Posted on 10/12/2001 2:10:41 PM PDT by Utah Girl
From time to time, you see one cross the screen. A spectral heap of humanity covered head to toe.
You've been told that there is a woman under the burka, but there is no way to know. There is no public face on the women of Afghanistan. Nor is there any public voice. Laughing out loud is illegal. Singing is a crime.
From the beginning, when the Taliban victory was welcomed by some as a promise of stability, this was the prime target of their campaign against unbelievers, against modern life, and against the "West." The fundamental enemy of their fundamentalism took the female form.
The victims of their harshest internal terrorism were women, forbidden to work, banned from school, beaten for an exposed ankle, stoned for a lark. The female half of the population was placed under virtual house arrest, or, if you prefer, slavery.
Now we see the Islamic fundamentalist attitudes toward women in new forms. In the will that one terrorist left behind ordering that "women are to be neither present at the funeral nor appear themselves sometime later at my grave." In the promise that "martyrs" in this jihad will secure a place in heaven — with 72 virgins to serve them.
Is "misogyny" too weak a word? Does "patriarchy" — sprinkled so liberally in Western feminism — pale beside the real thing?
For over a century, arguments about tradition and change have taken place over women's rights. It has happened in Afghanistan ever since the 1920s, when the reformist Afghan King Amanullah called upon the queen to remove her veil before a meeting of tribal elders, helping unite a rebellion against him. It has happened there since the 1980s, when educated Afghan women were demonized as Soviet stooges.
But it's not just Afghanistan and not just Islam that have seen women as the symbol of life spinning out of control. Lynn Freedman, a public health professor at Columbia, talks about a "family resemblance" between fundamentalisms. All of them.
If fundamentalism, she says, "can be seen as, in part, a reaction to a sense of dislocation and a sense that their own culture is under siege, often women become the symbol of that. Women out of control are a symbol of their own situation out of control."
In every text and tradition, from Baptist to Buddhist, we can choose references to support women's equality or to prove their inferiority. "It's a misconception that fundamentalism is going back to some agreed-upon pristine tradition," says Freedman.
Every religion — Islam included — has its own long history of women activists. At the same time, fundamentalist Christians designate the male as head of household and fundamentalist Jews restrict women to one side at the Wailing Wall. Says human rights activist Charlotte Bunch, "each of the fundamentalisms has a way of wanting women to stay subordinate."
Right now there is nothing to rival the repression in Afghanistan. An Afghan women's rights group operating out of Pakistan puts it best on its Web site, www.rawa.org: "Thank you for visiting the homepage of the most oppressed women in the world."
So today, America is finally staking out women's rights as part of the moral high ground in the struggle against terrorism. But internationally, I am afraid, we still tiptoe around the subject of subjugation.
In the first weeks of this war, we are making friends with the enemy of our enemy. This Northern Alliance may allow its women to go to school and shop in public and ride in the back of a truck if they have permission. But need it be said that these men are to the Taliban as the benign slaveholder is to the vicious slaveholder?
From the day that terrorist planes hit their targets, and Americans asked why, the president answered: They hate freedom. He has said more than once that we are in a struggle for freedom.
Now, catching a glimpse of the dehumanized shapes crossing the television screen, we know that freedom includes the women who form a mute and invisible backdrop to their own history.
Occasionally, even the people we disagree with have a point worth noting.
Define oppression. The left has stolen it, and you are letting them. Oppression is _not_ "defining roles based on gender".
/john
The thing to keep in mind, though, is that these Taliban abuses of young boys and young men is made possible BY the abuse of the women. Free women (especially free ARMED women) wouldn't stand for their sons being ripped out of their homes, to be given to the same murderous pederasts who are trying to oppress them.
So let's not get bogged down here in our own problems with the NOW gang. Taliban-style oppression of women, girls AND boys is only the most extreme example of a world-view that wants to FORCE everyone into their medieval prisons. This medieval world view PRODUCES terrorism.
/john (oppressed by having to support a family. NOT!)
Sure it is, if such roles are found to be unjustly burdensome by the women themselves. If only those who oppressed were permitted to define "oppression" then no one would be oppressed, right?
It's not up to the leaders of fundamentalist movements, of whatever faith, to say whether or not what they are doing is oppressive. Of course they will say it is not. But if the members of those movements find the conditions oppressive, and the nature of those movements make it impossible for those members to seek redress, that seems like prima facie oppression to me.
This isn't a matter of left and right... it's a matter of right and wrong.
What about the Aztecs whose god required they do human sacrifices? It was religious rituals, we couldn't let them have freedom of religion either. Good thing the Spaniards weren't so overly politically correct.
And you are correct that that's wrong, no question about it. But my point (and I realize and respect that you may disagree) is that a person would be hard pressed, I think, to find any fundamentalist religious movement that did not have women members who felt legitimately oppressed.
It's not about whether or not I think they're oppressed. The key is how the people in these communities feel themselves.
It's not about feelings. Its about objective right and wrong. But, within the boundries of justice, societies are free to define roles. My daughter feels oppressed that she has chores. Is she? No.
You might want to study Aristotle a bit. It'ts tough going, but it's worth it.
/john
Muslim 1140 The Prophet said: "The majority of those who entered the Fire of Hell was that of women." "So avoid the allurement of women." "Allah tests men by means of women but great is the harm done to men.
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