The last words of Gullan Bharo still echo:

“I know I will be killed. I am a mother of two children, but for the sake of my father’s dignity, I will sacrifice myself”

In the late hours of April 20, 2026, Gullan managed to flee her abusive husband's home to seek police protection and refuge near Rohri railway station in Sindh, where they took her to the court. She wanted safety. But her father pleaded and begged her to come home for the family’s honor, and she said yes, because she was supposed to protect her father’s dignity, like every daughter is taught to. On May 2, she was shot dead by her husband and his uncle.

“I know I will be killed”, she had said. Yet she was killed.

وَمَن يَقْتُلْ مُؤْمِنًا مُّتَعَمِّدًا فَجَزَاؤُهُ جَهَنَّمُ خَالِدًا فِيهَا وَغَضِبَ اللَّهُ عَلَيْهِ وَلَعَنَهُ وَأَعَدَّ لَهُ عَذَابًا عَظِيمًا

"And whoever kills a believer intentionally, his recompense will be Hell, where he will stay eternally, and Allah will be displeased with him, condemn him, and will prepare for him a tremendous punishment."

This is not just a mere tragic story. This is our culture, the one we deeply “honor”. The culture that kills women. And this culture was not built in one moment by one monster.

Honour killings in Pakistan claim the lives of roughly 1,000 women every year. Historical records from the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan show over 15,200 women were killed from 2004 to 2016. Recent years show the crisis persists, with at least 384 reported cases in 2022 and over 400 recorded in 2024.

To honor is to protect, to love, to defend, and there is no “honor” in murdering.

Gullan was not the first. There were other women. We owe these women more than grief. We owe them our voices before it comes to that.

Because grief is easy. Grief asks nothing of you except that you feel it. You can grieve and still be the same man tomorrow. You can grieve and still laugh at the same misogynistic jokes next week. We have been grieving for decades and the case numbers of gender-based violence keep climbing and the funerals never seem to end because we don’t question the beliefs that normalize violence.

Silence is complicity.

Every time you heard something that sat wrong in your stomach and you said nothing, you added a brick to the wall that women keep dying behind.

When a woman dies, men suddenly find language. Suddenly we are sensitive. Suddenly we are posting. Suddenly we understand the urgency. And then two weeks pass and the urgency dissolves back into the same culture it came from, and nothing structural has shifted.

She deserves more than your future grief.

A society that values honor should protect its daughters rather than fear their independence. And as we look forward towards the future, we are still left of a haunting question:

Will our ethical imagination ever catch up to our progress?