Entries from Islam's Advance tagged with 'Afghanistan'
Facing Up to Rape in Afghanistan
Rape is an endemic problem in Afghanistan. Whether women are forced into arranged marriages as child brides, or attacked by family members or local warlords, they are often held responsible for their own victimization. Afghan culture views a woman's virginity as sacrosanct, but Afghan law rarely gives her the chance to defend herself. Many women are thrown out of their families following, or even jailed.
And yet, things are changing. Earlier this summer, Afghan president Hamid Karzai pardoned three men convicted of gang-raping a woman in the northern province of Samangan. The rape took place in 2005 in front of the woman's village, after she had harangued the local warlord's men for forcing her son to become a soldier. At the time the case attracted little attention, and Mr. Karzai probably thought his pardons of three men, who had been sentenced to 11 years in prison, would also slip by unnoticed. The men all come from an influential tribe in the region.
Instead the case has been widely reported throughout the local and national media. Women's rights groups, activists and politicians are up in arms at the injustice. Some might argue that with an election approaching, Mr. Karzai's many enemies are simply using the subject to undermine him - but that does not change the fact that a rape case, and the issues of women's abuse, has taken center stage.
Afghan Journalists Under Fire
The Institute for War and Peace Reporting is one of those rare phenomena in the development world: an NGO that trains young men and women in post-conflict zones to use journalism to question and critique their emerging societies. Their courage and commitment is clear from the record number of journalists killed last year – 95 – primarily in the areas where IWPR operates.
Today’s guest post is from Jean MacKenzie, Program Director for IWPR in Afghanistan, who writes about the plight of Sayed Parwez Kambaksh, a young journalist sentenced to death for downloading a feminist criticism of the Koran from the internet – and of the religious and cultural bigotry young journalists face in the new, U.S.-backed Afghanistan.
The Face of Terror: Confessions of a Failed Suicide Bomber
Afghan Feminists See Koran as Strongest Weapon
Fatima Gailani believes that women’s rights can be achieved by a return to the teachings of the Koran. She is one of a small but growing number of Islamic feminists in the Middle East who are seeking to challenge both the dominant patriarchal culture in the region, and the assumptions of an earlier generation of women rights activists in the West.
Impotency, Afghanistan's Taboo
One of the many unique things about Farid, the subject of this video, is his openness about his impotency. He was diagnosed within the first few months of his marriage. In other households, the issue would be hushed up and the woman would often be blamed for this state of affairs, allowing the man to hastily divorce or take another wife. Not so with Farid. He chose to tackle the issue head-on.
The subject of male impotency is rarely, if ever, discussed in the Middle East. The taboo operates on many different levels: it challenges the roles of men as all-powerful providers, of women as passive child-bearers, and of children as the sole purpose of wedlock.
Searching For a Fourth Wife
Farid would take a fourth wife if he could afford one. This 29-year-old gravel supplier says he has already received a dozen calls from single women in his neighborhood who want to join his three current wives. He is something of a catch. His hillside house has no water or electricity, but his business hauling gravel provides a steady income. The fact that he has three wives and seven children, three of them sons, is a mark of his status in the community.
Keeping the Sharia Peace
Sharia law gets bad press in the West. It’s the body of law drawn from the Koran, reported sayings of the prophet, and centuries of jurisprudence, and in its most extreme form it prescribes punishments such as beheadings, amputations and stonings. Cases like that of the Saudi rape victim, who was sentenced to 200 lashes for meeting a man who eventually raped her, have largely come to define how we see Islamic law: at best, a kind of medieval anachronism; at worst, barbarous and anti-women.
In Afghanistan, tribal law suffused with Sharia is the only form of legal redress for the vast majority of the country. (A central justice system has yet to take off anywhere other than the capital, Kabul). Terrorism aside, few would argue the sophistication of Afghan crime; most is gun battles between warring families, theft of livestock and land, and government brutality. Those offenses can be found anywhere.
But what's remarkable about Afghanistan, and rural areas of countries like Jordan and Syria, is the degree of community and family cohesion. Terrorism again aside, crime is rarely committed by strangers. Tribal law, usually administered by elders or the local religious leader, is intended not as a form of public punishment but as conflict resolution.
Measuring Progress By the Koran
We take for granted the idea of progress in America. It's rooted in the collective narrative, and comes with a healthy sense of entitlement, responsibility and pride. But Afghanistan's progress has been fleeting over the past 50 years, and in its absence, the country’s own history has become a more provisional affair.
Whether it’s Karzai’s government presenting itself as a restoration of the benign period under the former monarchy, or the Taliban’s insistence that they are the heirs to the Soviet jihad, all sides dip selectively into the past, often giving the eerie impression that instead of progress, history is repeating itself.
Amid this historical confusion, Islam offers a rare sense of continuity to Afghanistan’s faithful. As Mullah Saiqal, an Islamic history professor at Kabul University, put it bluntly to me: “The past is a mess, and we could do with forgetting several decades.”
Mohammed Cartoons, Part II?
Every Friday for the past few weeks, embassies in Kabul have told foreign nationals to prepare for a rerun of the 2005 Mohammed cartoon riots. Back then, mobs attacked Western businesses and embassies across the Islamic world to protest images in a Danish newspaper that depicted the Prophet Mohammed with a bomb in his turban. This time the potential affront is a film made by right-wing Dutch politician Geert Wilders, in which he denounces Islam’s Koran as a "fascist" book that "incites people to murder." Rumors put out by the Wilders camp suggest he burns a copy of the Koran in the film.
Both cartoon and film (due to be released next month) are clearly crass and self-serving exercises that pay lip service to the idea of freedom of speech while being little more than vehicles for xenophobia. But rather than dwell on these productions, I'd like to ask what it is about them that provoked such a visceral and, for many, a disproportionate reaction in the Muslim world. Recently in Afghanistan, there have been several similar incidents in which religious intolerance has prevailed: a 23-year-old journalist sentenced to death last month for distributing a text on Islamic feminism; a publisher who released a Dari translation of the Koran without a corresponding Arabic text, and had to flee for his life.
Can these reactions tell us something deeper Islam's relationship to the West?
My Country or My Son
Since her election in 2002, Malalai has been repeatedly threatened by the re-emerging group. In many ways she was a direct affront to their radicalized beliefs: she did not wear the omnipresent burqa (her election posters showing her face shocked the city), and she stood up for women’s rights and education. Yet she was also a devout Muslim and mother of seven.
Modernizing Madrassas
If you had to imagine what an ayatollah looked like, you’d probably envision someone who looks a lot like Ayatollah Asif Mohseini. He’s a 76-year-old with a creased face, generous white beard, and a tightly-wound turban. Mohseini is the one of Afghanistan’s leading religious figures. When I got in line to see him last week, he was conducting one of the time-honored functions of an ayatollah: answering the religious questions of the faithful. His offices were packed with supplicants seeking answers to questions ranging from, What are suitable prayers to say when caught in rush hour traffic jams?, to literary discussions of Koranic verses.
China Threatens Afghanistan's Burqa Market
The bright blue veil of the burqa is one of the most iconic and widely worn pieces of women’s clothing in Afghanistan. Since the fall of the Taliban, fewer women wear the burqa in Kabul, but elsewhere, in the provinces, the burqa is as ubiquitous as ever.
While they evoke a reaction of horror and disdain from many Western women, the burqa in Afghanistan is a complex cultural signifier. Young married women wear light blue burqas; older women and widows wear a darker blue. White burqas signify new brides, or women from the northern city of Mazar-e Sharif. The particular pattern of flowers around the cap and face cover showcase the work of different designers, allowing women to be told apart.
The Zamarai family, shown in the video, have been tailors and burqa-makers for three generations. But recently there’s a new player in the Kabul burqa market: China, which mass-produces a style of burqa that many women here find more fashionable than the Zamarais’ traditional hand-assembled garments.
The Chinese-made burqas’ tightly-crimped folds and machine-produced embroidery have become something of a fashion craze in the last few months in Kabul. As one burqa seller named Hassan explained to me in a crowded Kabul market, “Women love the new, modern style of the Chinese burqas.”
Bloody Ritual, Modern Meaning
That seminal moment has split the Islamic world in two ever since, between the Shia, who claim Hussein and his descendants as the rightful rulers of the Muslim world, and the Sunni, who espoused the claims of the Caliph, or ruler, in Damascus.
For the first installment of Islam’s Advance, I want to take you into the heart of this ritual and explain what Ashura means today. Throughout the Shi’ite world, adherents express their mourning by beating themselves. In some regions this involves hitting one’s chest with a fist. Afghan Shi’ites practice one of the more extreme forms of Ashura, in which they use knives to flay their backs.
