Book Review: Blasphemy by Tehmina Durrani

“I wanted to but I couldn’t” 

These words reverberate through the protagonist’s mind from the beginning of her journey from a young nubile girl full of dreams and desires till the end of the lst chapter where by her mid life, has helplessly suffered much more than her due in life.

Authored by Tehmina Durrani, known for her controversial autobiography “My Feudal Lord” in 1991 takes on a similar narrative path of female subjugation in a society where morality and politics are deeply entrenched in social evils levied by warped and dysfunctional interpretations of Islam. This time, however, she objectifies the story to a girl although without dehumanizing her desires, spirit and nuances in her character.

Set in the interiors of South Pakistan, the book delves into the life that is concealed in the domestic courtyard and the bedroom walls of Pir Sain (Allah’s messenger) in the Holy Shrine. Heer, the beautiful young daughter of an anxious widow, becomes the object of the Pir’s desire and helpless against her poverty and mother’s will, she is wedded to become his 15 year old virginal bride. Life as she believed should be ended the day the Pir broke the bangles on her wrist, brought by her relatives on a visit. From then on, her life revolved around her domestic duties in kitchen by the day and the bedroom by the night.

From the wedding night onwards, Heer discovers the untamed side of her husband which she must satisfy and serve, sometimes by submitting young girls to save her own daughter or herself to other men to save herself the beating. In her suffering, she simultaneously fulfils her inquisitiveness around the historical lineage of the Pirs in the shrine from the elderly women in the house and unknowingly from the spirit of a woman who died fifty years ago in a tragic tale. She constantly questions the establishment of religious authorities like her husband who amass the wealth and hopes of many with no respite or change in their condition. However, like her domestic boundaries, these thoughts ruminate only in the four walls of her mind as any question or wayward comment cannot to risked to be deemed as ‘blasphemy’ for all the horrible consequences that follow.

Moreover, the book disturbingly exposes the incest, sexual and physical violence and perversion and the overt gender disparity beset in the privacy and closed doors of holy and politically powerful men in Pakistan. In the wake of much media attention that the social inequities in Pakistan are receiving, this is a worthwhile literary addition. 

Tehmina Durrani (right) with Fakhra Yunas - Former Wives of the political Khar family in Pakistan and Survivors of Abuse