Articles in The Friday Times by Dr. Rakhshinda Perveen
Discover Dr. Rakhshinda’s incisive writings featured in The Friday Times — Pakistan’s premier independent weekly known for bold and fearless journalism.
By Dr. Rakhshinda Perveen
Beyond Slogans: What “Mera Jism Meri Marzi” Leaves Unsaid
“Mera Jism Meri Marzi”
It is one of the most influential and controversial slogans in Pakistan’s recent public discourse on women’s rights. Yet there is a group of women and girls it rarely seems to include in its imagination: those who cannot meaningfully understand what a body is, what consent means, or what pregnancy entails.
By Dr. Rakhshinda Perveen
Not A Criminal, But A Patient — A Plea For Empathy
On May 18, 2026, the Federal Shariat Court struck down Pakistan’s 2022 Criminal Laws Amendment Act, which had removed Section 325 from the Pakistan Penal Code. Anyone who survives a suicide attempt can once again face prosecution, a fine, or imprisonment. We write as a psychiatrist and a gender justice advocate — not against Islamic values, and not to contest the court’s authority. We write because the ruling rests on a conflation that Islamic jurisprudence itself has never made: between the moral gravity of an act, and the culpability of a person whose illness drove them to it.
By Dr. Rakhshinda Perveen
How Pakistan’s High Court Is Changing The Economics Of Marriage
There are moments in this work when time collapses, when something you planted in urgency and exhaustion quietly surfaces, years later, in the precise language of the law. The Islamabad High Court’s ruling in Mst. Amara Waqas v. Muhammad Waqas Rasheed (W.P. 365/2023) is one of those moments, and I am still sitting with it.
By Dr. Rakhshinda Perveen
A Forgotten Community And The Politics Of Historical Silence
On the morning of Pakistan Day, a young Bangladeshi journalist sent me a WhatsApp message. “Warm greetings on Pakistan National Day. Wishing peace, progress, and prosperity to the people of Pakistan.” I replied with a photograph: mishti doi from Emaan Dhaka Sweets in Islamabad, a Pakistan flag sticker on the container.
By Dr. Rakhshinda Perveen
The Boys Nobody Sees: Bacha Bazi, Child Labour, And The Gender Blind Spots Of Child Protection
He is thirteen years old, fatherless, and has come from Dir in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KPK) to find work. The place he lands is Shahrag (District Harnai), a coal-mining town of Balochistan, where eight mines sit on the Al-Gilani branch of the mountain. When he arrives, the miners’ colony stirs. Word moves from shaft to shaft.
By Dr. Rakhshinda Perveen
Merchants Of Misery: The Global Business Of Selling Suffering
Every Ramazan, like clockwork, the screens fill up. A caregiver clutching a ration bag. A child with swollen eyes. A patient in a hospital bed, tubes attached, staring into the camera with an expression between grief and shame. The nasheed is melancholic. The donation link pulses. Give now. Allah will reward you.
By Dr. Rakhshinda Perveen
The Quiet Weapon Of “Good Morning” Messages In Women’s Lives
On Monday, I published a blog about harassment. By Tuesday, the comments section had become a masterclass in it. The blog was about “Good Morning” and “Good Night” messages, the ones that land on the phones of women like me: ageing, unglamorous, working quietly in Pakistan’s social development sector. Written in Urdu, deliberately so, because uncomfortable truths that travel easily in English tend to get stopped at the border of our own language.
By Dr. Rakhshinda Perveen
The Genocide We Choose Not To Remember
It mourns Rwanda on 7 April, honouring those lost in 1994. It recalls the Cambodian genocide on 17 April. 19 April marks the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, a powerful act of Jewish resistance against Nazi Germany. Holocaust Remembrance Day (Yom HaShoah) also falls in April, though the date changes each year. It commemorates Armenia on 24 April, marking the victims of the Armenian Genocide.
By Dr. Rakhshinda Perveen
Dead Women Make Good Stories: The Missing Voices In Islamabad’s Peace Talks
Everyone was watching the index. Oil futures. The Strait of Hormuz open, closed, half-open, disputed. Analysts on every channel telling us what a barrel means, what a pipeline means, what a percentage point on the stock exchange means for the morning commute in Stuttgart or the quarterly report in Houston. Fine. I get it. Money moves fast and money talks loud. But I kept thinking about one image. Not the handshakes on the tarmac. Not Vance in his suit doing his reluctant-diplomat face. One image that slipped through my feed almost apologetically, from MINAB 168 a school. Small girls. Pink blood stained bags. Photographs of children who went to school one morning and did not come back.
By Dr. Rakhshinda Perveen
Pink Tax Gone: What Comes Next?
I must have been eight or nine, sometime in the ’70s, when we walked past Gul Brothers in Aabpara Market, Islamabad. It was one of those shops run entirely by men, selling women’s undergarments and intimate products over a counter where women had to ask in lowered voices.
A packet of sanitary pads was displayed outside. I asked my mother what it was. She slapped me. Not out of cruelty, but reflex, the kind of instinct that comes from never having been given language for your own body. She was educated, employed, and modern by all standards of her time. The silence she enforced was not hers alone; it had been inherited.
By Dr. Rakhshinda Perveen
How Pakistan’s High Court Is Changing The Economics Of Marriage
There are moments in this work when time collapses, when something you planted in urgency and exhaustion quietly surfaces, years later, in the precise language of the law. The Islamabad High Court’s ruling in Mst. Amara Waqas v. Muhammad Waqas Rasheed (W.P. 365/2023) is one of those moments, and I am still sitting with it.
By Dr. Rakhshinda Perveen
A Forgotten Community And The Politics Of Historical Silence
On the morning of Pakistan Day, a young Bangladeshi journalist sent me a WhatsApp message. “Warm greetings on Pakistan National Day. Wishing peace, progress, and prosperity to the people of Pakistan.” I replied with a photograph: mishti doi from Emaan Dhaka Sweets in Islamabad, a Pakistan flag sticker on the container.
By Dr. Rakhshinda Perveen
Digital Exploitation In Pakistan: How Women Entrepreneurs Lose Control Of Their Websites
In the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, the land of the pure, it seems that if one entity is really 100% pure, that is exploitation.
Exploitation is too often normalised. Therefore, it remains usually undocumented and rarely challenged. One such undetected form prevails in the digital space, where website owners unknowingly lose control over what should rightfully be theirs.
By Dr. Rakhshinda Perveen
Gender Inequality In Pakistan’s STEM Sector Threatens The Nation’s Future
In 1996, I was writing a weekly Urdu science column on science and technology for the youth page of Jang in Rawalpindi. Nobody else was doing it. Information Superhighway was a phrase most Pakistanis had never heard. Cyberspace was a concept more than a destination.
By Dr. Rakhshinda Perveen
Dowry As Violence: Patriarchy, Power, And The State’s Failure In Pakistan
According to the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report, it will take approximately 123 years to achieve global gender parity at the current pace of progress. In Pakistan, where dowry remains socially celebrated, economically incentivised, and politically protected, dismantling the patriarchal structures that sustain this practice may take far longer, unless the state chooses to intervene decisively.
By Dr. Rakhshinda Perveen
Why Pakistan’s Most Educated Women Entrepreneurs Struggle To Scale Their Businesses
Watching business forums between Pakistan’s Prime Minister and Central Asian delegations, I see conference rooms filled with men in suits signing MOUs and discussing trade. Where are the women?
By Dr. Rakhshinda Perveen
Decades Of Abandonment: The Stranded Pakistani Biharis And A Crisis Of Citizenship
Can demographic anxiety and economic cost justify the abandonment of human beings for more than five decades? This question lies at the heart of the catastrophe of the Pakistani Biharis stranded in Bangladesh. It remains politically inconvenient, morally troubling, and legally indefensible.
By Dr. Rakhshinda Perveen
Stateless Patriots: The Silenced Story Of The Biharis In 1971
I believe in memory as coexistence, not competition. I believe in acknowledging the pain of the “stateless” Biharis, a community that has endured immense suffering, and I insist on recognising the genocide not out of emotionalism but academic rationality.
By Dr. Rakhshinda Perveen
Decades Of Neglect: Stateless Urdu-Speaking Pakistanis Stranded In Bangladesh Since 1971
Whenever I write about the trauma and endurance of approximately 324,000 Urdu-speaking Pakistanis stranded and their administratively managed statelessness in Bangladesh since 1971, I rarely receive solidarity or empathy. More often, there is a deafening silence. At times, there is derision.