‘The gutsiest woman in Pakistan’
Sharp-tongued lawyer Asma Jehangir died at 66, leaving behind a legacy as human rights champion
She was branded a traitor to Islam and her homeland, accused of blasphemy, attacked by angry mobs and thrown into prison. She was hailed as a courageous crusader, awarded dozens of international honours, nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize and described as “the gutsiest woman” in Pakistan.
For more than three decades, Asma Jehangir, a sharp-tongued activist and erudite attorney, was Pakistan’s leading human rights lawyer and champion. She spoke out for women abused in the name of honour, defended non-Muslims harassed as infidels, denounced religious extremism and marched for democratic freedoms under dictatorship.
She died Feb.11of a heart attack after being taken to a hospital in the Pakistani city of Lahore, her lifetime home, her family announced.
Jehangir often seemed to be everywhere at once — a vocal and visible presence at many historic public confrontations in Pakistan over military rule, religious intolerance and cruel traditions. Her barbed, witty comments in hundreds of news conferences, TV interviews and more recent tweets delighted liberal fans and infuriated conservative critics.
To be a successful activist lawyer, she once noted, one must “have an eye for what’s hot, the right case, the right bench.” Jehangir was a pioneer for women’s rights in Pakistan, founding the country’s first all-female law firm with her sister Hina Jilani in 1987. Over the years, she took on religious laws that blamed rape victims as adulterers, funda- mentalist Islamist groups that sought to suppress women, family and cultural traditions that trapped them in abusive marriages and traditional village councils that meted out rapes and lashings as punishment for suspected illicit relations.
Her early activism was forged as a young woman during the repressive military rule of Gen. Muhammad Zia ul-Haq in the 1980s, when she was arrested and imprisoned for protesting against Zia’s harsh “Islamization” policies and curtailment of women’s rights.
In one case, she defended a blind adolescent girl who was raped, accused of fornication and sentenced to be flogged and imprisoned. The ruling was eventually overturned, but at one point Jehangir was arrested.
Asecular-minded Muslim, Jehangir defended the rights of Christians and other minorities throughout her career, denouncing the abuse of blasphemy laws against them.
One widely shared tweet came from Malala Yousafzai, 20, the Pakistani activist for girls’ education who was nearly assassinated by Taliban militants as a teenager. She was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014 and is now studying at Oxford.
“The best tribute to her,” Yousafzai tweeted, “is to continue her fight for human rights and democracy.”