Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide

by Nicholas D. Kristof; Sheryl WuDunn

  "They know that a woman humiliated in that way has no other recourse except suicide," Mukhtar wrote later. "They don't even need to use their weapons. Rape kills her."

  After administering the sentence, the rapists pushed Mukhtar out of the stable and forced her to stagger home, almost naked, before a jeering crowd. Once home, she prepared to do what any Pakistani peasant woman would normally do in that situation: kill herself. Suicide is the expected way for a woman to cleanse herself and her family of the shame. But Mukhtar's mother and father kept watch over her and prevented that option; then a local Muslim leader--one of the heroes in this story--spoke up for her at Friday prayers and denounced the rape as an outrage against Islam.

  Mukhtar Mai. when we first met her, with students at her school (Nicholas D. Kristof)

  As the days passed, Mukhtar's attitude mutated from humiliation to rage. Finally, she did something revolutionary: She went to the police and reported the rape, demanding prosecution. The police, somewhat surprisingly, then arrested the attackers. President Pervez Musharraf heard about the case and sympathized, sending Mukhtar the equivalent of $8,300 in compensation. But instead of taking the money for herself, Mukhtar decided to invest it in what her village needed most--schools.

  "Why should I have spent the money on myself?" she told Nick on his first visit to Meerwala. "This way the money is helping all the girls, all the children." During that first visit, Mukhtar was hard to get to know. When her father greeted Nick and invited him into the house, it took Nick a while to figure out who Mukhtar was. Mukhtar's father and brothers did all the talking, and Mukhtar was simply one of several women who listened in the back. She covered her face with a scarf, and all he could see were her eyes, burning with intensity. Time after time, when Nick would ask Mukhtar a question, her older brother would answer.

  "So, Mukhtar, why did you use your money to start a school?"

  "She started a school because she believes in education."

  After a couple of hours, the novelty of having an American in the house wore off, and the men became fidgety and wandered off to do errands. Finally, Mukhtar herself began to speak, her voice muffled by the scarf. She spoke passionately of her belief in the redemptive quality of education, in her hope that men and women in the villages could live together in harmony if only they had an education. The best way to overcome the attitudes that led to her rape, she said, was to spread education.

  The police were stationed in Mukhtar's home, nominally to protect her, and they listened to the entire interview. Afterward, Mukhtar steered Nick aside to plead for help. "The police are just stealing from my family," she said angrily. "They're not helping us. And the government has forgotten about me. It made promises to help my school, but it does nothing." The new Mukhtar Mai School for Girls stood next to her house, and Mukhtar had enrolled in her own school, sitting beside the littlest girls and learning to read and write with them. But the school was unfinished and running out of operating funds.

  Nick's columns about Mukhtar (who at the time went by a variant of her name, Mukhtaran Bibi) brought her $430,000 in contributions from readers, channeled through Mercy Corps, an aid group that does work in Pakistan. But it also brought harassment from the government. President Musharraf initially admired Mukhtar's courage, but he wanted Pakistan to be renowned for a sizzling economy, not notorious for barbaric rapes. Mukhtar's public comments--including her insistence that rape of poor women was a systemic problem--embarrassed him. So the intelligence services began to lean on Mukhtar to keep quiet. She refused to do so, and the government fired a warning shot: Officials ordered the release of the men who had been convicted of raping her. Mukhtar collapsed in tears.

  "I'm afraid for my life," she told us by phone that night. Still, she wouldn't back down, and her response was to call on the Pakistani government to pay more attention to women's rights. Mukhtar went ahead with plans to visit the United States and speak at a conference on women. So President Musharraf, by his own account, put her on the "exit control list," a blacklist of Pakistanis barred from leaving the country. Mukhtar denounced the Pakistani government for doing so and refused to be intimidated. So then the intelligence services put her under house arrest and cut off her telephone land line. But she could still go up on her roof and get a weak cell phone connection, so she used it to describe to us how the police who supposedly were protecting her were now pointing their guns at her.

  Enraged at Mukhtar's continued defiance and outspokenness, Musharraf ordered her kidnapped (or, as he euphemistically put it, brought to the capital). Intelligence agents bustled Mukhtar into a car and a convoy drove her to Islamabad, where she was furiously berated.

  "You have betrayed your country and helped our enemies!" an official told her. "You have shamed Pakistan before the world." Then the intelligence officers led Mukhtar, sobbing bitterly, off to a safe house, where she was prevented from contacting anyone. As all this was transpiring, Pakistan's foreign minister was visiting the White House and hearing President George W. Bush publicly praise Musharraf's "bold leadership."

  Publicity about Pakistan's harassment of Mukhtar was embarrassing to the Bush administration, so Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice called the Pakistani foreign minister and told him it had to stop. The authorities released Mukhtar. Musharraf's aides proposed that, when the tempest died down, Pakistani officials accompany Mukhtar on a tightly chaperoned visit to the United States, where she would emphasize what a fine job the Pakistani government was doing. Mukhtar refused. "I only want to go of my own free will," she said. Mukhtar also complained publicly that her passport had been seized. Soon Musharraf returned the passport and allowed her to visit the United States on her own.

  By now, Musharraf had turned Mukhtar into a celebrity. She was invited to the White House and the State Department, and the French foreign minister discussed international affairs with her. Glamour magazine flew Mukhtar first class to New York to honor her as a "woman of the year" at a banquet where she was introduced by someone she had never heard of--Brooke Shields. Laura Bush offered a video tribute, noting, "Please don't assume that it's only a tale of heartbreak. Mukhtaran proves that one woman really can change the world."

  On that visit, Mukhtar sat in her palatial hotel suite on Central Park West, dizzied by the attention and luxury and deeply homesick for Meerwala. She worried about what would happen to the girls in her school during her absence. She found the interviews tiresome, partly because reporters weren't interested in her school but only in the rape. That's all they asked: So what was it like being gang-raped? Mukhtar had a disastrous live interview on the CBS morning news in which she was asked about it. Mukhtar indignantly replied: I don't really want to talk about that.... There was an awkward silence.

  During her American visit, Mukhtar was repeatedly invited by important people to dine in fancy restaurants; she kept asking for Pakistani takeout. Officials would tell Mukhtar how active their governments or aid groups were in Pakistan, and she would ask: "Where in Pakistan do you operate?" And the answer would come: Islamabad, Karachi, Lahore. Mukhtar would shake her head and say, "Where we need help is the countryside. Please, go to the villages and do your work there."

  Mukhtar herself lived by that credo. Sympathetic aid workers constantly urged her to move to Islamabad, where she could be safe. But she refused to discuss it. "My work is in my village," she said when we brought it up. "That is where the needs are. I am afraid, but I will meet my fate. It is in God's hands."

  Visitors to events where Mukhtar was honored saw a shy woman with a head scarf getting one standing ovation after another (when she appeared in Glamour, she set the magazine's all-time record for clothing-to-skin ratio). But Mukhtar's passion was always her school and her village, and most of her work was not at all glamorous.

  Nick has twice been a commencement speaker at Mukhtar's school, and the ceremony is quite a sight. More than one thousand students, parents, and relatives gather in a huge tent erected in a field, and they watch the stude
nts sing and perform skits warning against wife beating or early marriage. The mood is festive, and even some of the children of Mukhtar's imprisoned rapists take part. The girls incongruously break into spasms of laughter when pretending to be beaten by their husbands. Yet the constant message is for parents to keep girls in school, and that is an obsession for Mukhtar.

  She was particularly determined to save one of her fourth-grade students, Halima Amir, from being pulled out of school to be married. Halima was twelve, tall and thin with long black hair, and she had been engaged at age seven to a boy five years older.

  "I saw him once," Halima said of her fiance, As-Salam. "I never talked to him. I wouldn't recognize him if I saw him again. I don't want to get married now." Halima had been first in her class the previous year, and her favorite subject was English. Her fiance was illiterate. But her parents worried that she would soon hit puberty, and they wanted her to be married off before she might develop a crush on someone else and start people gossiping--or damage her most valuable possession of all, her hymen. Time and again, Mukhtar went to Halima's home, pleading with her parents to keep her in school. The drama was unfolding during one of Nick's visits to the school, and so on his next trip he asked about Halima.

  "She's not here anymore," another student explained. "Her parents arranged a marriage for her. They waited until Mukhtar was away on a trip, and then they pulled Halima out of school and married her off. Now she's living a long way away." Not every battle ends in victory.

  With the help of the contributions people sent her, Mukhtar expanded her activities. She built a girls' high school and began operating a school for boys as well. She obtained a herd of dairy cows to provide income to sustain the schools. She bought a school van that doubles as an ambulance, to take pregnant women to a hospital when they are ready to deliver. She built another school in a nearby gangster-ridden area, where even the government didn't dare operate--and the gangsters, rather than rob the school, enrolled their own children in it. She persuaded the province to build a women's college to absorb her high school's graduates.

  Mukhtar welcomes volunteers to teach English in her schools and will give them free room and board as long as they commit to staying a few months. We can't imagine a richer learning experience.

  Mukhtar also started her own aid group, the Mukhtar Mai Women's Welfare Organization, which operates a twenty-four-hour hotline for battered women, a free legal clinic, a public library, and a shelter for victims of violence. That was necessary because as Mukhtar's fame spread--partly through a weekly television show she launched--women from around the country started showing up at her home. They arrived by bus, foot, taxi, or rickshaw--and often they didn't even have money to pay the driver. The rickshaw drivers came to realize that if they showed up at Mukhtar's home with a sobbing woman, Mukhtar would pay the fare. Then Mukhtar used her prominence to nudge police, journalists, and lawyers to help the victims. Mukhtar didn't speak with sophistication or learning, but she was relentless and effective. And when women came to her with their faces destroyed by acid attacks or with their noses chopped off--a traditional punishment for "bad" or "loose" women--Mukhtar arranged plastic surgery.

  Mukhtar herself changed with time. She learned Urdu and became fluent. When we first visited Meerwala, she asked permission from her father or older brother every time she left the house. That became less tenable when she was hosting ambassadors, so she began going out without permission. This offended her older brother (her father and younger brother admire her too much to be bothered) and put a strain on the family. At one point, her older brother threatened to kill her unless she was more obedient. It didn't help that the forlorn women who were arriving at Mukhtar's doorstep were devouring the family's food and monopolizing the outhouse. But her older brother mellowed, for he is also moved by the stories of the visitors; a bit grudgingly, he admits that his sister is doing extraordinary work, and that times are changing.

  Mukhtar always used to cover her face and hair entirely, with just her eyes peeking through a slit. At the banquets where she was being honored in the United States, men had to be warned not to try to shake hands with her, to hug her, or--most scandalous--to peck her on the cheek. Yet after a year or so, Mukhtar became less finicky about her head scarf and began to shake hands with men. Her faith is still enormously important to her, but she realizes that the world will not end if her scarf drops.

  As Mukhtar's fame grew, the government began to push back. President Musharraf was still aggrieved at her for "embarrassing" Pakistan, so his intelligence services harried her and her supporters. An arrest warrant was issued against one of Mukhtar's brothers on manifestly bogus charges. For a time, the Pakistani government denied us visas because we had championed her case and were close to her. The intelligence apparatus planted articles in Urdu-language newspapers accusing Mukhtar of extravagance (totally untrue) or of being a stooge for Indians and for Nick in their supposed efforts to harm Pakistan. Some upper-class Pakistanis, while originally sympathetic to Mukhtar, scorned her as an uneducated peasant and were uncomfortable with the way she was lionized abroad. They unskeptically accepted the slander that she was a money-hungry publicity hound, and they urged us to focus not on Mukhtar but on the work of doctors and lawyers in the cities. "Mukhtar means well, but she's just a peasant," one Pakistani told us scornfully. All the slanders left Mukhtar deeply wounded.

  "My life and death is in God's hands," she said, as she had before. "That doesn't bother me. But why does the government keep treating me as if I were a liar and a criminal?

  "For the first time, I feel that the government has a plan to deal with me," Mukhtar added. The plan, she said, was to kill or imprison her or to fake a scandal to discredit her.

  Mukhtar today in her steadily expanding school (Nicholas D. Kristof)

  Sure enough, a senior police official warned that if she was uncooperative, the government would imprison her for fornication. Fornication? On any given night there were about a dozen other women taking shelter alongside Mukhtar on the floor of her bedroom (she gave the bed itself to Naseem Akhtar, her chief of staff). President Musharraf even sent a warning through a top aide to Amna Buttar, a courageous Pakistani-American physician who was planning to accompany Mukhtar on a visit to New York: Mukhtar should watch her tongue in America, because the Pakistani government could hire local thugs to kill her and make it look like a mugging. Buttar passed the warning on to us.

  Naseem told us: "I want you to know that no matter how we are killed, even if it looks like an accident, it isn't. So if we die in a train accident, or a bus accident, or a fire--then tell the world that it was not actually an accident."

  Mukhtar's courage is having an impact, and she has shown that great social entrepreneurs don't come just from the ranks of the privileged. Rapes used to be widespread in rural Pakistan, because there was no disincentive. But Mukhtar changed the paradigm, and women and girls began to fight back and go to the police.

  In 2007, a case similar to Mukhtar's unfolded in a village called Habib Labano. A young man eloped with his high-caste girlfriend, outraging the girl's family. So a high-caste council resolved to take revenge on a sixteen-year-old-girl, Saima, who was a cousin of the young man. Eleven men kidnapped the girl and paraded her naked through the village, and then, on council orders, two men raped her.

  Inspired by Mukhtar, Saima didn't kill herself. Instead, her family sought prosecution. Saima went for a medical checkup that confirmed the rape, and aid groups moved to help her. After a protest that blocked a road, the higher authorities fired two police officers and arrested five of the lower-ranking suspects. It wasn't exactly justice, but it was progress. Raping poor girls is no longer always a penalty-free sport, and so rapes appear to have declined considerably in the southern Punjab. There is no data, but inhabitants in village after village say that rapes used to be common and are now rare.

  Mukhtar has also galvanized other change-makers, creating echoes of herself. Farooq Leghari is a bull of a
man, a tough cop who speaks English and has been seasoned by service in some of the toughest parts of Pakistan. In a long conversation at a police post that he commands, he spoke of ruling by fear, of beating up suspects to make them confess. Everything he knew was the law of the jungle, and then he was sent to Meerwala to be the top cop looking after Mukhtar. He was taken aback by Mukhtar and her commitment to the poor and helpless, and in spite of himself he came to admire her deeply.

  "It is a spiritual feeling," he recalled. "I am very glad when I see Mukhtaran Bibi going abroad, when she opens schools or shelters." As Farooq fell under Mukhtar's spell, he became increasingly uncomfortable with the orders from his superiors to spy on her and harass her. When his superiors scolded Farooq for protecting Mukhtar, he told his bosses of her wonderful work. That's when he was abruptly transferred to a distant police post. Farooq continued to denounce the persecution of Mukhtar publicly, so we asked him why he risked his career to stand up for a woman he was supposed to have punished.