Pacific Scoop:
Profile – By Kim Bowden.

Inspiring study-weary students, marking assessments and striving to get your own research published are part and parcel of most university lecturer’s job descriptions. Head-counting students after a suicide bomber attacks is not.

Rukhsana Aslam arrived home from work on October 20 last year to find her mother in tears. In the time it took to travel between her office at Islamabad’s International Islamic University and the home she shared with her family, two suicide bombers barged into the campus and detonated their vests. Turmoil.

Moments before one of the blasts at the entrance of a busy cafeteria, gunshots rung through the university as a vigilant guard fruitlessly tried to curtail one of the bomb-strapped men’s rampages. The guard knew something was amiss when the bomber, in gaudy disguise, was intent on entering the women-only facility.

By chance, Aslam’s young students were socialising on the cafeteria’s mezzanine floor and, perhaps due to the heroic actions of the guard, escaped the explosion unscathed – physically at least.

Others were not so lucky. Reports put the death toll from the twin bombings at six.

Since the war on terror began, Aslam says her hometown, the Pakistani capital of Islamabad, has become unrecognisable.

“Islamabad used to be a really dull, small place; a bureaucratic city with lots of diplomats. The war on terror started a chain reaction. Because the government centre is there, all the bombers, they came for revenge. It became a very unsafe place. It was totally different; it was living through a war.”

Aslam and her family adapted their lifestyle to cope in the volatile city, learning to operate with military-like strategising.

“The pattern was that the bombers would usually target crowded places so mostly what we started doing was that we used to go to do our groceries and our chores in the afternoon when it would be so hot most people would not go out.

“There was a definite threat to the schools. So we stopped sending kids to the school until the time they put in the wires and security system and everything.”

For her own sanity, Aslam keeps tabs on her husband’s movements.

“It is a necessity that when he leaves home he texts me, ‘left home on my way to the market or on my way to do this thing’. So I know so that if something goes wrong I know where to look.”

Despite all efforts to safeguard herself and her family, sometimes the threat simply feels too close to home.

“Many times it would happen that I would come back and I would be listening to the news and I would be thinking, ‘oh my god I was just passing through that street ten minutes ago when the bomb was blasted’.”

Apt perhaps, that Aslam is quickly making a name for herself in the fledging field of peace journalism.

While mainstream media strives for objective or balanced news coverage, peace journalists take a stand. They choose to write about conflict in a manner that actively promotes peace.

Aslam is the author of a chapter in a groundbreaking new book on the topic, Peace Journalism, War and Conflict Resolution.

Although she has two master’s degrees under her belt, Aslam is only just embarking on PhD study and is relatively low down the ranks of academia. She has relished the chance to be published alongside colleagues she says, are “the topmost workers in peace journalism”.

“I just feel so honoured to have a space between them, I never expected it.

“Twenty more years down the line, when I am a really absent looking professor, probably then it would be expected of me.”

Not to say Aslam isn’t incredibly accomplished.

In a world where many assume Muslim women are not encouraged to academic or career success, Aslam’s resume is testament to overachievement.

She earned her bread and butter as a staff correspondent at a national daily and dabbled as a freelancer for the BBCs Urdu language service, Pakistan Television and GEO TV. She says her journalism career was a labour of love as the pay was terrible and in her homeland the media freedom was, and still is, severely restricted.

In 1993 she received a scholarship to study abroad and completed her second master’s degree in international journalism at City University in London. Her first master’s degree is in English literature. On her return home, there was a stint as the media advisor for the British High Commission in Pakistan.

Ten years ago she made the switch to academic life, charged with setting up the communications department at Pakistan’s first exclusively women’s university. The blank canvas didn’t faze her.

“I find it more challenging and exciting to setup a new department and let it grow. I designed the curriculum and hired staff right from scratch. Once it is doing successfully I am happy.”

Having made a name for herself, Aslam has since been head-hunted for positions at two more Islamabad universities and is currently head of media and communication studies at the International Islamic University’s women’s campus.

Teaching suits her ‘glass is always half full’ approach to life.

“Journalism tends to turn you into a cynical person because you are always looking for the negative. Negative makes the story, negative makes the headlines. You meet a politician and you never look at where that person has done well, you always look at what haven’t they done.

“I need to believe in the good. My satisfaction is when I work with the youth and I see their enthusiasm and I see their desire to do good. You may call it naivety; you may call it a lack of experience. But it is goodness. And that’s what inspires me.

“My cause is how to teach them to preserve that goodness but also to become good in their profession.”

Aslam is the eldest girl of five siblings. Her younger sister, always the “drama queen”, is quite the television star, fronting the Nadia Khan morning show.

“She has the charisma. The camera loves her and she looks beautiful on screen,” says Aslam.

“Whereas I am the opposite, I get tongue-tied before a microphone.”

But in front of a class full of aspiring young journalists, Aslam comes into her own.

“I am very good in my class. I feel that I teach with a passion. I have that emotion that comes out while I am talking to my students.”

Shomaila Sadaf, once a student now a colleague of Aslam’s, says her lectures were never dull.

“It used to be such an interactive class, we used to discuss every topic, share our experiences and we used to argue.

“The best thing about her style of teaching was that she never made us bored. 

“I am witty by nature and she never said, ‘stop it, or that’s not good’, rather she used to laugh her heart out whenever we were in a conversation.”

Aslam admits she is a sucker for the kids with character.

“I think that being naughty is healthy when you are young. I like girls with a spark. It makes them curious, it makes them want to know.”

No doubt she sees herself in them.

Sitting queen-like, attired in a graceful shalwar kameez, it is three small scars on Aslam’s forehead that hint to an adventurous childhood.

“The scars on my forehead are from three separate occasions, once I fell from the stairs, once a door caught me…Another time I broke two teeth of my brother.

“I was a talkative child, always getting in trouble. I was intelligent, always first in class, but naughty as well.”

Aslam’s unconventional approach in the classroom extends to the staffroom, where many of her female colleagues are, like Sadaf, ex-students.

“I treat them like my younger sisters. In my office we have a family atmosphere – they come, they can fight with me, they bring their kids to my office. I don’t mind. They will discuss their sex life to their academic life to their professional life, any problem and I am open to it. And probably I will do the same with them which is not the traditional way of working in Pakistan, you have a hierarchy: a senior is a senior, a junior is a junior.”

It seems Aslam is anything but traditional.

Her own life had a shake up three months ago when she uprooted her husband and two children and relocated, for a period at least, to Auckland to pursue a PhD in media and conflict resolution at AUT University.

She quickly dismisses any suggestion she is some kind of superwoman, having it all and successfully juggling family, career and now academia. In fact, in Pakistan her choice of life direction has ruffled more than a few feathers.

“From a traditional Pakistani point of view, where you get married at 19, you will say, ‘she has married late, she is a failure, she shouldn’t be looking for better opportunities in this stage in life.”

This free-thinker blows any Pakistani female stereotype out of the water.

She says for example, “it is assumed if you get married you would end up looking after the house”.

Her marriage, 13 years ago, was one of choice and her parent-in-laws never talked to the couple for close to five years after the union.

Aslam’s husband explains his parents could not get their heads around the fact the pair were from different clans.

He says in his own mind, he is also a feminist. Between the headstrong Aslam and two young daughters, he probably never stood a chance to be otherwise.

“Our relationship, when you see it from a western perspective is just normal but back there it is different.

“I am an advocate for treating women with respect. If I want that for my daughters, first I have to pass it on to my wife.”

Aslam also believes positive change in the world starts from within.

“If you do not have peace inside, you cannot work for peace in the world. One of the reasons why we don’t have peace in the society and the world is because we don’t have peace with ourselves,” she says.

Sybil Arif, whose friendship with Aslam spans quarter of a century, says she “is a living example of what women can achieve in underdeveloped countries when they acquire education, follow a career path and stand up for their rights.

“At this critical time in history, when the world is facing a challenge trying to understand different cultures and religious backgrounds, she is a voice of reason that could effectively be part of the solution and not the problem.”

Aslam hates the idea of coming across as some sort of saint. She confides she is a huge fan of Mills and Boon romance novels: “The first thing I did when I came here was to join the library.”

While western women the world over flock to cinemas to watch Julia Roberts find an enviable balance of pleasure and spirituality, Aslam seems to have figured it out all on her own.

Kim Bowden is a recent journalism graduate with a Postgraduate Diploma in Communication Studies from AUT University. She has been a regular contributor for Pacific Scoop.