>Bin Laden is, of
>course, hardly a suitable heir to the Third World liberation
>movements of the mid-20th century, but he does purport to >speak for
>the downtrodden and against Western capitalism and >militarism. Except
>that his movement has nothing to offer the most >downtrodden sex but
>the veil and a life lived largely indoors.
which is something I've kept coming across in quite a bit of press comment -- the assertion that women in Afghanistan are kept literally imprisoned indoors. Which raises two questions in my mind:
1) What clever trick have the Afghans managed to pull which has allowed them to be the only primitive agricultural society in the world which does without female labour? Do they have indoor wells, or do the men carry water, for example?
and
2) If this picture of life is correct, who are all those long haired people with recognisably female figures who I keep seeing in the background of BBC news footage, working outdoors in clothes reasonably suitable for the task?
I'm not holding myself out as an expert on the position of women anywhere, and indeed am sure that the Taliban are absolutely dreadful people. But I can't help thinking that when even someone as typically perceptive as Echenreich is repeating as obvious fact things which are demonstrably not true, then something pretty dangerous has happened to the free world's media.
dd
despite my email address, I have no connection with any Islamic organisation.
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