by Sanam Maher
Qandeel’s critics attacked her social media pages.
“Unfollow this account, she is spoiling Pakistan’s name,” urged one Instagram user.
“She was a vile human being no pride in herself and in Pakistan and with a body like that I’ll be hiding it not displaying it,” added another.
“This woman is a disgusting slut,” one user wrote, accusing Qandeel and her supporters of pandering to the West. “People in Pakistan are desperately seeking to be like North Americans, mimicking their lives but you never will be. Embrace your culture, religion, and country…”
Another wrote, “People like this should be shot.”
“I couldn’t tolerate it any more,” Nighat says. She was receiving calls from women who were worried about their privacy settings and what their friends, family members or work colleagues could see on their social media pages. They felt overwhelmed by the stream of hate speech targeting anyone who spoke out against Qandeel’s murder. Nighat herself wanted to go offline. “I realised that if I needed to talk to somebody about the threats I was receiving online, I had no one to turn to,” she recalls. “Who was I supposed to go to?”
She knew she could not delay the helpline any longer. There was just one problem: she had no money.
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Nighat was a university undergraduate when she entered an online chat room for the first time. It was the early 2000s. Desktop computers were all the rage—by 2007 there would be machines in five million homes in cities like Lahore, Karachi and Islamabad,3 and Nighat’s brother-in-law, whom she lived with, had just bought one for the house.
By 1992 dial-up Internet was available in urban centres in the country, but it would be a few years before Internet service providers began offering low-cost packages. In 2000 only 133,900 Pakistanis were online,4 and Nighat was one of them. The arrival of mIRC (Internet Relay Chat) software was a revelation: a whole world of strangers outside the tight circle of her family and school friends, all accessible whenever she wanted, and none of them knew her real name. At the University of Punjab in Lahore, where she was studying law, all the girls she knew were nervous about talking to boys—or rather about being seen talking to boys. For most of them, including Nighat, even the hint of some interest from a boy could lead to being yanked out of school. And many of the girls were the first in their families to attend university.
“I knew that if word got back to my parents that I was hanging out with some boy or talking to him, my education would be stopped,” says Nighat. And so, on some nights, she would sit before the computer—which had been placed in her room—and her fingertips would hover over the smooth black squares of the keyboard as she waited to hear a dial tone, a whistle, a crackle and the staticky whine that let her know she was close, a few tries on a patchy connection away from being anyone she wanted to be. A woman with a made-up name who was free to be any ASL (age/sex/location). “When you heard that sound, when the connection was made, just like that, life would feel exciting,” she remembers.
One night, some time after midnight or 1 a.m., she was in her room sitting at the computer, with her back towards the door. The lights were switched off and the door was unlocked. She was not allowed to lock the door to her room as her family didn’t believe there was anything you needed to be doing in your room that warranted keeping others out. She logged on and opened up a chat window. She was curious about who was out there, and on that night, like other nights, the chat was a tepid interaction with someone halfway across the world. “Who are you?” she asked. “What do you do?” The conversation might last a few minutes before she moved on to someone else, or the person she was chatting with realised that she wasn’t interested in anything more exciting than finding out the mundane realities of their life.
But that night she was not alone. There was someone else, standing quietly in the dark behind her. He watched her face, suffused with light from the screen, and saw her eagerly respond to someone on the other side. Nighat’s elder brother, the breadwinner in the family, whom she had had to ask for permission to go to university—“What sense does it make for you to study the law?” he had asked, and then relented on condition that she went to classes wearing a niqab to cover her face and body—was standing behind her and reading the messages she was exchanging with a total stranger. Where had she even met this man?
Her brother exploded. “You have rubbed any respect we had in the dirt,” he screamed. He slapped her. Her mother woke up and rushed into the room to find Nighat sobbing and pleading, “But what have I done?” Her brother was so upset, he started crying. Nighat’s mother had no idea what was going on, but she realised the girl had done something that could bring shame on the family. She too hit her.
“From tomorrow, she will not go to university,” Nighat’s brother announced, his face wet with tears. “She’s busy having affairs there.” The next morning the computer was taken from her room. In the end she was allowed to attend classes, but she never used an online chat room again.
Nighat was born in Ratta Matta, a town of 30,000 to 40,000 people near Jhang in Punjab. Her parents, Mehar Allah and Nasreen, had also been born and raised there, like their parents before them. They were sharecroppers. After each harvest they would retain a small share of the crops they produced; the rest went to their landlord. They were almost illiterate; Nasreen had only ever read the Quran.
Some time in the 1960s, Mehar Allah went to Karachi. He was the first person in his family to leave the village for the city. He landed a job as a daily-wage labourer, hauling bricks and shovelling endless mounds of sand on to the site of a new building for a bank. It was hard work, and he missed his wife and children. Every day an army of labourers like himself worked round the clock as the creamy white tower, round as a stack of coins and ridged like a car tyre, rose against the city’s skyline.
Once the building was completed, he was employed as a peon in a family-run textile business. Soon it was discovered that he had an excellent head for numbers, and moreover he was honest. He taught himself to write Urdu and worked his way up to clerk, poring over his employer’s books. By the time Nighat was born in 1979, Mehar Allah had moved his family to the city, and in the 1980s he became a partner in the business.
He was determined that his children be educated and enrolled them in an English-speaking private school. “We went to a wonderful school called Little Foxes,” Nighat says. She pauses. She realises that she has reverted to her childhood pronunciation of the school name, the name she and her sisters used when they had not yet learned to speak English. “Did I say ‘Little Foxes’? I meant Little Folks.”
The children were competitive and tried to get the best grades. They signed up for as many extracurricular activities as they could and took part in singing competitions. They were good singers—they got that from Mehar Allah, who could carry a tune and loved Siraiki poetry—their voices trained from years of performing and listening to wedding songs and hymns in Ratta Matta. Mehar Allah could never remember which grade any of his six children were in, but he attended the ceremony at the end of the year when they were awarded first, second or third place in their respective classes.
By the mid-1990s, Mehar Allah had started his own business, producing fibre canes, and had set up a factory in Lahore. He brought his nephews from Ratta Matta to the city and into the business so they did not have to herd goats and sheep for the rest of their lives. Mehar Allah also bought the land that his parents had tended and gave them their own home. For the first time their crops were entirely their own. But then Mehar Allah became very ill. He had always been a hard worker and had not taken care of himself. He suffered from diabetes and later temporary paralysis. The energy that had brought him from Ratta Matta to one of the richest cities in the country suddenly failed him. As he grew sicker, he wanted to be at home with his parents. He wanted to go back to the village.
It was decided that Nighat’s e
lder brother would handle what was left of the business in Lahore, and Nighat went to live with her sister, who was married. Money was tight, so there could be no more private education, and she was enrolled in a government secondary school. It was a culture shock. The system was completely different to what she was used to: everything was taught in Urdu, including mathematics and science. She struggled to understand her teachers and did badly, often barely scraping through to the next grade. When the time came to apply to university, she realised she wanted to study English literature, but her grades were not good enough. On a whim, she decided to apply to the University of Punjab to study law. To her surprise, she was accepted.
By this time Nighat’s brother, only four years older than her, was supporting the family. Mehar Allah and Nasreen would sometimes send their children gifts of flour, ghee or spinach from the village, but they could not pay for their education. Nighat’s brother was more conservative than his father. Even though Mehar Allah had enrolled his girls in schools where they sat in classrooms with boys, his sister would not go to a co-educational university, he said. “My brother was paying for everything now and he held all the power in the family,” Nighat says. “Everyone was dependent on him, and I needed his permission if I wanted to go to university.” Initially, she had not been that keen on studying law, but the moment she was told that he did not want her to do so, she dug her heels in.
She refused to wear a full veil as her brother wanted her to. She would only agree to wear an abaya, a long, full-sleeved gown, and a scarf to cover her head. When I ask why she didn’t just say she would wear a niqab to classes, and then remove it—after all, how would her brother know?—she looks surprised. The idea never occurred to her. “Why would I lie about it?” she asks. “I wanted to show them who I was. I knew that whatever I did would set an example for the other women in my family. I was the first one to go to university and study law—none of the men had ever done that.”
In Ratta Matta, Mehar Allah’s friends and relatives criticized him. Why are you sending your daughter to a university where she will study with boys? they asked. Why does she even need to study law? But Mehar Allah had heard them boasting when their sons had come back to the village with a law degree, and had seen these boys throw their weight around because they now had a power that few in the village did: they knew their rights. Mehar Allah wanted to tell them all, My girl is also a lawyer. Three years later, he got his wish.
Nighat was twenty-four years old and a fresh graduate when her father received a marriage proposal for her from a friend. “The boy’s family said they wanted to send me abroad to keep studying,” Nighat recalls. “They wanted me to become a barrister.” She didn’t particularly like her suitor, but she had nothing to compare him to: she had never been on a date, and she did not dream of her wedding day like many of the girls she knew. Her father suggested that she get to know the boy, and he was given permission to call the landline at their home and talk to her. For six months they would have stilted conversations while Nighat’s family members sat within earshot. They were allowed to meet only two times, even when they were engaged.
“It’s difficult to talk to you like this,” her fiancé complained. “I want to buy you a mobile phone.” But Nighat was not allowed to have her own phone. It was the early 2000s, and only about 5 percent of Pakistan’s population of 144 million owned a mobile; they were a status symbol.5 Moreover, Nighat had only seen a mobile phone in the hands of men. However, she agreed, and hid the phone from her family, only using it to speak to her fiancé.
One day as she sat with her family there was an unfamiliar buzzing sound. It was coming from Nighat’s bag. Her brother pounced, reached inside and pulled out the mobile phone. She had forgotten to turn off the ringer. Once again he told her she had brought shame on the family. She could not be trusted. She was not a good girl. Even today her voice is low and small, as though she is telling me a terrible secret about herself, when she recalls what he said to her that day. “I remember thinking, what is the big deal? What have I done that is so terrible? I’m only talking to my fiancé, and if he has a mobile phone, why can’t I?”
She was married soon after. The promises about going abroad for her education had been empty. Her husband and in-laws told her she was not allowed to work. After all, what kind of woman would want to go to the courts and wait around for hours while strange men gawked at her? She whiled away her days watching TV in her cramped new home with her in-laws, cooking and cleaning. There was no computer and no need for a mobile any more now that the man she had been talking to on the phone was her husband.
When she was in her third year at university, some friends had talked to her about sex. She could not believe what they were saying. She told them they were lying. No one in her family had ever mentioned this to her and she had not used her precious time online to look up things like that. “It just didn’t cross my mind,” she explains. “I wasn’t curious about it. I thought that you got pregnant by kissing.” She insisted to her friends, It’s the kiss. That’s what does it. They laughed at her when she made a disgusted face and said she never wanted to get married. But now, a few months after the wedding, she found herself pregnant.
While her husband and in-laws were thrilled, she had never been more unhappy in her life. “I lived in a small room with my husband, I cooked and I mopped the floors,” she says. “That was my life. I had no other purpose.” One night at 2 a.m., a month after her baby was born, she woke to the sound of her husband’s mobile phone ringing. He was fast asleep. She answered it. There was a woman on the line. “All my frustration from that past year just exploded,” she recalls.
She woke her husband up and told him she was done with him. He was furious and, while tussling with her, tried to choke their baby boy. “I’m going to kill you,” he shouted at her. “You are a bad woman. You have a terrible character.”
In the morning Nighat’s father came to the house. “If she stays here, I’ll kill myself,” her husband threatened.
“In that case I would have liked to leave her here, just to see that,” Nighat’s father said, picking up her bags. Holding her baby in her arms, she followed her father out of the house. It took her four years to get legal custody of her son, Abdullah, who goes by the name Bullah.
Back at her home, the family had gathered. They wept when they heard about what had happened, mortified that she would be a divorcée. Her aunts and uncles urged her to remain in iddat—the Islamically mandated forty days of seclusion for a widow or a divorcée. Her father asked everyone to leave. “There will be no such thing,” he announced. The next morning, when he saw her, he asked, “What are you doing sitting at home? Get up, get out and find yourself a job.” She went to the court and applied for her licence. She could finally practice law.
In court she would stand up to argue points only to have judges snap at her to sit down. She learned how women were treated in a system where, even as recently as 2016, only 5.8 percent of judges in the higher courts were women.6 While she waited for hours for her cases to be heard, she saw how mothers were treated when they were allowed to meet the children who had been taken from them—weeping in the corridors outside the courtrooms as clerks, peons and lawyers stepped around them as they sat on the floor with nowhere to be alone with their babies. “I would look at these women and think, I’m a lawyer and I’m getting knocked out by this system. What are these women going through?”
Around this time she was employed by the law minister to manage his office in Lahore. The job was perfect in many ways. Her boss was usually busy in Islamabad and frequently appeared on television in religious programmes. He rarely had time to be in Lahore, and so Nighat could run the office as she pleased. But the best thing about the job was that she had her own computer and access to the Internet for the first time in her life.
She used the three years she managed this office to research and finish a course in Internet governance. By this time
, 2007, 3.5 million Pakistanis had access to the Internet, and Nighat was interested in the ways these people, especially women, were using the World Wide Web. Who had the right to be online and who determined access to the Internet?
One day two women friends visited her at work. They were being harassed by men on the site Orkut, a social media that was popular among Pakistanis at the time. Is there any law against this kind of behaviour? they wanted to know. Should we just shut down our accounts or is there something we can do? Nighat didn’t have an answer for them, so she started researching cyber harassment and looking into the laws governing Internet use in Pakistan. She helped her friends secure their accounts, boosting their privacy settings to avoid unwanted attention. They in turn told their friends about her.
One day Nighat’s boss was in Lahore for the taping of the religious show that he hosted. He came to the office when he was done, and she brought some case files into his room, where he was sitting at his desk.
He looked at her for a while. “You’ve got a bit fat,” he commented.
Nighat was taken aback. She stammered, “Yes, I suppose, a little bit.”
“Come here.” He beckoned to her. “Come sit on my lap. Let’s see just how heavy you have become.”
She stared at him. He repeated himself. “Come sit.”
Nighat apologized and got up to leave.
“What did I just tell you to do?” he snapped.
A wave of fury rushed through her. “You should be grateful I didn’t slap you for that.”
Her boss sighed. “You should consider yourself lucky. I asked you nicely.”
As Nighat was walking out, she heard him call out, “The other women lawyers do it for 500 rupees.”
Nighat learned about a rights organization based in Lahore called Bytes for All, which focused on digital security, freedom of expression and gender-based violence online, among other issues. She applied for a job there, and was soon working with the organization tackling online harassment. She learned that since 2007 the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority had been spying on Internet and mobile phone users by using a technology that enabled it to read content in real time. Journalists, bloggers, rights activists and citizen journalists were at risk of being monitored, and many websites such as Blogspot or media platforms like YouTube were censored or blocked in the name of national security, religion or morality.7 She began lobbying the government for comprehensive cybercrime legislation.