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Signs of the Times for Fri, 03 Feb 2006

By Khalid Hasan
Pakistand Daily Times
24 Jan 06
WASHINGTON: An event honouring Mukhtar Mai at the United Nations was cancelled after Pakistan’s UN Mission lobbied hard, arguing that it would be embarrassing for Prime Minister Sahukat Aziz to be at the UN at about the same time as Mai.

This correspondent has established, despite denials by the Pakistan’s UN Mission in New York and even the prime minister, that the Pakistani authorities had something to do with the cancellation of the Mukhtar Mai event.

Click to Expand Article

By Asma Jahangir
October 4, 2004
It is a measure of just how terrible what happened to Mukhtar Mai was that news of the attack on her sent shock waves across Pakistan, where sexual assault and violence against women is commonplace. Mai, a 30-year-old woman who lives in the remote hamlet of Meerwala, was brutally and publicly gang-raped in June 2002 by four volunteers on the orders of a village court, or jirga. Mai's then 12-year-old brother Abdul Shakoor (pictured behind her) had been seen walking with a girl from the more influential Mastoi tribe; they demanded Mai's rape to avenge their "honor." Mai's family sat helplessly while she was dragged into a room, even as she screamed and pleaded for mercy. To further humiliate her, and make an example of those who would defy the power of local strongmen, she was paraded naked before hundreds of onlookers. Her father covered her with a shawl and walked her home.

Click to Expand Article
Comment: Now, keep in mind that her community and her own family expected her to commit suicide after this event. Her own father objected to her going to the police.

The school she opened is for girls.

She is quoted as saying: "If women aren't educated, it's hard for them to speak up for themselves.

But keep in mind that Mukhtar, herself, was illiterate!

Yet there is something inside her that is bigger than education, bigger than the pain and suffering and humiliation she experienced.

We think it is LOVE.

Martha Stout, author of "The Sociopath Next Door" writes:

"The ability to LOVE comes bundled up in conscience... It lives in the part of the brain that reacts emotionally, and in their favor, when those we love need our attention, our help, or even our sacrifice.

"We have already seen that when someone's mind is not equipped to love [psychopathy], he can have no genuine conscience either, since conscience is an intervening sense of responsibility based in our emotional attachments to
others. Now we turn this psychological equation around. The other truth is that should a person have no conscience, he could never truly love. When an imperative sense of responsibility is subtracted from love, all that is left
is a thin, tertiary thing - a will to possess, which is not love at all.

"If given the choice between all the power, fame, and money in the world, and the privilege of loving [parents, children, spouses, friends], those who have conscience would choose the latter in a heartbeat.

"There is the will to possess and to dominate, and then there is love.

"But is it possible to have TOO MUCH conscience?

"Yes and no.

"Freud observed that an over-active superego could bully its owner into depression and possibly even suicide. But superego, that yammering disciplinary voice internalized from our early experiences, is NOT conscience. Neither is something that psychologists call "unhealthy shame,"
in the sense of a reaction to having committed bad deeds, so much as it is the irrational belief, instilled by negative messages in childhood that one's whole self is somehow bad, repellent, worthless. Even a little unhealthy shame is too much, but unhealthy shame is hardly normal conscience, which is an intervening sense of responsibility and not an
intrusive feeling of worthlessness and calamity. When contemporary psychologists say that too much conscience is toxic, their vocabulary is careless. They are referring to unhealthy shame or to a strident superego working overtime.

"Conscience, our seventh sense, is a different phenomenon altogether. It is a feeling of obligation based in love. So the question lingers: Is extreme conscience debilitating or elevating?

"To understand what a great deal of conscience does to the psyche, we can observe the lives and the happiness level of people who have developed their innate sense of conscience into an especially powerful emotional muscle. Each one of us might name different individuals as our moral heroes, from historical or public figures to people we have known personally who have impressed us with their moral commitment. ...People whose moral commitment has resulted in signal contributions in many areas, including civil rights, civil liberties, reduction of poverty and hunger, religious freedom, environmental protection, and peace.

"In a systematic study of such people, Anne Colby of Redcliffe's Henry Murray Research Center and William Damon of Brown University's Department of Education... concerned about what they perceived as our current scarcity of moral leadership, selected 23 individuals who they considered to be "moral exemplars."

"[The exemplars], diverse in terms of race, religion, socioeconomic status, and specific goals, all have one thing in common: an extraordinarily powerful sense of conscience, an "overdeveloped" sense that they are responsible for the welfare of their fellow human beings. They represent, from a psychologist's vantage point, the diametric emotional and mental opposite of the psychopath.

[There are] three striking commonalities among individuals of extreme conscience. 1) certainty 2) positivity 3) unity of self and moral goals.

"Certainty" refers to an exceptional clarity concerning what the exemplars believe to be right, and also their sense of an unequivocal personal responsibility to act on those beliefs.

"Positivity" expresses the exemplars' affirmative approach to life, their extraordinary enjoyment of their work, and their marked optimism, often despite hardship or even danger.

"Unity of self and moral goals" describes the integration of the subjects' moral stance with their conception of their own identity, and the sameness of their moral and personal goals.

"Unity" means, for such people, conscience is not just a guiding light, it is WHO THEY ARE. Cabell Brand explained in an interview, "Who I am is what I'm able to do and how I feel all the time - each day, each moment... It's hard for me to separate who I am from what I want to do and what I am doing..."

"Colby and Damon consider this third characteristic, the "unity of self and moral goals," to be their most important finding, and crucially important to the understanding of conscience and its effects.

"When conscience grows sufficiently strong, apparently it unifies the human psyche in a unique and beneficial way, and rather than causing "life disruption," extreme conscience significantly enhances life satisfaction.

Colby and Damon write:

"Our exemplars have been invulnerable to the debilitating effects of privation because all they have needed for personal success is the productive pursuit of their moral mission."

"In unself-conscious defiance of our cultural tendency to set conscience and self-interest in opposition to each other, Colby and Damon's exemplars "defined their own welfare and self-interest in moral terms and were, with very few exceptions, extremely happy and fulfilled." Far from causing them suffering, or making them into dupes, their exceptional sense of obligation to other people made them happy.

"Conscience, our sense of responsibility toward one another, allows us to live together, in our homes and on our planet. It helps to create meaning in our lives, and stands between us and empty existence of meaningless competitions. A very large sense of conscience can integrate moral intention, personal desire, and identity in the mind - right action becomes WHO WE ARE - and for this reason, extreme conscience appears to be a rare exact-fit key to human happiness." [Martha Stout, Ph.D., The Sociopath Next Door] (highly recommended)

As the C's have said:

Life is religion. Life experiences reflect how one interacts with God. Those who are asleep are those of little faith in terms of their interaction with the creation. Some people think that the world exists for them to overcome or ignore or shut out. For those individuals, the worlds will cease. They will become exactly what they give to life. They will become merely a dream in the "past." People who pay strict attention to objective reality right and left, become the reality of the "Future."

June 13, 2005
Some of you might remember the amazing story of Mukhtar Mai Mukhtaran Bibi who fought back after having been savagely raped on the orders of her village jirga. Instead of staying silent, she took her rapists to court, and used the compensation awarded by the government to open a school for girls.

Mukhtar Mai's bravery made her a cause celebre. Time Magazine (Asia) profiled her as one of "Asia's Heros." She was recently invited to the United States to speak by Amnesty International, and had an American speaking tour scheduled as well.

Last week, the Pakistani government decided that she was drawing too much attention. First they banned her from travelling, then they put her under house arrest, then they kidnapped her and detained her incommunicado.

Click to Expand Article

Oct. 21, 2005
ABC NEWS
Three years ago, Mukhtar Mai was brutally raped in her remote village in Pakistan. After a long struggle, Pakistan's supreme court convicted her attackers, and she's only able to talk about it now.

"I feel very happy, and God will look after me in the future," she said. "I am very, very hopeful that I will get justice."

Tomorrow Mai will travel to New York, her first trip out of Pakistan, to receive Glamour magazine's "Woman of the Year" award. And she'll travel around the country to speak on the plight of rural women.

"We look for strength. We look for persistence — a woman of the year is someone who believes that women can do whatever they set their mind to, and Mukhtar illustrates those qualities better than anybody," said Cindi Leive, Glamour's editor in chief. "This is a story that's going to shock everyone who hears it."


Click to Expand Article
Comment: Obviously, the support of activists got Mukhtar out of Pakistani detention... But this story bears watching.

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