A WOMAN OF SUBSTANCE
Sabbah Haji
Director, Haji Public School, Breswana, Jammu & Kashmir, India
in a candid interview with Mark Ulyseas
As a ‘single’ Muslim woman heading an educational institute in a frontline State that is often subject to terrorist attacks, do you get any threats? How does the community view your work? An abundance of stereotyping that really means nothing here in my world. I’ve answered this same question from so many different people so many times, it’s beyond amusing. First of all, what relevance my being ‘single’ to anything, particularly my work? How does my being a Muslim woman make my working any different than a non-Muslim woman’s? Because Muslim woman in general aren’t allowed? [Echoes of ‘YES, IT IS KNOWN.’]Maybe in some other world because that sort of thinking does not happen in a normal society, as ours is, Muslim though we may be.
Then: My state is as much subject to terrorist attacks as the next. We are no longer in the mid 1990s or early 2000s. This is about a decade after militancy and we’ve had no violence in my village or the vicinity for as long. That there is an overwhelming popular movement/desire for change in Kashmir is undeniable. However, the world needs to understand that Kashmir is not what is made out to be – we are not constantly under threat from terrorists. If anything, the only visible sign of conflict we see is security forces everywhere – the state apparatus, and not bearded gunmen in salwar kameez as people seem to believe. Maybe if the situation was the same today as in the mid-‘90s or the early noughties, my answer might have been different. As things stand, it is not. I couldn’t find a more peaceful spot in the world than our village [the volunteers can corroborate this]and frankly, even when political developments hot up in other parts of the state, tiny villages like ours in the mountain are least affected. We are a bunch f farmers cut off from the world outside and as long as the weather holds, the animals are healthy and the crops look good, we don’t really care for much else.
© Mark Ulyseas
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