Afghan Women: Free at Last?

Right. As if five years of Taliban rule and brainwashing haven’t left any hazardous effects.

Let’s also get another thing straight: wherever you have a lot of Muslims running around, and wherever you have a lot of Muslims in power, especially in a place where Taliban ideas have been imposed for five years, you’re not going to have "liberated" women anywhere at anytime.

There is not one Islamic state where women have anything close to what any sane person would call "rights." You couldn’t name one place where Muslims rule and where a woman can pursue her own free will without facing severe consequences to her bodily health.

For instance, imagine that in Iran or Sudan a woman suddenly decides to exercise her free will and starts walking around in public without a veil or hijab. Do you think she would get very far before she would be severely beaten, imprisoned, shot, or have acid thrown in her face?

Muslim males always patiently explain to me that, "Our women are free, but they are required to wear the hijab."

Am I missing something here? How is it that women are free but simultaneously do not have the freedom to not wear the hijab -- without facing a severe punishment? How is it that a group of people can be free when they have to abide by a million other rules that Islam imposes on them?

Is my notion of freedom a little bit confused or is there something wrong with this picture?

So now we have post-Taliban Afghanistan, where the interim administration pays lip service to all kinds of notions of "gender equality" but nothing of substance really changes. For instance, the administration says how women are now "equal," but in the same breath announces that the government will still impose a strict form of Sharia law.

Mmm-Hmm.

Let me see: gender equality is going to exist alongside the imposition of Sharia law?

Is this some kind of tasteless and cruel joke?

Anyone who knows anything about Sharia law, and knows what has happened to the poor women that have been the victims of it, knows that it necessitates the brutalization and dehumanization of women.

The interim administration in Afghanistan has also sent inspiring chills up the spines of fanatic Muslims with its heart-warming promise that public executions and the severing of bodily limbs will continue as before. Even better, it has made sure to console Muslims that the Islamic all-time favorite -- the public stoning of adulterers -- will also endure.

There are going to be some progressive changes, of course. The punishments for "sin" aren’t going to be conducted at Kabul's sports stadium anymore (where the Taliban loved to conduct them). The interim administration is much more tolerant: it’s going to conduct the Islamic forms of punishment in another geographical location.


Afghan women feel so liberated with the Taliban gone that almost none of them dare to take their burqas off. Know why? Because the burqas are the ultimate and logical conclusion of the Islamic religion’s misogyny.

In her classic work Woman in the Muslim Unconscious, the Moroccan scholar Fatna Sabbah has meticulously solidified the case of how the dehumanization and demonization of women in the Muslim world is rooted in the Islamic religion itself.

Afghan women know that if they take their burqas off, the Muslim vigilantes and Taliban among them, who despise the sight of a woman’s face, will do what their fanatic Muslim brethren did before the Taliban took power, and what they have done around the world in places like Indonesia: throw nitric acid in the faces of women who dare show their God-made natural and beautiful selves.

Today, gang rapes by armed Afghan factions are widespread. These rapes are tolerated and even encouraged by regional Afghan authorities, who are complicit in the assaults themselves. This begs a question: how does it work in the Muslims’ mind that it is sinful for women not to wear the burqa because, somewhere in this psychology, women are desire and desire is Satan, but it is simultaneously not sinful for gangs of Muslim men to rape women?

Does it have something to do with how the 9/11 terrorists were motivated by their hatred of what they perceived to be the West’s decadence and sin, but how they simultaneously drank liquor in strip joints the nights prior to committing their mass murders?

Does it have something to do with why Pakistani Muslim soldiers waged war against the sinful infidels amongst them in 1971 but simultaneously raped a quarter of a million Bengali women after massacring 3 million unarmed civilians? (side note: raping women in Muslim holy war is not considered a sin in Islam, as long as the women are considered infidels).

In any case, the new and "progressive" Afghan interim administration still requires women to have the permission of their male relatives before traveling or applying for passports. This is perfectly understandable: we couldn’t have women just going wherever they want of their own free accord now could we?

The five years of brainwashing under the Taliban regarding the sub-human nature of women has left an extremely ugly mark: young Afghan boys treat women worse than animals. Just barely after learning to speak, many boys already know to shut their mothers up if they begin to say anything --and to then do the talking for them.

Yes, there are some hopeful signs. Many Afghan girls are going back to school, after being prohibited from doing so under the Taliban. I just can’t help from wondering what they will be taught.

And yes, apparently a driving course for women is opening up soon. But this confuses me somewhat: would the male relative that still often has to accompany a woman everywhere she goes sit in the back seat while the male driving instructor sits on the passenger side? How will the woman learn to drive while wearing a burqa? And if she takes it off while training, what if the instructor just finished reading Imam Ibn al-Jawzi’s text Dhamm al-hawa, which teaches that female beauty is a manifestation of the devil himself? What if he gets so upset by seeing what Islam teaches him is a demon that he may throw acid in her face?

Yes, there are some other moves forward. Under the Taliban, television, film, books, photography, music (even at weddings) and sports were banned. There appears to be a steady liberalization in this area, but only when men are involved of course.

That women might be allowed to laugh also remains a thorny issue. Laughing was illegal under the Taliban, since it apparently gives insult to Allah. With the Taliban gone, some Afghan men have been experimenting with laughing in public. Up until now, everything appears to be okay in this area. But whether women will be allowed to engage in this risky activity without a threat of the flogging, stoning or amputation that Sharia Law necessitates for bad behavior remains a mystery.

Women’s shoes that make noise, such as high heels, were illegal under the Taliban. It still remains to be seen what shoes Afghan women will be allowed to wear, since many religious fanatics still fear, as the Taliban morality police did, that such shoes might excite a pious man.

Yes, the Taliban morality squad that enforced the rules by beating women in detention centers and, most often, in public places, is now gone. So there might be fewer incidents of women being gunned down on the street for walking without a male relative or for allowing their ankles to show. That’s the good news.

But we have to keep in mind that, no matter how politically incorrect it is to say it, the Taliban were not the aberration of Islam in terms of how women were treated; they were the logical extension of it.

Anyone who doubts that the Taliban somehow held a monopoly on the oppression of women inside of the Muslim world only has to read Nawal El Saadawi’s The Hidden Face of Eve: Women in the Arab World or Parvin Darabi’s Rage Against the Veil to get an idea about the mutual exclusiveness of Islam and women’s rights. Both books demonstrate how Islam mutilates the lives of its women.

Yes, the Afghan interim administration has instituted several declarations on behalf of women’s "rights." But what use do declarations serve when there is no functional justice system or police force in the land, and when many fanatic Muslim and Taliban-brainwashed males are still running around with their misogyny running unhindered in their heads?

Because of these tragic circumstances, we simply can’t abandon Afghan women. And we can’t leave it to the radical feminists in our society to help, because their self-centered feminism is applicable only to themselves. They couldn’t care less about what happens to actual real breathing women in the world. Their top priority is not to violate their political ideology by conceding that the West has anything valuable to teach non-Western nations.

So those of us who care for human dignity and integrity must do what Afghan women are daily praying for us to do: to never mind our own business and to interfere as much as we can.

Because whenever and wherever women are mistreated, it is our business; it must be everyone’s business.

Jamie Glazov holds a Ph.D. in History with a specialty in Soviet Studies. He is the author of 15 Tips on How to be a Good Leftist and of Canadian Policy Toward Khruschev’s Soviet Union ( McGill-Queens University Press, 2002). Born in the U.S.S.R., Jamie is the son of prominent Soviet dissidents, and now resides in Vancouver, Canada. He writes the Dr. Progressive advice column for angst-ridden leftists at EnterStageRight.com. Email him at jglazov [at] rogers.com.