forces me to question and hone in my motives for this trip.

In the TED Talk, the speaker, Khalida Brohi, talked about 'honor' killings. Honor killings occur when a family deems a behavior shameful, usually for relationships that occur outside of marriage. According to the UN, 1000 reported honor killings are performed each year in Pakistan. Click here for the video. 

Unfortunately, in many rural areas of Pakistan, honor killings and overall female oppression is a custom that stretches back for decades. Most of the time, women aren't even aware of their oppression and see themselves in a futile situation. Even more, political change, in many cases, does not reach rural areas enough to spark modification. Khalida Brohi has been trying to modify the culture of these rural towns through other means; by creating different centers (collective embroidery meetings, reading classes, collecting folktales, etc.) for women to participate in, she teaches them to empower themselves so they can be their own leaders.

In the back of my mind, I have always known that there are certain parts of Pakistani culture that scare me. It's ironic knowing that honor killings and acid attacks and abuse occurs in a country that preaches peace. These are hard circumstances to overcome, especially because most of it occur in areas where the people aren't well educated enough to grow out of their provincial beliefs.  

I looked at the comments under the video, and I couldn't help but feel sad at what I read. Because the topic was relating to Pakistan, an Islamic nation, a lot of the comments evolved around the negative view of Islam. Pushing aside the fact that most YouTube comments shouldn't be taken seriously, I feel that many of the comments are similar to what I hear in some real life discussions--"Islam promotes the oppression of women", "Islam is hindering gender equality", "It's safer to just kill all Muslims". Given the project that I am doing, I feel as though I should clear a few things up:

It is a well known fact that religion does, in many aspects, influence the culture of a group. Even in the US, there are many Christian ideals that hover over into mainstream society. So it really isn't hard to mistake a culture with a religion.

I'll start by saying that Islam means "peace" and is a religion that advocates for equality of man and woman (and every other type of gender a person could be) in every regard. The base for most of the abuse and oppression in Pakistan is because of the lack of education. Even if small town rural people do read the Quran, most of them do not understand what they are reading (the Quran is written in Arabic, and Pakistan's official language is Urdu or some other version of it).And if they do understand the words, they don not necessarily understand the meaning. Most of their education is based off of generations of oral preaching that have nothing to do with Islam. So though they might be Muslim, they do not know what it means to be Muslim, and because they are so uneducated, most of them confuse their provincial customs with their religion as one and the same--which is what many people do when they watch CNN or FOX or MSNBC as their only form of religious knowledge.

So now I look at my project. I am collecting folktales to, yes, record and help preserve a piece of history, but I also want to clear up that these folktales are a piece of culture (a piece of perspectives) and not a piece of religion solely. I remind myself that I am writing these stories to open up a new perspective of Pakistan so we can perceive another aspect of a culture we don't see in news media. I hope that in so doing this, I can help separate the religion from the culture for both the citizens of Pakistan, and the people outside looking in.

In other news, I made this teeny little video as a sort of trailer for the vlogs that I'll be putting up from Pakistan.

I hope you have a good remainder of your day!