September 2002

Sodom in Pakistan

    

  

 
In early September 2002, six men were sentenced to death for a gang rape of a 30-year-old woman in the Pakistani province of Punjab.

 

The rape had been ordered in June by a tribal village council as punishment for her family because her 11-year old brother was alleged to have had relations with a girl of higher social status.

The case has highlighted the plight of women in Pakistan's rural areas, particularly in tribal regions, where the practice of so-called "honour killings" is common. The practice punishes women who are believed to have brought their family into disrepute. According to other reports in the BBC, in this year alone, dozens of cases of rape and "honour killings" have been reported in Punjab province.

 
 Similarity to the story of Sodom

But what struck me most about this case was its similarity to the story of Sodom. You will be struck too, if you can get past the gender of the victim. (Lots of men can't because they can't see men and women as equal and thus interchangeable in any story.)

Sodom is really a story of an attempted gang-rape, by a delegation from a town. In the BBC story, the gang-rape was committed by posse sanctioned by a village council.

Another similarity was in the way females were treated as chattels of males. In the biblical story, Lot offered up his daughters in negotiation with the gang who arrived at his house. In the Pakistani case, the village council demanded the sexual use of the girl as compensation for a transgression by the family's son. In both cases, the females had no autonomy; they could be traded or demanded by males.

For non-Christian readers, let me explain briefly, the story of Sodom from the Old Testament, and its alleged significance.

In Genesis, chapters 18 and 19, the God Jehovah, accompanied by 2 angels, made a pit-stop at Abraham's house in Mamre, on their way to the city of Sodom. Abraham showered his guests with generous hospitality. There was also a discussion about whether his aged wife, Sarah, could conceive a child.

Then the visitors prepared to leave.

Genesis 18, verse 16: Then the men rose from there and looked toward Sodom, and Abraham went with them to send them on their way.

Jehovah then went into a bit of soliloquy. Genesis 18, verse 17: And the Lord said, "Shall I hide from Abraham what I am doing?"

Well, he eventually decided he would tell Abraham of his intentions.

Genesis 18, verses 20 – 21: And the Lord said, "Because the outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is great, and because their sin is very grave, I will go down now and see whether they have done altogether according to the outcry against it that has come to me; and if not, I will know."

What followed was another conversation between Abraham and the Lord, this time about what the latter would do if among the wicked people of Sodom and Gomorrah, he also found some righteous folks. Would Jehovah destroy the righteous with the wicked?

Eventually, Jehovah promised he would not. He would find some means to save them first.

 
What exactly happened at Sodom?

The two angels arrived at Sodom by the evening. They came upon Lot who was sitting by the gate of the city. Lot invited them to his house. After some hesitation, they agreed, and were treated by Lot to a feast.

Genesis, chapter 19, verses 4 - 8: Now, before they lay down, the men of the city, the men of Sodom, both old and young, all of them people from every quarter, surrounded the house. And they called to Lot and said to him, "Where are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out to us that we may know them."

So Lot went out to them through the doorway, shutting the door behind him, and said, "Please, my brethren, do not do so wickedly!"

"See now, I have two daughters who have not known a man; please, let me bring them out to you, and you may do to them as you wish; only do nothing to these men, since this is the reason they have come under the shadow of my roof."

The crowd would not be so easily dissuaded.

Genesis, chapter 19, verse 9: And they said, "Stand back!" Then they said, "This one came in to stay here, and he keeps acting as a judge; now we will deal worse with you than with them." So they pressed hard against the man Lot, and came near to breaking down the door.

Lot and the angels barricaded themselves in the house, and the angels struck the crowd blind, so they couldn't further their attack. The angels then told Lot to get his sons, daughters and in-laws out of the city.

Genesis, chapter 19, verse 13: "For we will destroy this place, because the outcry against them has grown great before the face of the Lord, and the Lord has sent us to destroy it."

Which they did, before the night was over.

 
 And the moral of the story?

Homophobic, literal-fundamentalist Christians often refer to this story of the destruction of Sodom as proof that their God abhors homosexuality; that it is so sinful, it incurs the wrath of God.

But if you read the passages carefully (and even so, you have to remember, I was quoting from an English translation, not the original Old Hebrew text, which itself was set down centuries after circulating only in oral tradition), you'd be hard-pressed to find any mention of same-sex eroticism or same-sex love.

The story makes for very dramatic theatre indeed, and the very reason it's dramatic is that it was about an attempt at gang-rape. Now, rape, as the more enlightened among us realise, is not really about sex. Sexual penetration is merely a means to abuse and humiliate the other party, as the case in Pakistan shows. The objective is dominance and the degrading of the opponent, not the erotic or the romantic.

Contained within the very words of Genesis are clues that social status and pride were intrinsic to the story. The mob said, "This one came in to stay here, and he keeps acting as a judge; now we will deal worse with you than with them." Can you feel the venom against those who were seen to be behaving haughtily?

Did you notice that Lot offered his daughters to appease the mob? How does one explain this?

Well, in tribal societies, women had nowhere near the same status as men; they were chattels of men. Lot could offer them up for negotiation. What was more important was that the social status of males should not be violated by rape.

It has also been argued by Biblical scholars that in tribal societies of those times, hospitality to visitors was a great moral requirement, and Lot would have failed in it if he could not protect his visitors. He would have lost more face having his visitors violated than having his daughters raped.

Literal, homophobic Christians like to make the point that Sodom was a society that liked homosexual sex, and their "wickedness" (read: homosexuality) was the reason their God destroyed it. This incident at Lot's house was only the last straw.

 
BBC, 1 Sept 2002

Death sentences for gang rape

A special court in Pakistan has found six men guilty of their part in the gang-rape of a woman - a case which has provoked national outrage. All six - including two men from a self-appointed tribal council in a remote part of Punjab province - have been sentenced to death by hanging.

Defence lawyers said they would appeal against the guilty verdict.

Human rights activists in Pakistan have expressed satisfaction with the conviction, but say the government must now act on the issues brought up by this case.

Eight other men who were accused of abetting the rape of 30-year-old Mukhtar Mai in June were acquitted.

The rape was ordered by a tribal "panchyat" or council in the village of Mirwali, near Muzaffargarh city, to punish Mukhtar Mai's family after her brother was accused of having an illicit affair with a woman from a more powerful tribe. In many of Pakistan's remote areas, tribal councils, made up of community elders, still work like a lawful body, judging cases ranging from animal theft or tribal rivalry to murder.

Mukhtar Mai's brother, Abdul Shakoor, said the story of his affair was concocted to cover up the fact that he had been sodomised by three men earlier in the day and threatened to report the incident.

National outrage

Mukhtar Mai testified that when she apologised to the council, one man said she should be pardoned but another immediately insisted that she should be raped. She described begging the council to save her, but they took no notice and four men raped her while hundreds of villagers did nothing to stop the assault.

Afterwards, she said she was forced to walk home half-naked in full public view, covered only with a piece of cloth.

However the police took no action until a case was registered a week after the rape. The role played in the incident by the village council, which has no legal standing, has raised particular concerns.

A spokesman for the human rights commission said the government had allowed this kind of informal justice system to flourish throughout the country and it needed to be immediately controlled. Activists also say this case illustrates the horrific abuse many women face in Pakistan, with most of them never seeing their attackers brought to justice.

The BBC's Susannah Price in Islamabad says the widespread publicity surrounding this case ensured it was brought before an anti-terrorism court, which dealt with it relatively quickly.

 

The real reason

There is no textual support for this interpretation. The words "wicked" and "righteous" in the Bible is generally used to distinguish between those who refused to recognise Jehovah as the omnipotent God, and those who did. "Wicked" almost always means pagan, and pagan rituals in those times (and in that region) tended to include temple prostitution and cultic orgies. The association between sexual rites and worship was there, but paganism was the primary evil. Jehovah had more or less decided to destroy Sodom (even before his angels arrived at its gates) because it denied allegiance to him, and continued to worship other gods.

In Deuteronomy, this is quite clearly spelt out. In the words of Moses speaking to the people of Israel,

Deuteronomy, chapter 29, verses 22 - 26: "So that the coming generation who rise up after you, and the foreigners who come from a far land, would say, when they see the plagues of that land, and the sicknesses which the Lord has laid on it: 'The whole land is brimstone, salt and burning; it is not sown, nor does it bear, nor does any grass grow there, like the overthrow of Sodom and Gomorrah, Admah, and Zebolim, which the Lord overthrew in his anger and wrath.'

"All nations would ask, 'Why has the Lord done so to this land? What does the heat of this great anger mean?'

"Then people would say: 'Because they have forsaken the covenant of the Lord God of their fathers, which He made with them when He brought them out of the land of Egypt; for they went and served other gods and worshipped them, gods that they did not know and that He had not given to them.' "

 
 A different culture

Let's get back to Pakistan. Even in our modern era, we have cultures that are so totally different from us, where the notion of young people crossing social class barriers is taboo, where families have to pay the price of social transgression by an 11-year-old boy, where females can be used as penalty. They are so alien to us! What more with biblical stories from thousands of years ago?

This should warn us against reading too much of our modern prejudices and assumptions into cryptic old tales. Yet people do. They take a phrase here and a phrase there, and they say, see, the Bible forbids homosexuality.

Yah, sure.

© Yawning Bread 

 

And while we are on the story of Lot, this is what Genesis says about what happened after Sodom was destroyed.

Lot's wife had died  - turned into a pillar of salt - during the escape as she looked back at the scene of destruction. Lot and his daughters took refuge in the mountains above the town of Zoar.

Genesis, chapter 19, verse 31- 36: Now the firstborn said to the younger, "Our father is old and there is no man on earth to come in to us as is the custom of all the earth. Come, let us make our father drink wine and we will lie with him, that we may preserve the lineage of our father."

So they made their father drink wine that night. And the firstborn went in and lay with her father, and he did not know when she lay down or when she arose.

It happened on the next day, that the firstborn said to the younger, "Indeed I lay with my father last night; let us make him drink wine tonight also, and you go in and lie with him, that we may preserve the lineage of our father."

Then they made their father drink wine that night also. And the younger arose and lay with him, and he did not know when she lay down or when she arose. Thus both daughters of Lot were with child by their father.

Would literal-minded Bible-thumpers please give equal weight to this lofty example by a God-fearing family?

 

Footnotes

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Addenda

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