Word: bibi
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When a young, illiterate housewife named Zafran Bibi went to Pakistani police last year, pregnant and claiming a fellow villager had raped her, she didn't expect that she'd be the one punished. But a judge in the ultraconservative Northwest Frontier province exonerated the man and last month convicted Zafran Bibi of adultery. Her sentence: death by public stoning. In Pakistan, victims of sex crimes are subject to harsh Islamic laws known as the Hudood ordinances. For a rapist to be found guilty, four adult male Muslims have to witness the crime, or the rapist must confess...
...Zafran Bibi's case is especially complex. Her husband Naimat Khan, who until last year was in jail on a murder charge, claims that his own father forced Zafran Bibi to make the rape accusation against a man with whom the father was feuding. Later she changed her story and accused her brother-in-law, who was never charged. Khan says his wife actually became pregnant after a conjugal visit to him in jail. "It will be justice if my wife is handed back to me," says Khan...
President Pervez Musharraf says that he has no plans to do away with the Hudood laws. Tampering with them would enrage the religious conservatives. But two weeks ago, after Musharraf promised the death sentence would not be carried out, a Peshawar court temporarily suspended Zafran Bibi's death sentence and is considering her appeal. For human-rights activists, the reprieve doesn't go far enough. "As long as such laws are on the books, people will suffer," says Afrasiab Khattak, chairman of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. --By Hannah Bloch
...Hudood ordinances, which were put in place more than 20 years ago by a previous military dictator, Zia ul-Haq. Human rights activists say the laws, and their abuse, help promote the very extremism that Musharraf is trying to fight in Pakistan. When Musharraf first learned of Zafran Bibi's case during a meeting with foreign reporters in Islamabad earlier this month, he was startled. "Is that the law? Now? I don't even know," he said. But he promised that Zafran Bibi would not be stoned to death and, two weeks ago, a Peshawar court temporarily suspended the sentence...
...dance of challenge and accommodation. "He cannot change it," says Malik Hamid Afridi, a former prosecutor in Kohat. "There is no force other than God. There is no change to the Koran. There are no amendments." But near the Kohat court, a prosecutor who reluctantly helped to convict Zafran Bibi disagrees. "Of course women suffer more because of our customs, because there is no freedom for women," he says. "Actually, it is not the fault of the judge. It is the fault of the law. The law should be amended...