>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.
There's a difference between wearing a burkha because one's husband likes it and because the state demands it under pain of severe punishment. Which isn't to say the first isn't an obnoxious form of coercion, but bringing in cops and vats of acid raises the coercion to a new level.
Call me a human rights imperialist or a perpetrator of epistemic violence if you will, but the burkha is a horrifying implement, and it still is even if Laura Bush says so.
Doug