Imagine being a girl child growing up in a joint family, with the Chachas and the Taus in the same house, one on a separate floor.. Mama and Mausi also stay nearby and kids have a grand time throughout their childhood, with so many brothers and sisters, so many sports and adventures together.  You grow up feeling you are never short of good friends, older sibling (cousins) are always there to guide, protect, reprimand you, support you and fight for you. On Raskha Bandhan, your life is nothing short of a party as you tie Rakhi to all the brothers, and in return they all give you some sweets, some nice dresses or fashion jewelry previously chosen by you. You pray for their long life and they take the vow to protect you and care for you foreverAnd you know this is for real. This is how it will be.

Now imagine you are born in a Muslim household. If you are lucky and have an inborn sense of protecting yourself, you avoid being molested in early childhood by your own cousin who lives in the room next to you and your parents. As an innocent girl child, you sometimes wonder why Bhaijan (Chacha’s son) looks at your body parts like he is doing an X Ray, and you feel his eyes are following you as you walk out of any room. When you are taking a bath, you sometimes see a shadow in the adjoining toilet which has a small opening to the bathroom where you are. You ask your older sister, why has Ammi started shouting at me for no reason after I came out of the bathroom and orders me to cover your head with a Dupatta? As you grow older, you realise that your mother was only trying to protect you from the of the older boys in the house, all of whom you grew up with and called Bhaijan, Bhaisahab, Chotey Bhai. You also learn to not be in the same room with any of your older male cousins, to talk to them while you are outside of their grabbing distance.  You grow defense mechanism whereby even when the whole household is together, taking a nap on a hot summer afternoon in the same room to save AC expenses, you must squeeze yourself between your Ammi and your Mamee lest am undisciplined hand find its way up your 12-year-old body. At the age of 14, you get propositioned from 3 separate cousins, and when you are offered a cold drink by one of them, you know that it might come with a price. When going on a walk in the park with the family, you must ensure you are not separated, lest you get cornered by an older cousin who takes you to show an old tree and then asks, alright if I kiss you now?

You spend your whole childhood and teenage feeling wary and confused, not being sure whether this is what brothers are like in general, or if you are the only sinful creature who invites the lust from one of the most sacred relations in the world. All of this because of verse 4:23 which clearly state that your cousins are not your brothers and are Na – Mehram to you. Hence for your cousins, you are “women unto whom they could have gone in”

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