“Good job, mullah sir”
[T]he girls, ages 13 and 14, had been fleeing for two days along rutted roads and over mountain passes to escape their illegal, forced marriages to much older men, and now they had made it to relatively liberal Herat Province.
But a cop spotted them, and far from protecting them, he sent them back home. “There they were publicly and viciously flogged for daring to run away from their husbands.” Or rather their “husbands” who were more like rapist slaveowners than anything we in the less thuggish part of the world would consider “husbands.”
Forced into a so-called marriage exchange, where each girl was given to an elderly man in the other’s family, Khadija and Basgol later complained that their husbands beat them when they tried to resist [being raped]…
In the video, the mullah, under Mr. Khan’s approving eye, administers the punishment with a leather strap, which he appears to wield with as much force as possible, striking each girl in turn on her legs and buttocks with a loud crack each time. Their heavy red winter chadors are pulled over their heads so only their skirts protect them from the blows.
The spectators are mostly armed men wearing camouflage uniforms, and at least three of them openly videotape the floggings. No women are present.
The mullah, whose name is not known, strikes the girls so hard that at one point he appears to have hurt his wrist and hands the strap to another man.
That’s how it always is with these things – a whole crowd of grown men, many of them heavily armed, combining forces to hit women or even young girls as hard as they possibly can. Bullying at its purest and its starkest freedom from shame. The girls are treated like objects that exist to squeeze penises, and if the objects decline to squeeze their alloted penises, they are treated as sentient for just long enough to be flogged with leather straps.
On Saturday, at the Women for Afghan Women shelter, at a secret location in Kabul, there were four fugitive child brides. All had been beaten, and most wept as they recounted their experiences.
Yes I daresay they did.
I read Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s “Nomad”. It describes a lot of the same behavior.
Good grief, this is just horrifying. My mind is blank, I don’t even know what to think after coming across this kind of evil, twisted, barbaric cruelty.
But never, never forget that, in spite of the explicitly religious justification for child rape-slaves brides (q.v. Aisha), and even though this rape and imprisonment important tradition is enforced by violence direct from the literal hands of the local religious authority figure, compassion is the central defining feature of religion.
*sigh*
None is so blind as those who put on blindfolds and plug their ears with their fingers and shout “I’M NOT LISTENING LA LA LA LA LA!”
What a twisted, vile religion, Islam is. They call it marriage, but it is quite clearly slavery. One of the girls in the Kabul refuge was ‘sold into marriage.’ Another two were ‘sold into marriage’ and then, when they fled, were taken by their father, a mullah, and killed. It is slavery, pure and simple, as Ayaan Hirsi Ali points out in Nomad. Any practice which puts women completely in the charge of men, consigns them to ‘marriage’ with men they do not know and do not choose, and then commits them to virtual house arrest for the rest of their lives, is slavery, and a particularly brutal form of slavery at that. Islam is a nasty, violent religion. The Qu’ran is a nasty, violent book. It is, arguably, as Geert Wilders says, as dangerous as Mein Kampf. Neither should be banned, but both should come with warnings, and be held in equal contempt.
It is not at all surprising that bear-baiting is a favourite pastime in Pakistan, and quite legal. To call the country mediaeval would be to hurl an insult at the whole 10th Century.
O, this deserves to be highlighted:
Your writing is always top-notch, but sometimes it’s astonishing and breathtaking. No other sentence could so accurately describe the depravity. We need more of this.
Ah, but who are we to say that being flogged is a bad thing. Perhaps there are other ways of knowing, ways in which being flogged is good. Some people pay to be flogged, after all. And perhaps, in that culture, running away is just a clever way of agreeing to the marriage. We cannot claim to know what the signifier is signifying, after all. There is no connection. Fleeing could mean anything. And, as Westerners, we simply cannot judge. Especially since bad things happen in the West, too. Which is not to say that this incident is necessarily a bad thing.
I think I’m about halfway to a “Comment Is Free” column, here.
Oh, three quarters of the way, at least.
and they call it religion of peace? My irony meter is broken ‘SPROING!!’
Aww. Poor Mullah. How nice of that other fella to relieve him. Islam truly is a religion peace – just look how it’s adherent look out for and take care of eachother. Warms that cockles of me ‘eart, it does.
But here we sit, throwing up our hands in horror, appalled by the vicious actions of ‘the other’. Doing nothing.
British Defence SecretaryLiam Fox was recently criticized by Afghan government officials for describing Afghanistan as a “broken 13th-century country”. It would be interesting to know what these officials think of these events.
Trouble is, even if these Afghan local leaders, and a majority of the people in these remote provinces, came to the conclusion that neither the Quran nor the Hadith permitted such child-bride selling / slavery or such public flogging, these violent yokels would find some other non-religious pretext, grounded in cultural tradition, to continue these practices. Hence the comment of the man at the end of the Times article that what happed was non-Islamic.
As an American, I had a immediate reaction to the article: What hope does the U.S. have of ending such barbarity through a continued military presence in Afghanistan? Are the Afghan people, as a whole, worth the trouble? Shouldn’t the U.S. just get out and let the non-military NGOs do whatever they can to protect Afghan women and girls and to promote their education and economic empowerment?
Are the Afghan people, as a whole, worth the trouble? Shouldn’t the U.S. just get out and let the non-military NGOs do whatever they can to protect Afghan women and girls and to promote their education and economic empowerment?
The most important weapon in the ‘war’ against ignorance is education and in countries plagued by male-dominated dogma particularly the education of women. But how to achieve this? Not at the end of a gun, surely? It seems to me that a key point is determining where to start and Russel Blackford’s commentary on Sam Harris’s recent musings about a scientific basis for morality might be a good place to begin. Whatever you think about Harris’s central points an important thing he gets right, and that Russel emphsises, is that it is possible to say that ‘this morality is better than that morality’, or ‘the morals extant in this culture are better than those in that culture’. Cultural relativism allows monsters to flourish unopposed.
My comment above about us not doing anything was written from frustration. The story about those two girls brought tears to my eyes and as I’m a 57 year old bearded ex rugby player, me crying is not a picture you want to hold in your head for long. Ophelia, for just one example, is doing something through her writing and maintaining this blog. The problem is how to move from this to automatic and immediate general condemnation of actions like the flogging of women for running away from their designated roles as obedient little penis strokers.
‘The most important weapon in the ‘war’ against ignorance is education and in countries plagued by male-dominated dogma particularly the education of women. But how to achieve this? Not at the end of a gun, surely?’
If the Taliban want to burn down a school because it is educating girls, guns may be necessary to dissuade them. Carefully phrase arguments are unlikely to do the trick.
Compassion, indeed. And Morality: religions are the arbiters, keepers, transmitters of morality, even as their purveyors are the most immoral of beings. Hard to go along with it. It is the old Donatist question in the “west.” When Blair foresaw the day when Christians, Jews and Muslims could live in peace together in the middle east, I thought: well what about the Apostates, Atheists, Agnostics and Animists? The four As. Their chances aren’t good. Religion has to go. Bye.
can’t we get more info on how afghans are helping each other i.e. like RAWA and what we can do to help these organizations…
rather than this drip drip of negativity…which some people will then use as an excuse to criticize all afghans/Muslims etc…
seems that would be a better call for liberals
Saeed has a point here. Drip Drip. I confess to negativity, would help in reeducation and wonder what is to be done. Will look up RAWA.
the point is that all this negative info just hardens peoples attitudes to afghans/Muslims etc…
please read m. Joya raising my voice…an absolute brilliant book on Afghanistan, women and the NATO occupation/liberation (delete as applicable)…
I have come to the conclusion that the principal western military effort in Afghanistan should be to protect young people, women and girls in particular, while they are being educated in properly run and equipped schools. This is the last thing that the benighted Islamists want, and thus it is clearly what should be done. Moreover, once a young (particularly female) person is brought to a sufficient basic standard, she can never be diseducated. And further, she will be well placed to pass on what she knows to her own children.
If that cannot be done, then the west may as well withdraw and watch from a distance as the dominoes start to fall as they did in Europe in the 1930s: Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran… all getting harder-nosed and ever more vicious governments, with sympathetic movements setting up all over the ME and in Europe as well.
reading that book gave me an insight into how cultures are not eternal they change and shift from time to time…warfare, the rise of differing ideologies, etc..have all impacted to make to weaken womens rights in afghan…
If people want to do something…Send a donation to those places mentioned that are trying to help out women in Afghanistan…Then send another donation to another organization doing the same thing where you live…
Abuse like this, and worse goes on all over the globe…In a way, those girls are very lucky…They got ‘divorced’ and didn’t end up getting murdered by their own fathers…
Ayaan Hirsi Ali has set up her foundation:
http://www.theahafoundation.org
You can read about Malalai Joya and RAWA here:
http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2009/11/16/353210.aspx
You can also, as I have said before, just type Malalai Joya into the search box at the top of the page. As I told Saeed last time he commented, I have not been ignoring her.
Saeed, you’re talking bullshit. This post does not harden people’s attitudes to Afghans – the girls who were flogged are Afghans! The men who flogged them are not more “Afghans” than they are, so defending the girls against the cowardly violent men is obviously not to attack “Afghans.” Don’t be so damn silly; think before you type.
My comments went directed at you Ophelia as you are a knowledgeable person…they were directed at some of the more ‘excitable’ commentators on here…
this is what afghan used to be like:
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/05/27/once_upon_a_time_in_afghanistan?page=full
Ian’s conclusion that the women need to be protected that they may be educated is certainly correct. Protection means force. The US and the west (along with progressive, liberal, secular, atheist, “Muslims’) will have to commit for 50 to 100 years I guess. We should be prepared for that extent of time and the casualties to occur. The first victims of superstition are women. Hence, supporting their organizations in place is worthy, the way to go to defeat ‘fanatical’ Islam, but without force(s), the girls and women are over-exposed and doomed.
There are plans for a peace jirga now, meaning “peace and reconciliation with the Taliban”…but women’s groups are pointing out that that will mean the rights they’ve been able to regain will be yanked away again. The government is so discredited and so feeble that the only real alternative to foreign troops is Taliban rule. There are reasons for not wanting Taliban rule.
Come on Saeed. This may have been the way Afghanistan was, but this is not the way Afghanistan is, and there don’t seem many options for creating an Afghanistan like the Afghanistan of the 1950s, if these pictures give us a true idea of what it was like back then.
Now we have the vilest form of Islam, and the opportunistic use of Islam, where little girls can be ‘sold into marriage’ to clear debts, and where their rebellion is treated as an offence against Islam. Look at Muslim majority countries in the world today, and you see this same story repeated, with variations.
I don’t know the Afghanistan of the 1950s, and there may have been pockets of good sense and progress at the time, but I should like to know what it was like, in those days, to live in tribal areas. The utopia presented in the pictures is a far cry from anything that I knew growing up in India in the 1950s. There was, however, a brief hiatus of a few decades, where religion tended to be go into a kind of hibernation, as countries, like India and Pakistan, Nepal, Burma, etc., began to modernise. But then all this began to reverse, and religion once more began to produce a bigger footprint in public life, until, now, it’s hard, even in the West, to remember a time when religion was a private affair, and largely stayed out of the public sphere. This was the age when JFK had to downplay his catholic roots in order to get elected.
Possibly the same kind of marginalisation of religion occurred in 1950s Afghanistan, but that is only a dream now, obviously. This is not the Afghanistan of today, and wherever Islam makes its appearance today, the agenda is definitely not to accept marginalisation and privatisation of religious dogmas and laws, but to govern countries and to ruin people’s lives by the tyranny of religion functioning as a way of ordering public as well as private life. And yes, I damned well am, as you put it so coyly, ‘excitable’, when I see little girls being flogged for running away from their ‘husbands.’ You’re damned right I am.
If this is used to portray Muslims or Afghans negatively, whose fault is that? The NY Times, for reporting it? B&Ws, for commenting on it?
No, of course it’s the perpetrators’ fault, but for some reason we don’t hear much condemnation of this kind of barbarity from within the Muslim “community”. Looks like the religion is a cover for criminality. The “justice” system appears to be precisely backwards.
Eric
“Now we have the vilest form of Islam”
As apposed to…..?
Biatzsche. I don’t know. I think Islam is the vilest religion, and there’s not much, in my view, to separate fundamentalist, extremist Islam from moderate Islam. Moderate Islam, so far as I can tell, really pertains to those who either (i) have abandoned Islam, or (ii) are Muslims in a fairly nominal sense. The biggest problem with Islam is that it has no way of moderating the effect of the Qu’ran and other (apparently) unchallengeable sources, like the Hadith and the Sunna. So a Muslim is a fundamentalist almost by definition.
This could have been said in earlier centuries about Christians as well, but since Spinoza and the growth of biblical scholarship, it is hard to take the Bible simply as read. There is apparently a movement of Qu’ranic criticism, but this is largely infidel, and cannot, without blasphemy, be taken seriously by the majority of Muslims, and not at all, so far as I can understand, by the ulema. The ‘dispersed authority’ of Islam is perhaps the biggest stumbling block, since there is no clear way of bringing about change in Islam.
The same kind of dispersion of authority is beginning to dominate in Christianity too, and I suspect it will lead to the same kind of unpredictability about Christian belief and practice. I think this process is now deeply underway, and I have my doubts whether the Christianity that we will know in the future, will have any clear understanding of what fundamental Christian beliefs consist in. My hope is that this is a sign of the collapse of the major religions, but if it is, it is going to pass through a fairly troubled and bloody phase, in my view. As these religions die, it would be best to stand well back.