Her nephew returned just as she was opening the gate to visitors. Two women in their twenties, both completely veiled, wanted to rent the upstairs section of the house that Ahmedi had been trying to lease because she needed the income. "I didn’t know them, but they seemed honest and I was about to show them the rooms when there was a commotion outside and several policemen burst into the courtyard. In the shouting and confusion they arrested the two women and my nephew.  He was just standing there holding the cement."

When her son-in-law came home from work later that afternoon, Ahmedi and he visited the police station to find out what had happened. The arrest didn’t make sense since Tufail and the women were strangers to one another.

Even now, five years later, Ahmedi Begum finds it hard to talk about what happened next. "The police put me into a separate room and told me they were arresting me, too. I was shocked. ‘I’m a respectable woman who has lived a respectable life. You have made a mistake,’ I told them. ‘You must let me go.’ But they ignored what I said. They even took away my earrings and bracelets, my wedding gold. When the officer-in-charge came, I told him the same thing:  ‘I’m a grandmother, a widow, a respectable woman, why are you keeping me here?’ He said they would free me in a little while." As Ahmedi talks, her work-worn hands turn over and over in her lap.

"As I was sitting there waiting, one of the police opened the door and said, ‘If you want these other women, here they are,’ and they pushed them into the room. They were naked, bleeding . . . . They raped them again in front of me. I covered my eyes," says Ahmedi, unconsciously doing the same thing again. "I couldn’t watch."

Her anguished response angered the officers. Ahmedi was forced to her knees, her arms pulled to her sides. "Why are you covering your eyes? Watch it, watch it!" she was told. Then, while they still held her, a police officer thrust his penis into her mouth. ‘They were laughing and shouting ‘suck, suck,’" says Ahmedi, as the tears slide down her face. "I, who have never known any man’s body except my husband’s. Such shame, such shame. I was a grandmother, a woman of honor. But they weren’t finished with me." Just like the other two captives, the five-foot-tall widow was stripped and, like them, she was held down while one officer after another repeatedly raped her. "It went on for hours, and the same with the other girls. I cried, prayed, I asked God why. I don’t know how many policemen came through that room that night. It could have been fifty. I will never forget their laughter, their shouting."

Ahmedi thought it was over when they dragged her outside. "It was morning and I believed they would let me go," she recalls. "But they threw me on the ground, and holding me facedown, they began to beat my whole body with a wide leather strap. I thought they would kill me. Suddenly the beating stopped . . . Then I screamed and screamed. I felt as though my insides were on fire. I have never known such pain." A police officer had forced a lathi, an oversize truncheon, covered in fiery chili paste, into Ahmedi’s rectum. It was done with such violence that her rectum was ruptured, and the chili paste burned like acid on the lacerated tissue. Mercifully, Ahmedi passed out. When she regained consciousness several hours later she was in Kot Lokhpat Women’s Prison.

"I couldn’t walk, I couldn’t speak, my mouth was too swollen. My clothes were covered in blood." Ahmedi lay almost motionless for days in her cell until a government minister made a VIP tour of the jail. During his visit, prisoners were required to sit on the ground with their criminal files in front of them. "He saw the blood on me and spoke to me, but because of my mouth I couldn’t reply," says Ahmedi. "He ordered a doctor to see me." He also ordered the police commissioner of Lahore to investigate the matter.

The medical report detailed the savage assault and documented that Ahmedi had been subject to "severe sexual torture." The other two women in the case had been charged with "roaming about," which can be viewed as prostitution in Pakistan. At the same time, Ahmedi learned that she was in prison charged with zina.

Zina, sex outside of wedlock, encompasses adultery, fornication, and rape, and its maximum punishment in Pakistan is stoning to death those who are married. For unmarried transgressors, the punishment is up to one hundred lashes, and ten years’ imprisonment.

Under the law as it stands in Pakistan, women who have been raped can be charged with adultery or fornication. The proof required for zina is that there be four Muslim adult males of "good repute" present who can attest to the act of sexual penetration. No male witnesses of good repute, of course, are likely to stand and watch a rape in progress without trying to stop it. And because of this requirement it becomes impossible to punish the rapists. Instead, the victim is prosecuted. Her legal complaint of rape is considered a confession of illicit sexual intercourse.

This is exactly what happened to sixteen-year-old Safla Bibi in 1983. Virtually blind, Safia was employed as a domestic in the home of a local landowner. She was raped first by her employer’s son, and then by her employer. As a result, she became pregnant and subsequently gave birth to an illegitimate child. Safia’s father registered a case of rape for his daughter. The judge, however, acquitted both the son and the father because there were not four male witnesses to attest to the assaults. Safia’s pregnancy, though, was deemed in court evidence of fornication. In sentencing her to three years’ rigorous imprisonment, a public flogging, and a fine of Rs. 1,000, the judge stated he was giving the handicapped teenager a "light sentence" because of her young age and near blindness.

In Ahmedi’s case, she spent three months in Kot Lokhpat jail. She was released on bail after Asma Jahangir, a human rights activist and lawyer, took up her case. The Lahore grandmother was finally acquitted three years later. But in that time, her son-in-law abandoned and then divorced her daughter because he felt shamed by the gossip.

Ahmedi is stiIl under treatment for a chronically ulcerated rectum.  She also suffers from constant back pain from the beating, as well as high blood pressure and frequent nightmares. She believes she was arrested because shortly before the incident she had refused to rent out rooms to a police officer from the station where she was assaulted.

Compounding her health problems were the visits she received from the police several times after she was acquitted. "They offered us thousands of rupees to drop the case against them, but they never gave back my dowry jewelry. I told them my honor is more important than their blood money. The last time they came, a police official said to me ‘These men cannot be punished. It is bad for the country, and will bring a bad name for the police, if they are.’"

The officers involved in the attack were charged but never tried. They were transferred outside the city to different parts of the province, as was the trial. The witnesses could not afford the frequent travel to the new location in Rawalpindi, seven hours drive away. Such ploys are commonly used in Pakistan in cases against the police.

Tragically, Ahmedi’s case is not an isolated one. Seventy-two percent of all women in Pakistan in police custody are physically and sexually abused, according to lawyer Asma Jahangir, who is also cofounder of Women’s Action Forum, a national women’s rights organization. Equally shocking is the fact that 75 percent of all women in jail in Pakistan are there under charges of zina. "Many can serve months, even years, waiting for their trials to be heard," adds Hina Jilani, Jahangier’s sister, and a fellow human rights activist and lawyer.

But it isn’t just law enforcers who see rape as a fringe benefit of their positions. In a country where a woman’s chastity, purity, and honor must be preserved at all costs, even to death, women are subject to sexual assault almost daily, as Pakistan’s newspapers attest. And it is an easy crime to commit because punishment for men is so rare.

Rape is a weapon commonly used for revenge. In August 1991, twenty-six men raped Allah Wasai, a woman who was eight months pregnant, to settle a score with her father-in-law. After the attack she was paraded naked through her community. In November of that same year, two young women were subject to nearly identical barbaric assaults. In each case the young woman was gang-raped by eight men, and then had her nose amputated. "To cut off someone’s nose" is a figure of speech in Pakistan that means to humiliate . . . "

I'm sure some will say, "Well, this report certainly is ugly, but why do we need to make such things public?"  Well, one reason is because I'm unhappy with the whitewashing Islam presently is receiving in our news media.  Over and over, I see well-educated and smooth-talking personalities explaining that Islam actually is a very peaceful and benign religion.  Then they quote a few carefully selected verses from the Koran that seem to support this perspective.  In other words, it's unfortunate that a few fringe "fanatics" are giving Islam a bad name.  Too many naive Americans are buying  into this sham.

I disagree with much of what I'm hearing.  Regardless of what certain portions of the Koran seem to say, the real question is what does this world religion produce whenever Muslims are in the majority.  The answer is evident when one takes a close look at Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Somalia, Sudan, Indonesia, Pakistan, etc.  It would be difficult to point to a single Islamic nation where citizens are truly free and where women are treated as other than cattle.

For example.  The Bible says that Christian eyes haven't seen, nor have Christian ears heard, the things that God has prepared for those that love him.  However, the Koran explicitly depicts the Muslim heaven as a place where men will be given a superhuman sex drive, so that they can spend their days having multiple affairs with young women who will remain perpetual virgins.  I would be embarrassed if the Bible described heaven that way.  And, perhaps worst of all, when it comes to heaven Muslim women aren't even spoken of.  Either they won't be allowed in, or if they are, they aren't even worth even mentioning.

How many Americans know that multitudes of Christians are being slaughtered by Muslims in Indonesia, or crucified or sold into slavery in the Sudan?  Does anyone care?

Although each Muslim man or women must be judged as an individual rather than corporately, I do believe that the Islamic faith is inherently evil. 

Our present terrorist-fighting "coalition" easily could evaporate, and be replaced by a world-wide Islamic front arrayed against the rest of mankind.  Osama bin Laden would love that.

PS.  A thought for those interested in biblical numerology.  Since 7 is the Bible's "perfect number," 6 becomes a symbol of imperfection.  No wonder, then, that the number of the beast of Revelation 13 is "666."  With that in mind, it is interesting that the Koran contains 6,666 verses.

 donhawley1@attbi.com

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