As Americans sat glued to the news in the weeks after the Sept. 11 terrorism, they occasionally caught glimpses of shrouded, faceless figures trying to stay out of the way in Kabul, Afghanistan.
Those ghostly figures on the periphery had little to do with the news reports, which focused on whether the ruling Taliban was harboring Osama bin Laden, a chief suspect in the attacks. Those ghostly figures were women, after all, and hold no power in the Taliban’s decision-making.
But they are something of a study in how religious piety can be used to justify brutality. The women of Afghanistan are veteran victims of their own leaders’ radical interpretation of Islam.
“The Taliban have taken misogyny to a special level,” says Larry Goodson, author of the recently published book “Afghanistan’s Endless War: State Failure, Regional Politics, and the Rise of the Taliban” (University of Washington Press, $35). “It is the cornerstone of their national policy. Bashing women is just about all they do well.”
Since 1996, when the Taliban took control of most of the country, women have lost an array of rights, according to the underground Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (www.rawa.org). Women cannot appear in public uncovered or unescorted by a male relative. They cannot work, go to school or drive. They cannot be treated by male doctors, which makes health care difficult to come by–the ban on work exempts only a few women doctors.
They cannot laugh or talk loudly, RAWA says, because no male stranger should hear a woman’s voice. They cannot wear high heels, because a man must not hear a woman’s footsteps. They cannot wear makeup or brightly colored clothes, nor can they polish nails. To keep from attracting men, they must wear the mandatory head-to-toe shroud (called a burqa), its thickness and weight often making it difficult to see and breathe.
The Taliban established all its rules in the name of devotion to Islam, as well as the punishments for breaking them: whippings, beatings, imprisonment, or even public execution.
But most scholars and moderate Muslims agree that such treatment of women disgraces the religion.
“These [fundamentalist] men sprung from women. Islam says that heaven lies beneath the feet of your mother,” says Aasma Khan, an attorney and spokeswoman for the New York City-based organization Muslims Against Terrorism. “Shame on all of them for belittling, torturing, abusing and controlling the Muslim women in Afghanistan–including their mothers, wives, sisters and daughters.”
Islamic scholars say that the Muslims’ holy book explicitly bestows many rights on women.
“Basic Islamic teaching, in the Koran, is considered the most progressive in world religions because it specifies women’s rights,” says Tamara Sonn, a professor of humanities specializing in Islam and Muslim issues and customs at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Va. “This includes the right to own and manage wealth, the right to inherit, and the right to choose a marriage partner, the right to divorce, and the right to alimony and child support, at the same time, prohibiting female infanticide.”
But a woman’s honor is a paramount virtue in many Muslim cultures–one that overrides many other ideals, Goodson says. The honor of her entire family depends on her honor, and to preserve it, she must stay chaste except in marriage, he says.
That is one of the great divides that such cultures cite in their differences with the West.
“The sexual freedoms enjoyed in Western society, especially by women, are viewed with open disdain. Female sexual freedom is extremely threatening to Islamists,” says Goodson, an associate professor of international studies at Bentley College in Waltham, Mass. “When you are among Islamic radicals, the discussion doesn’t get too far before the subject of women comes up, and the relative freedom of Western women is viewed as highly symbolic and indicative of the decadence of Western culture.”
Some of the limits on Afghan women are based on the presumed limits of men–that they can’t control their sexual impulses if a woman inadvertently tempts them in the slightest way.
In a patriarchal society like Afghanistan’s, Goodson says, that’s a big reason that the Taliban renders women virtually invisible in public, instead of taking steps to restrain men.
For proof of the wisdom of limiting women’s choices–through arranged marriages, job restrictions and severe punishments to quash free will–the Taliban and some other Muslim cultures look to the West, says Goodson, who has lived and traveled extensively in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
“When I was living in Pakistan in the ’80s, some of my greatest friends there would argue that the high divorce rate in the U.S. reflects the invalidity of two young people who think they’re in love getting married–as opposed to family members who are older and wiser picking the right person for you,” Goodson says.
“Secondly, they point out that the high level of divorce is due to the greater freedom we have given women here; that the fact that they were out working, making salaries and enjoyed equal rights under law, makes it easier for women to choose divorce,” he says. “They saw it as a great social ill that we face, that their societies don’t face.”
The roots of this oppression
But religion and core values don’t completely explain the subjugation of women. A lot of it is simple economics.
Afghanistan had a number of progressive governments prior to the Soviet invasion in 1979, says William Reno, professor of political science at Northwestern University in Evanston, who has traveled in Afghanistan. Even after ’79, the Soviet-backed government, consistent with communist ideology, encouraged education and jobs for women. Women had nearly equal rights–some held prestigious positions in the workplace.
But when the Soviets withdrew in 1988, a fierce power struggle ensued. The Taliban, having trained in Pakistan schools, emerged in the mid-’90s, confronting a country in economic ruins.
The poverty fueled the disfranchisement of women. As the Taliban began to train its rank-and-file–most of whom were minimally educated, rural and orphan boys from refugee camps–it pointed to women as thieves of jobs that should be theirs. (Part of the Taliban’s ferocity had its roots in holy war mentality, which the U.S. had helped foster by aiding the fundamentalist movement against the Soviet invasion years before.)
And so the spiritual and the secular met in a marriage of economic necessity, Aasma Khan says, and women lost out.
“They [Taliban leaders] admit that the Koran requires women to be educated just like men, but the Taliban clerics say that right now Afghani resources are limited and they need to build up their infrastructure, and that means focusing on the men who will likely have the most jobs,” she says.
It’s not that they necessarily have an ideological problem with a woman working, she says, as long as the husband and other men in the woman’s family approve and as long as she covers properly.
“[But their view is that] there just aren’t enough jobs around to give all the men that chance and the women too,” she says. “In other words, they have a very basic understanding of the same Islamic principles and values that we have, they just have made some bad decisions in what comes first when running a country.”
For evidence of just how bad some of those decisions have been, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan points to the fact that the internal fighting of the past two decades has left many women widowed with children. They must fend for their families, and yet they are forbidden to work. So they resort to begging or prostitution.
Not an original mindset
Though the means or extremes the Taliban goes to may be different, denying women their rights is by no means an original move.
Even now, some people in Middle Eastern countries endorse what are known as “honor killings,” in which a brother may kill his sister if she is believed to have shamed the family.
In Pakistan last spring, for instance, police say a man slashed the throats of his estranged wife, her mother, and his 4-year-old sister-in-law because he suspected the wife of adultery.
Other countries still support limits on women too.
“The Saudi royal house . . . supports some of the same proscriptions on women’s participation in public life as Taliban does,” Reno says. “The difference, however, is that Saudi laws and social attitudes permit education of women and tolerate participation in the workplace, though in segregated facilities in many trades and professions.”
The West can’t afford to be self-righteous either, says Janet Bauer, director of women’s studies and associate professor of international studies at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn. The notion of female equality was not widely supported in the not-too-distant past.
“Christians, Jews and others have used the cultural authority of religion as an instrument of male dominance,” she says. “The freedoms that women currently have in the Christian world are of very recent vintage and came about through great effort and struggle.”
Even now in the U.S., not everyone subscribes to all of women’s rights. Shortly after last month’s terrorist attacks, for example, Rev. Jerry Falwell appeared on the Christian television show “The 700 Club,” saying that feminists (along with various other groups) were partially to blame for the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11:
“I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way–all of them who have tried to secularize America–I point the finger in their face and say, `You helped this happen.'”
Falwell later apologized for this remark.
A powerful force
Religion through the millennia has proved a potent source of polarization, and it still has great potential to create small and big misunderstandings, even within a given religion.
Khan says, for instance, that if she comments negatively on the burqa that Afghan women must wear, many may think she’s criticizing any head covering. But Khan says that she respects Muslim-American women who choose to cover their heads; it’s a free exercise of religion in this country.
“It’s not the covering of Afghani women per se that we think is backwards,” Khan says. “It’s the violent enforcement that they [Taliban leaders] seem to be doing to make it happen.”
Indeed, Goodson says, Afghan women illustrate the distinction between the results of free and forced religious practice.
“Despite repeated Taliban protestations that their policies toward women are supported by Islamic law, we should not be misled,” Goodson says. “Their perverse interpretation of Islam overlooks the prophet Muhammad’s effort to emancipate women and instead . . . enslaves and enfeebles women.”
Afghanistan may be only tangentially connected to the recent attacks on the U.S., and the war on terrorism may lead elsewhere. But the country’s women, who once held jobs and spoke their minds, have become casualties of a different kind of terror, says Eleanor Smeal, president of the Feminist Majority, an organization that has campaigned against the Taliban since early 1997.
“Modern women there [who defy Taliban limits] are the symbols of the West, a symbol of what is wrong,” Smeal says. “They are the canaries in the mine–the first to die in this war.”
