To grapple with the curse of honour killing, the British Council is running an awareness campaign about the issue in the rural Sindh and Southern Punjab. To highlight the religious and traditional misinterpretations a national conference is being organised here on September 17-19.
As part of the media campaign, Dastak, as NGO, has prepared a music video to reach a wider audience and spread the message in a simple way for the understanding of the issue. The song "Kari Jo Geet - song of a women condemned" - is part of the campaign. This project has been funded by The Global Opportunity Fund of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office of the British Government, and is managed by the British Council in Pakistan. The singer is Mai Hanju and Mosadiq Sanwal provides the music, while Hasan Mujtaba composes lyrics.
According to a brochure, prepared by the British Council, the honour-killing awareness raising campaign held last year in rural Sindh and Southern Punjab through print-media, street theatre, police training and an international conference, has created a strong body of public opinion condemning honour opinion condemning honour-killing as a henious crime.
Through this campaign, the realisation that honour killing is, to a great extent, a result of misinterpretation of religion and tradition has emerged. To follow up on this, the advisory committee of the aware raising project has decided to engage Islamic jurists and religious scholars of Islamic law, intellectuals and community leaders in a dialogue. The purpose is to widen the debate in order to contribute further towards achieving the goal of eliminating honour killing from our society.
It is hoped that the conference will generate a body of knowledge, which will effectively help understand honour killing from three points of view as follows:
(i) Honour killing in the light of Islamic injunctions, (ii) Honour killing in the light of mindset and political perspectives, and (iii) Honour killing and the role of state institutions. The conference specially aims to enhance awareness about the existing misinterpretations related to religion and culture.
Examine ways to better understand the cultural context in which so-called honour crimes take place in Pakistan, and highlight and promote the true viewpoint of Islam on women-related issues.
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