Pashtun Personality of the Week: Bushra Gohar – A Remarkable Leading Politician

Bushra Gohar

The following is being pasted from my old blog; click here for a discussion on the post.

And at last, we continue on with our Pashtun leaders series … I’m going to stop apologizing for the delays in being consistent with this series because writing these out really does take a lot of time 🙂

Bushra Gohar

Bushra Gohar is one of my personal favorite women in contemporary times. It makes me so proud that she’s Pukhtun, too, because she’s quite an accomplished woman, and whenever I lose hope in my people, I think of her to feel hopeful again. What makes me happiest, though, is that she’s really easy to talk to and interact with. Very humble and down-to-earth. I know too many people, when they make it big, start feeling so big that they refuse to interact with us “smaller” people then. Gohar isn’t like that. In fact, I sent her a few questions in preparation for this post that I wanted her to answer, and she got back to me right away. There wasn’t any “I don’t have time for this average human blogger random Pukhtun girl to write about me” kind of responses, and she certainly didn’t ignore me.

Pakistani Racism against Pashtuns: what it’s like hearing that a Pashtun man killed 10 relatives

The article below was originally published over at MuslimGirl.Net, titled “Misogyny Doesn’t Come from ‘Pashtun Culture.'”

Image from: http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/man-killed-fiance-nine-relatives-5467616

As a Muslim, I find it agonizing having to write about and recognize the injustice so prevalent in so many Muslim societies—mainly because of the role of such violence in inviting more Islamophobia and assuring Islamophobes that their bigotry is well in place. It’s worse when you’re an ethnic minority almost everywhere (except in Afghanistan) because you’re Pashtun, and you’re marginalized in virtually all spheres of life, and then suddenly, so many news outlets, major and minor, are talking about the barbarity of your culture and people. I’ve written about the marginalization of Pashtuns in Pakistan on my blog before, so I won’t go into details about that here. For now, I want to reflect on a possible reaction to the most recent act of misogyny that a man who shares my ethnic identity has just committed: homeboy killed ten of his relatives because he wanted to marry a girl whose father couldn’t yet afford the marriage and asked him to wait.

Punjabi-Pashtun and Pashtun-Punjabi Racism and Hatred in Pakistan

Pre-pre-script: The comments on this article were quite phenomenal, many of them reiterating my point. To read them, please click here (scroll a little down on the page to view them).

Pre-script: I realize I’m using “Pukhtun” and “Pashtun” interchangeably – because they are the same thing. I don’t use “Pathan” because many Pashtuns mind that name and see it as a distortion of the original “Pashtun/Pukhtun.”

This is going to be tough to read for those Pukhtuns who are in denial of the fact that the mockery, the racism, the bigotry of the Punjabis against Pashtuns goes both ways: it’s not just Punjabis alone who mock Pukhtuns; Pukhtuns mock Punjabis constantly as well – they just do it in different ways. It’ll also be a tough read for Punjabis and other non-Pashtun Pakistanis who think “Pathan” jokes are funny or who deny the reality of institutional racism against Pashtuns in Pakistan.