Afghan women live as slaves (minor gag alert)

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.

Defining roles, not defining oppression. Oppression is clearly defined. Please read what I wrote.

I did read what you had written. My point was that if the defining of roles leads members of the population to be unjustly burdened without course of redress, then such defining of roles is essentially oppressive. I'm not going to split hairs over a single example, but claiming that oppression is not oppression because you don't like the way the left uses the term isn't really an argument.

I'm using a classic definition of oppression, and I stand by my statement that I cannot find an example of a fundamentalist religion that does not, to one degree or another, exert some oppression over some of its women members. If you have an example, I would be pleased to hear about it and debate with you its merits.

See, just as our friend kd5cts argued against the knee-jerk use of the word oppression on the part of the left, I have to take some exception to the use of the word victimology here. I think our fellow conservatives often write off any grievance on the part of a group like women as victimology, without really looking at the facts in a particular instance.

In the case of fundamentalist religions oppressing women, I'll certainly agree that not everyone who says they are being oppressed are. But in the case of someone who has been unjustly burdened because of their sex, and who because of their sex has no redress through the community, I think "victimology" is misapplied.

Of course, we're talking generalities here. I imagine we might find more common ground over specific instances.

Incidentally, Utah Girl, I want to say thanks. It's getting rarer and rarer on this board to find someone willing to discuss things instead of just using the forum as an excuse to scream.

I'm one of those "outside looking in" people, so bear with me. There seems to be a fundamental (so-to-speak) flaw in this argument. In the United States, no one is forced to be part of a religious group (with cultic exception). What I observe are people who wish to makeover a religion in their own image.

I attended service at an Orthodox temple and found the male/female separation quite natural.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.