Religious zest and the plight of women

Today as we stand looking at significant scientific, economic and technological advances that had been made in the last fifty years, you can’t help wondering how come the situation of women has improved so little or in parts of the world got worst. The reality is that millions of women are suffering and being oppressed under religious laws and Islamic cultures in many different parts of the world. The past fifty years have been some of the darkest in women’s lives. With the anti-secularist backlash, the rise of political Islam, and efforts over the past two decades to impose religion on the people, thousands have been executed - decapitated or stoned to death - and medieval laws to suppress women have been revived.

Islam is the ideology in power in most Muslim countries. In all of these, society has suffered serious setbacks in civil rights in general, and women’s rights in particular. Yet many voices seek to justify Islam: western academics, the mainstream western media, so-called moderate Muslims and some Eastern intellectuals all try to justify the operation and rationalize brutality. They tell us that what we are seeing is not the real Islam; they divide Islam into good and bad, moderate and fundamentalist. They tell us it’s their culture and that’s how they live. The British imams going on media to keep reminding us that all Muslims are not terrorists.  Outrageous and racist but because they are Imams or religious leaders their remarks are tolerable. They fail to address in any constructive way cultural, social, political and economic factors that has bedeviled Muslims across the world. Here are a few cultural issues that the Muslim leaders need to address.

1.     Equality of rights for women

Women are deemed to be inferior to men. Women are men’s belongings and women can have no authority over men. That a woman counts as only half a man in legal and financial matters; this is enforced widely and those Muslims who justify this rely on Islamic script. “And call into witness two men; or if two be not men, then one man and two women” (Koran, The Cow. Verse 282) and “ God charges you concerning your children: to the male the like of the portion of two female” (Koran, Women, verse 11)

2.     Sexual oppression of Women

Women earn God’s grace by obeying their husbands. The message is clear: men dominate, women obey. From a religious perspective, women are there merely for the sexual enjoyment of men and for purposes of reproduction. In Islam female sexuality is acknowledged, but limits and confines women to their sexual and reproductive roles. Most muslim has taken this too far by considering women as a potential danger by distracting men from their duties and corrupting the community. Orthodox interpretation place restriction on women’s sexuality, whilst men are given the right to marry up to four wives and the right to temporary marriage as many times as they wish. Free male–female sexual relations are considered a sin in Islam. This is justified by literal interpretation of Koranic verses that define which sexual relations are permitted under Islam, and the punishment for any transgression (called zena) outside these limits. Zena is punishable by flogging, imprisonment and stoning to death.

3.     Legal practice and women

Despite modernisation and reform, family law and the penal code have remained largely untouched, on the contrary in the last three decades fundamentalists have inserted their interpretation. Polygamy, men’s unconditional right to divorce their wives, the law regarding sex outside of marriage, men’s decision making over their wives’ employment and travel, and a woman’s lack of right to custody of her children are among them. Hijab is the definitive form of clothing for women. According to widely practice Islamic law, the legal age for a girl to wed is nine – an obvious case of sexual abuse and rape.

Conclusion

The state is a prerequisite for women’s liberation from religious oppression. A strong social movement and international support is needed with long-term commitment to build modern and stable states across the Muslim world.

Why Suicide and suicide attack is happening in Afghanistan

Modern way of living and utilities has penetrated deep into Afghan society, even the most conservatives in the remotest village has some access to media, modern transportation, agriculture utilities, health care and medicine and many more appliances. While their values and social structures remain tribal or traditional. The penetration of modernity has been embraced by Islam, Islamists never said ‘NO’ to modernity to achieve their ends, most fanatics such as mullah Omar and Sayyaf, Rabani or Mujadadi uses modern tool to extend their influence on the community. The modern way of life has provided opportunity for some to secure a better life and for others to be worsen as the so called leaders have influenced them by using modern utilities. The tightly knit of society has been broken as everyone struggle for their survival. The means of survival have also changed; people are relying less and less on agriculture and husbandry. Its no more possible because of the drought and natural disasters. Those who have better life are either in business of poppy or have sons in a foreign country or a professional occupation. Te lives of many Afghans have got better today in material term, the poverty of our grandparents are now unimaginable for many Afghans. The society has become more injustice too. The society does not offer the chance to escape from traditionalism, nor the prospect how to make such an escape. Individuals have to accept greater risk and uncertainty in their lives.

Its absolutely wrong to attempt to explain self-emulation by five hundred women last year and over a hundred men most of men in suicide bomb attacks as behaviour and characteristic of individuals. Its not the action of innately disturbed people. These suicides have social causes.

Afghanistan in its traditional form could be seen as working in terms of mechanical solidarity. Afghan society in traditional and tribal form is integrated, or held together, by the fact that Afghans had similar beliefs and values and they have similar roles. In traditional Afghan society all people do similar things, similar job and they live similar lives, doing little farming or something. In traditional afghan society identities are clearly defined in terms of roles and family background.

Afghan society is not traditional in the sense mentioned above. Afghanistan for most has changed, the home which was work space is no more. people to have better life work in a different place than home, work is not controlled by family. People like sayyaf or mullah omar control the village or people work in the cities.

There is no solidarity in Afghan society. People have to struggle to live via other means, while it’s Russians, or mujahdeen or Americans or Taliban or someone else trying to control their lives. The norms in society are old and rotten it does not provide a good framework for individual to act. As a result most individuals are corrupt and their moral structure does not lead them. the society has not lost the morality or it has not been loosen. The only answer afghans think will work is to strengthen norms this is supported by the so called leaders because this serves their purposes. Afghanistan has become corrupt and hypocritical. Life for many has become hard especially for women.

There is a conflict in Afghan society, we as Afghans failed to respond constructively and fix this failure that is why first Russians and now the rest of the world came to fix it. not because they care about Afghanistan but because Afghanistan have caused some serious problems to the rest of the world. The demands of the self proclaimed leaders have conflict with each other and as a result they are in constant conflict and because they have no political intelligence the only way they settle conflict is through bloodshed, and that has turned them into criminals. Individuals have abandoned the social norms but they maintain to conform with it. Afghans support the goal of what is said by the criminal leaders. They do not follow any other route. While they think the goal is not good enough for them but they like the means for achieving it. Afghans are deeply unhappy about their lives, some blame others, others seek god and they commit suicide and kill others for their imagined gods. Some afghans conform, they don’t want to protest, they think the protest route end up not in the desired location. Some are deeply unhappy that includes the 500 women who committed suicide last year.

view from a grain of sand

Women in Afghanistan were not suddenly plunged into brutal un-freedom when the Taliban came to power in 1996. Nor have they always been subject to repressive rule. In a documentary that is both intimate and broadly political, Meena Nanji offers a view of the past thirty years of Afghanistan's history through the lives of three women.

Wajeeha is a literacy instructor and activist with the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA); her husband died fighting against the Soviets in the 1980s. Roeena is a defiantly unmarried doctor who works in refugee camps populated mostly by people who fled Afghanistan when competing warlords reigned in the mid-1990s. Shapire, along with her husband and children, fled Afghanistan after the Taliban assumed power. She now teaches girls in a refugee camp.

Via interviews, narration, and vrit and archival footage, Nanji compellingly argues that the loss of women's rights in Afghanistan is not a simple story that revolves around the Taliban. It is a much larger-and continuing-story of a nation that has suffered through near-constant war and mass displacement over several decades.

in 1989, the foreign powers withdrew, leaving Afghanistan with a power vacuum and an organized, well-armed movement of religious fundamentalists. From 1992 to 1996, competing warlords ruled. Another wave of people fled. In 1996, the Taliban came to power. U.S. readers should be well aware of what happened in Afghanistan in 2001.

The women in View from a Grain of Sand have lived through all of this. The film was shot in refugee camps and within Afghanistan over three visits-in fall 2000 (while the Taliban reigned and the world mostly ignored it); in fall 2001 (just after 9/11); and in 2003 (after the U.S. attacks, the fall of the Taliban, and the creation of a parliament dominated by the very same warlords who had reigned during the chaotic years of 1992 to 1996). Meena Nanji has documented her subjects' stories as they moved from obscurity to a focus of global attention. She has also documented the constancy of their struggles. These women's lives reflect continuous repression, lack of resources, and active work for change through a series of power shifts, all of which have been marked by violence and instability.