Thursday, March 29, 2012

The Will Of A Fanatic Islamism

Hamid Karzai is well and truly sick and fed up with complaints about his country's misogynistic attitudes toward Afghan women. This is the kind of cultural interference that he fumes indignantly about. The West has no business instructing the East how it should go about the business of its social compact. Women have their place in Afghan society; it is a traditional heritage that women not be seen. It is, after all, for their own protection.

In Muslim societies it is well understood that men have instinctual urges that cannot be controlled. And that women instinctively attempt in the way they present themselves, to arouse men. Women are the work of the devil, and men are pious supplicants of Allah. Women distract and destroy the peace. Women should be retiring, should be well covered, silent, unobtrusive, not appearing in public.

If left to their own devices, women would mingle with men they do not know in social activities, in education, in bazaars, at offices. The tension between the genders is an avoidable distraction, and women should know their place. It is for this reason that hundreds of Afghan women languish in prisons for moral crimes, crimes against society and Islamic principles. Those women who shamelessly run away from home, desert a marriage bed.

Human Rights Watch has had the unmitigated nerve to issue a report, I Had to Run Away, insisting that the government of Hamid Karzai release these women. "It is shocking that 10 years after the overthrow of the Taliban, women and girls are still imprisoned for running away from domestic violence or forced marriage."

Girls are maintained in juvenile detention facilities, and women in prisons, accused or convicted of various offences.
"Some women and girls have been convicted of zina - sex outside of marriage - after being raped or forced into prostitution. Judges often convict solely on the basis of 'confessions' given in the absence of lawyers and 'signed' without having been read to women who cannot read or write. After conviction, women routinely face long prison sentences, in some cases more than 10 years."
Little does the government acknowledge the entire story, however. The women who are content to remain in prison because there they are safe. No one whom they fear will be able to attack them, flog them, throw acid at them, murder them. Female inmates whom Human Rights Watch interviewed before issuing their report filled in some of the blanks.

A 17-year-old imprisoned for running away with a boy whom her parents had forbidden her to marry: "My parents come every week on visiting day. Every time they tell me that very soon they will pay the prison staff to give me to them, and then they will kill me." Another woman sentenced after fleeing her father-in-law who raped her and had her brother murdered.

It is true that in the urban areas of that country the lot of women and girls has improved measurably in the ten years of UN and NATO intervention. Millions of children have been able to attend school finally, including young girls. And women have become accustomed in Kabul to going out in public, mostly completely covered in traditional burkas, but free to go out nonetheless.

But NATO countries are eager to depart; they have sacrificed personnel and treasury for long enough, and in the final analysis the change has been cosmetic. The Taliban is resurgent, the government weak, ineffectual and corrupt. The Afghan government and the U.S. has been negotiating with the Taliban; their return is inevitable; either to consolidate with the government or to retake it completely.

And then the fate and the future of the women of the country is foreordained to become what it was; all the gains in their human rights will dissolve in the reality of the indomitable will of a fanatic Islamism.

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posted by Pieface @ Thursday, March 29, 2012

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