Time Magazine Article-Women and the Taliban -- Harmony's Civil Rights and Human Rights Forum

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Date Posted: 14:52:17 12/25/01 Tue
Author: Harmony 1972
Subject: Time Magazine Article-Women and the Taliban

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,185651,00.html

This week Time magazine has an article about the plight of women in the Taliban-before, during, and after the fall of the Afghan group. The article was well written, and it is heart-wrenching, yet uplifting and even powerful to read. Like you can really look into their world and wonder why we Americans feel so lucky, yet more privileged. I wonder what it would be like to feel what these oppressed women are feeling.

At certain points throughout the article, it can be all too brutal:

"If the future is uncertain, the recent past is an all-too-well-substantiated fact. The Taliban made Afghanistan a laboratory for the systematic oppression of women. What it did will haunt that nation and the world for years to come."

It is true, and the system affects not just women, but every Afghan-male, female, young, old.

Looking at the pictures, taken during and after the Taliban, women and their friends hide their celebrations, when they would be risking their lives. They protest in silence with lace-trimmed burqas. Girls are educated in the basements one hour per day. Even fashion is strong in the interest of these women againest the interests of the Islamic belief:

"The rules were enforced capriciously, sometimes ferociously, by religious police from the Orwellian-named Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice. Ministry thugs wielding lengths of steel cable would beat women in the street for infractions like wearing white socks. "If women are going outside with fashionable, ornamental, tight and charming clothes," an early decree from the ministry warned, they "should never expect to go to heaven.""

The Taliban is the most strict form of goverment of controlling of women, but not so strict among other nations. Yet it seems it is no different between countries, and small binding groups of pro-Islam radicals criticize some of the softness brought by countries such as Jordan as the treatment of women, especially in this example about Jordan's ban on honor killings:

"Jordan's Islamic Action Front, a powerful political party, has issued a fatwa, or religious ruling, saying the proposal would "destroy our Islamic, social and family values by stripping men of their humanity when they surprise their wives or female relatives committing adultery.""

So what is this telling us? That women are not human? That if men kill their wives if they suspect adultery that is it considered a family value? Is domestic violence a family value?

What if this same example was brought to American society?

Just think about it. Women in Afghanistan have already suffered enough. And it is not just women. It is every Afghan, who has a dislike for the Taliban and extremist oppression in general.

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Replies:

I wish RAWA were more effective -- The Observer, 19:50:47 12/26/01 Wed
- Re: I wish RAWA were more effective -- Harmony 1972, 21:55:14 12/26/01 Wed