|| -----Original Message-----
|| From: Michael Pollak
||
|| On Fri, 14 Dec 2001, Doug Henwood wrote:
||
|| > But the Taliban - many of whom were not Afghans, and of those who
|| > were, were from an ethnic group representing well under half the
|| > population - forced women to wear the damn things. It's not like they
|| > were spontaneous expressions of home-grown patriarchy.
||
|| Are you sure about that? My impression was that women wore, and still
|| wear, the burkha in rural areas controlled by the Northern Alliance
|| because their husbands demand it. I was under the impression the divide
|| was not foreign/homegrown so much as city/country -- kind of
|| like with the
|| chador in Iran: the imposition of cosmopolitan city ways on the more
|| conservative countryside (in Iran by the Shah, in Afghanistan by Soviet
|| supported governments) contributed to a fundamentalist backlash
|| that ended
|| up enforcing country customs on the city folk.
||
|| But if anyone knows of a balanced historical treatment of the subject
|| online, I'd love to read it. Because now that you mention it,
|| it is kind
|| of odd to reconcile widespread burkha-wearing with the fact that the
|| dominant traditions of Islam in Afghanistan until 30 years ago
|| are usually
|| said to be influenced by Sufism and Buddhism and marked by
|| their relative
|| tolerance. So somewhere my understanding is deficient or oversimplified
|| or both.
||
|| Michael
Some recent history:
In 1919, when Afghanistan became independent the new royal couple were very pro-western and enacted legislation promoting womens' rights. Women were encouraged to educate themselves, burqas were outlawed in public parks, the seclusion of women was opposed by the royals, and Queen Soraya even published a womens' magazine. As Ataturk has similar plans for Turkey, he sent military advisors to Afghanistan despite the fact that the Turkish war of independence was still in full swing. A few years later, the new Turkish Republic sent educators to Afghanistan and even set up a music academy. All this threatened the mollahs who started a revolt in 1928 when King Amanullah Khan declared "“Religion does not require women to veil their hands, feet and faces.” He was forced to flee the country.
Same thing happened to Taraki and Amin in 1978-79 (Amin did his best to provoke the locals). Rural chieftains don't like central reforms or social progress as a rule.
Afghans call their rural chieftains mollahs, in Turkey they're called aghas, Kurds call them sheiks, but it's basically the same thing: The top dog of a rural community sees any action of an external authority affecting his community as a threat to his authority.
Relations between the sexes was probably more egalitarian before islam moved in (after the Moghuls moved out), as was the case among the Turks of Asia Minor before the Ottoman Empire. However, in these parts, religion isn't the main reason for disfranchising women: Land inheritance is. Women thus dispossessed and pauperized are then sold in marriage. Islam puts the limit at 4 wives at a time. The Koran is interpreted as allowing instant alimony-free divorce in case the husband wants to renew his harem. Typically, the youngest wife will be periodically changed by a prosperous husband. The patriarchy therefore has many good reasons to see women kept in their place, and uses the pretext of religious dictates to do so.
As for the Talibs, I don't know how many people realise that these are all war orphans who have had the most brutalising life imaginable. The are totally ignorant both intellectually and emotionally, having spent their childhood cooped up in Paki seminaries where they were indoctrinated in Wahhabism and taught to fight so that they could become martyrs. You can't get much more screwed up than that.
Hakki