Muslims in power (shudder...)

Tuesday, November 22, 2005

This article was written a few years ago but is especially prescient now that so many muslims long for an islamic "government". A typical muslim women had this to say on another blog: "Islam is the solution" sounds right to me. Why is it assumed that "democracy is the solution"? As a Muslim, I don't have any particular desire for a democratic state.




by Shauna Lambrecht


The woman of Afghanistan see the world through a swatch of mesh. In September of 1994, a group of religious young men from Pakistan, the "Taliban," led by Mullah Mohammad Omar, appeared on the Afghanistan political scene. They gave the impression that they had come to rid Afghanistan of corruption and disorder. The Taliban attacked and captured provinces until they got to the capital Kabul. After nine-months and 231 bombs the Afghanistan government surrendered. The Taliban claim to follow a pure, fundamentalist Islamic ideology, yet they display harsh oppression against women. Within Islam, women are allowed to earn and control their own money and participate in public life.

Women in Afghanistan, under Taliban rule, were confined to their homes unless a close male relative escorted them. Women must wear a "burqa," and may not speak in public; their escorts must speak for them so they do not excite the males with the sound of their voices.

At age eight, girls are not allowed to attend school. In 1996, women were outlawed from owning businesses. Those that did were told to shut them down. In Afghanistan, 70 percent of school teachers, 50 percent of government officials and 40 percent of the doctors were women prior to 1996.

A male physician cannot treat women, yet at the same time, very few women are allowed to practice medicine. Many women and young girls died of treatable ailments because they were prohibited from being treated by a male doctor or being placed in hospitals where males are present. Instead, women were placed in small dirty clinics where there is no running water. Their supper come at six every night in a wheelbarrow. In the only maternity hospital, most women deliver their children on the floor or double up in a twin bed with another expectant mother. Several women tried to commit suicide by drinking household cleaner: they would rather die than live in these horrible conditions. Surveyed by Physicians for Human Rights, 97 percent of Afghan women exhibit signs of suffering major depression.

Women had to paint all of the first floor windows black in their homes, so men couldn’t look inside. They had to have black curtains along the windows of the buses that they rode in so that no one could look inside.

Every Friday, people gathered in the city of Kabul to watch the public whippings, stonings, amputations and executions of people who had dared to oppose the Taliban. Several Internet reports and magazines articles expose the Taliban’s cruelty. One elderly woman was walking when her ankle showed from underneath her burqua. The "religious police" saw her and broke her ankle with a metal cable. A woman tried to flee Afghanistan with a male who was not her close relative and was stoned to death for adultery. One woman dared to disobey the Taliban by teaching little girls in her own home. They shot her in front of her husband, daughter and students.

All of these crimes brought to you in the name of the Religion of Peace™