As the presidential election season arrived in Afghanistan, the incumbent Hamid Karzai sprang a nasty surprise on the country's Hazara Shiite women by signing on to a "rape law" that legitimizes non-consensual sex in wedlock. Designed to placate arch conservative Shiite clerics, the law compels women of this sect to "be bound to give a positive response" to the sexual desires of their husbands, illness being the only extenuation. It also legalizes child marriages of Shiite girls and restricts the freedom of the community's women to venture outdoors without "permission of the husband."
Thanks to the mobilization of Afghan activists and their supporters around the world, the Karzai government has now been forced to put the law on "hold." The reason Karzai could not scrap it altogether was fear that it would cost him Shiite votes in the coming elections. The consolidation of votes into different religious and sectarian "banks" whose keys are held by self-appointed custodians of morality (the class of mullahs) is not unique to Afghanistan, but it is a particularly sad commentary of a regime claiming to be fighting the Taliban's religious extremism going down the same path of Islamism for political expediency.
The rape law is not the first instance when Karzai traded the dignity of Afghan people on the question of gender equality with "peace" and "reconciliation" in the war-ridden country. In 2008, a 23-year-old student journalist Sayed Pervez Kambaksh was sentenced to death by a secret court of three mullahs in Balkh province for blasphemy. The charge against him was of circulating an essay on women's rights that questioned verses in the Quran. Kambaksh had merely downloaded the document from the Internet, but it was enough to enrage state-sanctioned clerics, who are no less brutal in their vision of an "Islamic society" than the Taliban.
When an international media campaign to free Kambaksh took off, Karzai promised that justice would be done "in the right way." Typical of the president's "ways," it was a parrying tactic. Kambaksh only managed to get his sentence commuted to 20 years of imprisonment. An appeal to the Afghan Supreme Court yielded no relief as it ruled against him without even hearing his defense. For a relatively new political and judicial system being built haphazardly since the overthrow of the Taliban in late 2001, Karzai could have intervened personally to free Kambaksh and set a bold secular precedent. But the "law" — codified to harass ordinary Afghans and perpetuate super suppression of women in the name of Islam — had to take its course because the regime was afraid of a backlash that strengthens the Taliban.
Even before the sadistic logic of electoral vote "banks" kicked in, Karzai had parceled out power and state patronage to zealous warlords who imposed a reign of sexual terror in their fiefdoms across the country. In 2005, the poetess Nadia Anjuman was beaten to death by her husband in Herat, courtesy the assurance of pro-Kabul warlords who guaranteed the man that he would never be prosecuted. Millions of Afghan women are being battered with no recourse due to the concordat between the Karzai government and the mullahs, which is seen as a bulwark against the cancerous Taliban. Karzai has often spoken about peace and negotiations with "moderate" Taliban to end the war, but his model of national reconciliation perpetuates the war against the women of Afghanistan.
A parallel horror against women is unfolding across the Durand Line in Pakistan, where the "secular" government of President Asif Ali Zardari has been colluding with mullahs and the Pakistani Taliban to brutalize women in Swat Valley. As a demonstration of how Shariah law practically works, a horrifying video has come to light in which Pakistani Taliban enforcers surround a teenage girl, pin her to the ground, and whip her ferociously. Her "crime" was to step out of home with a man who was not her relative.
When Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani ordered an immediate post-hoc inquiry to control the public-relations fiasco, an "Islamic judge" and a local state official prevailed upon the victim to deny the flogging. However, Muslim Khan, the local Pakistani Taliban leader, had no qualms in initially accepting that such incidents are routine in Swat and that it was "necessary" to punish the girl publicly to restore order.
Although the incident propelled thousands of Pakistani women to the streets outside Swat, many protesters had to cover their faces for fear of being identified and persecuted. So Islamized has the civil society in Pakistan become that counter-movements wedded to fundamentalist parties have also occupied public spaces to praise imposition of Shariah in Swat and vow proliferation of kangaroo courts manned by misogynist clerics all over the country. With the military and civilian establishments of Pakistan interdependent on the Pakistani Taliban, pathological forms of policing "misbehavior" of women are burgeoning.
The dictatorship of legalized rape and female servitude is being forced upon people in Pakistan and Afghanistan with the justification that it is prescribed under Shariah and is a prerequisite for "peace." The Bollywood film star Shahrukh Khan recently commented that there is an "Islam of Allah and the Islam of the mullah." In Pakistan and Afghanistan, though, the mullah has ensured that pampering him is the only pathway to Allah and peace. Pending a comprehensive defeat of "mullahcracy," irrespective of whether the U.S. military stays or exits from the region, the war on women will not cease.
The war on women rages on in Afghanistan
Speaking Truth to Muslim Power
Obama does no favors to Islam by ignoring its internal debates.
By REUEL MARC GERECHT
wsj.com
The United States is not at war with Islam and will never be. In fact, our partnership with the Muslim world is critical in rolling back a fringe ideology that people of all faiths reject."So spoke President Barack Hussein Obama in Turkey last week. Following in the footsteps of the Bush administration, Mr. Obama wants to avoid labeling our enemy in religious terms. References to "Islamic terrorism," "Islamic radicalism," or "Islamic extremism" aren't in his speeches. "Jihad," too, has been banished from the official lexicon.But if one visits the religious bookstores near Istanbul's Covered Bazaar, or mosque libraries of Turkish immigrants in Rotterdam, Brussels or Frankfurt, one can still find a cornucopia of radical Islamist literature. Go into the bookstores of Arab and Pakistani immigrant communities in Europe, or into the literary markets of the Arab world and the Indian subcontinent, and you'll find an even richer collection of militant Islamism.Al Qaeda is certainly not a mainstream Muslim group -- if it were, we would have had far more terrorist attacks since 9/11. But the ideology that produced al Qaeda isn't a rivulet in contemporary Muslim thought. It is a wide and deep river. The Obama administration does both Muslims and non-Muslims an enormous disservice by pretending otherwise.
Theologically, Muslims are neither fragile nor frivolous. They have not become suicide bombers because non-Muslims have said something unkind; they have not refrained from becoming holy warriors because Westerners avoided the word "Islamic" in describing Osama bin Laden and his allies. Having an American president who had a Muslim father, carries the name of the Prophet Muhammad's grandson, and wants to engage the Muslim world in a spirit of "mutual respect" isn't a "game changer." This hypothesis trivializes Islamic history and the continuing appeal of religious militancy.Above all else, we need to understand clearly our enemies -- to try to understand them as they see themselves, and to see them as devout nonviolent Muslims do. To not talk about Islam when analyzing al Qaeda is like talking about the Crusades without mentioning Christianity. To devise a hearts-and-minds counterterrorist policy for the Islamic world without openly talking about faith is counterproductive. We -- the West -- are the unrivalled agent of change in the Middle East. Modern Islamic history -- including the Bush years -- ought to tell us that questions non-Muslims pose can provoke healthy discussions.The abolition of slavery, rights for religious minorities and women, free speech, or the very idea of civil society -- all of these did not advance without Western pressure and the enormous seductive power that Western values have for Muslims. Although Muslims in the Middle East have been talking about political reform since they were first exposed to Western ideas (and modern military might) in the 18th century, the discussion of individual liberty and equality has been more effective when Westerners have been intimately involved. The Middle East's brief but impressive "Liberal Age" grew from European imperialism and the unsustainable contradiction between the progressive ideals taught by the British and French -- the Egyptian press has never been as free as when the British ruled over the Nile valley -- and the inevitably illiberal and demeaning practices that come with foreign occupation.Although it is now politically incorrect to say so, George W. Bush's democratic rhetoric energized the discussion of representative government and human rights abroad. Democracy advocates and the anti-authoritarian voices in Arab lands have never been so hopeful as they were between 2002, when democracy promotion began to germinate within the White House, and 2006, when the administration gave up on people power in the Middle East (except in Iraq).
The issue of jihadism is little different. It's not a coincidence that the Muslim debate about holy war became most vivid after 9/11, when the U.S. struck back against al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Many may have found Mr. Bush's brief use of the term "Islamofascism" to be offensive -- although it recalls well Abul Ala Maududi, a Pakistani founding father of modern Islamic radicalism, who openly admired European fascism as a violent, muscular ideology capable of mobilizing the masses. Yet Mr. Bush's flirtation with the term unquestionably pushed Muslim intellectuals to debate the legitimacy of its use and the cult of martyrdom that had -- and may still have -- a widespread grip on many among the faithful.When Sunni Arab Muslims viewed daily on satellite TV the horrors of the Sunni onslaught against the Iraqi Shiites, and then the vicious Shiite revenge against their former masters, the debate about jihadism, the historic Sunni-Shiite rivalry, and the American occupation intensified. Unfortunately, progress in the Middle East has usually happened when things have gotten ugly, and Muslims debate the mess.Iran's former president Mohammed Khatami, whom Bill Clinton unsuccessfully tried to engage, is a serious believer in the "dialogue of civilizations." In his books, Mr. Khatami does something very rare for an Iranian cleric: He admits that Western civilization can be morally superior to its Islamic counterpart, and that Muslims must borrow culturally as well as technologically from others. On the whole, however, he finds the West -- especially America -- to be an amoral slippery slope of sin. How should one talk to Mr. Khatami or to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the less curious but morally more earnest clerical overlord of Iran; or the Saudi royal family and their influential state-supported clergy, who still preach hatred of the West; or to the faithful of Pakistan, who are in the midst of an increasingly brutal, internecine religious struggle? Messrs. Khatami and Khamenei are flawlessly polite gentlemen. They do not, however, confuse civility with agreement. Neither should we.It's obviously not for non-Muslims to decide what Islam means. Only the faithful can decide whether Islam is a religion of peace or war (historically it has been both). Only the faithful can banish jihad as a beloved weapon against infidels and unbelief. Only Muslims can decide how they balance legislation by men and what the community -- or at least its legal guardians, the ulama -- has historically seen as divine commandments.Westerners can, however, ask probing questions and apply pressure when differing views threaten us. We may not choose to dispatch the U.S. Navy to protect women's rights, as the British once sent men-of-war to put down the Muslim slave trade, but we can underscore clearly our disdain for men who see "child brides" as something vouchsafed by the Almighty. There is probably no issue that angers militants more than women's rights. Advancing this cause in traditional Muslim societies caught in the merciless whirlwind of globalization isn't easy, but no effort is likely to bear more fruit in the long term than having American officials become public champions of women's rights in Muslim lands.Al Qaeda's Islamic radicalism isn't a blip -- a one-time outgrowth of the Soviet-Afghan war -- or a byproduct of the Israeli-Palestinian confrontation. It's the most recent violent expression of the modernization of the Muslim Middle East. The West's great transformative century -- the 20th -- was soaked in blood. We should hope, pray, and do what we can to ensure that Islam's continuing embrace of modernity in the 21st century -- undoubtedly its pivotal era -- will not be similarly horrific.
We are fooling ourselves if we think we no longer have to be concerned about how Muslims talk among themselves. This is not an issue that we want to push the "reset" button on. Here, at least, George W. Bush didn't go nearly far enough.
