Misogyny: The Taliban Ban Women's Voices--and Faces--in Public

To be blunt: They don't worship God. They worship a certain part that THEY have, and they couldn't be happier about it.

Here they are: the flower of manhood. Beards—and you’d better grow a big, black, thick one—and obligatory guns, camo Jeep, shoulder-fired rocket, and ear-to-ear grins because they get everything they want from a woman because they will rape, starve, or beat the living *b^)& out of her if they don’t get it.

Jerrold M. Post, MD was a forensic psychiatrist who practically invented the science of psychological analysis of terrorism. In fact, he spent 22 years as the principal terrorist profiler for the CIA, in the process writing a number of psychological profiles of world leaders that guided the understanding of emergent philosophies, often based on nested-kinship tribal mores, that would lend themselves to terrorist actions.

One of the things Post wrote about was religious and ethnic states, and what he found should terrify all of us: these species of states, which fuse religion and race/ethnicity, must have two to have continued legitimacy for those voters upon whom their continued survival will depend:

• External Enemies: These will be traditional foes of the political region—the United States, for example, for the Taliban. External enemies provide long-term straw dogs upon whom can be dumped responsibility for the nation’s position in the world and its security status in its relationships with other societies.

• Internal Enemies: These will include other ethnic or racial groups and people of other religions—for the Sunni Taliban these will include Shia Muslims, Jews, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, animists, or secularists—but it almost invariably, include women. Why? Because in most cultures, money and all other forms of power have been kept out of their hands, making them perpetually politically weak—and also because they are physically weaker than the men who have traditionally controlled them. Internal enemies are very important as they are the daily scapegoats upon whom may be blamed the failure of the regime to provide a reasonable standard of living, public services like sanitation and healthcare, education, emergency relief and the like. In the case of the Taliban, there is the phobic and misogynist sexual mores that elevate adultery to a capital offense—and always the responsibility of women, cast as temptresses.

It’s worse than even that, but we’ll get to that shortly.

The problem with the Internal Enemy is that, after crippling repression, the Internal Enemy ceases to be a problem. The External Enemy may be silent at the moment … or, as is the case of the United States in Afghanistan, gone.

Now the state, to prove its legitimacy, must invent something—or, as in this case, adopt something that is even more conservative than what it’s already been doing.

So, here’s what the Taliban just instituted.

The Taliban’s New Article 13

Writes the Associated Press:

Article 13 relates to women. It says it is mandatory for a woman to veil her body at all times in public and that a face covering is essential to avoid temptation and tempting others. Clothing should not be thin, tight or short.

Women should veil themselves in front of all male strangers, including Muslims, and in front of all non-Muslims to avoid being corrupted. A woman’s voice is deemed intimate and so should not be heard singing, reciting, or reading aloud in public. It is forbidden for women to look at men they are not related to by blood or marriage and vice versa.

But that’s not all. Article 19 of the new codes extends the tightening of the laws:

Article 19 bans the playing of music, the transportation of solo female travelers, and the mixing of men and women who are not related to each other.

The U.N. was quick to respond:

“Given the multiple issues outlined in the report, the position expressed by the de facto authorities that this oversight will be increasing and expanding gives cause for significant concern for all Afghans, especially women and girls,” said Fiona Frazer, the head of the human rights service at the U.N. mission in Afghanistan.

And indeed such “significant concern” is absolutely warranted. And all this repression and terror rests not on the Qur’an, but on the hadith. And indeed shari’a law is 90% hadith and only 10% Qur’anic, and therein lies the problem because the hadith take the three Qur’anic verses that deal with awra and expand it into a hideous vilification and execration of women, in the same way that New Testament

At Issue: The Notion of “Awrah” in Islamic law.

First, the Taliban, like the Saudis, instituted what’s called the Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice—known in Arabic as the Muttawa. In Saudi Arabia this came with its own nasty little police force. Applied to both males and females, it most often far more violently targets women.

Classically speaking, if you look only at the verses in the Qur’an, you get a very limited meaning of this term, coming from just three verses (surahs) in the Qur’an. Here there are. Note: Yathrib is the old name for Medina:

And when a group of them said, "O people of Yathrib, you cannot make a stand so go back," a group among them asked the prophet to excuse them, saying: "Our homes are ‘awrah’ (exposed/naked)," when they were not exposed. They just wanted to flee. 33:13

O you who believe, those whom your right hand possess (slaves), as well as those who have not yet attained puberty, should seek your permission at three times: before the Fajr Salat, when you remove your clothes at noon and after the Isha Salat. These are three ‘awrah’(exposed/private times) during which you are likely to be exposed. Beyond those times, there is no blame upon you or upon them to go around mingling with one another. God thus clarifies the revelations for you. God is Knowledgeable, Wise. 24:58

And finally, the last:

And say to the believing women to lower their gaze and to guard their private parts and not to show their beauty spots except that of it which is normally shown. They shall also cover their cleavage with their ‘khimar’. They shall not show their beauty spots except in the presence of their husbands, their fathers, the fathers of their husbands, their sons, the sons of their husbands, their brothers, the sons of their brothers, the sons of their sisters, other women, what their right hands possess, the male attendants who have no sexual desire and the children who are yet to attain awareness of women’s ‘awrah’ (nakedness). They shall not strike their feet so as to reveal details of their hidden beauty spots. You shall repent to God, all of you, O believers, so that you may succeed. 24:31

The commentary of the writers of Qur’an Islam online is simply this:

In harmony with the correct meaning of the word ‘awrat’ derived from 33:13 and 24:58, it is clear that the ‘awrah’ of women which is mentioned in 24:31 simply means the nakedness of women.

That’s full nakedness. Nowhere is there mentioned or implied the radical sexualization of women’s bodies we see today in the demand that:

• women cover their faces because they lure men

• cover their feet because they are deemed sexual

• women’s voices not be heard in public because they lure men to sex

• that women wear burqa or niqab

As far as hijab goes, hijab is a Jewish term for a head covering worn by women in religious ceremony. In Tuareg culture, hijab is worn by men, not women. The great Turkish Assyriologist Muazzez İlmiye Çığ wrote a book asserting, based on translated cunieform tablets, that only temple harlots, who initiated young men into sex, wore head coverings in ancient Mesopotamia—and that it was a symbol of high status.

So, if the earliest Islamic cultures, based on the Qur’an—not the man-(and I do mean man)-written hadith that claim to be sayings of the Prophet Muhammad—there were no great strictures on women. The only real exception is asking women to cover their breasts in a culture where women went topless, and this was because desert violence against women wasn’t unknown.

However, note that the only body parts women are asked to cover by the Prophet Mohammad are their breasts. And indeed areas to be covered by men (yes, there were rules for them, too) are from the waist to the knees. For women: the shoulders to the knees. And garments might be a bit longer (but not to the floor!) if the woman was during her childbearing years.

But that’s the Qur’an, which has precious little notion of punishing anyone for a moral infraction. Then came the Hadith—written by men and, it clearly appears, for their benefit. Now, look what we have, as they have invoked it, courtesy of Cornell University.

Now, note this: I was 53 years old on 9/11. In my entire lifetime living in South Carolina and almost 20 years in California, I had never seen a Muslim woman in cover. Not one. Ever.

Immediately after 9/11, Muslim women began to veil, used as billboards for a religion while their husbands and sons strolled around completely disassociated from the religion and therefore protected from opprobrium and assault. This was no manly act. It was a provocation, and if a covered woman were attacked it was a more serious offense than an assault on a man because she was so vulnerable. It was a dare, and it w as an abuse of Muslim women.

I have always said that the greatest achievement of Osama bin Laden was that he convinced Western men—especially men tied to religions—how much control of women they could achieve. Indeed, men all over the world had watched women gained rights from the Egyptian revolution and the Westernization of Central Asia — including Iran and Afghanistan — in the period from the 1920s to the 1950s and even beyond to the Iranian Revolution of 1978-1979.

When the backlash came it came hard. This is a photo of a women’s march of 100,000 just days after the Iranian Revolution—protesting the forced veiling that would befall them in here days. Their cries fell on deaf ears.

Forced veiling is IDENTITY STRIPPING.

Prior to the rise of the Taliban, women in Afghanistan were protected under law and increasingly afforded rights in Afghan society. Women received the right to vote in the 1920s; and as early as the 1960s, the Afghan constitution provided for equality for women. The Taliban stripped them of everything. They regain rights and privileges under Coalition administration, but lost them all—including the right to an education, the right to work, to the right to choose clothing, the right to refuse sex on his terms to a husband (he can starve her if she doesn’t comply) and the right to hold office. Here’s a before-and-after photo, perhaps all you need to know.

In the photo below, Afghan women on a college campus in the 1950s and as they are forced to dress today. Now their voices may not be heard in public.

The U.N. and Amnesty International are pressing to have gender apartheid declared a crime against humanity—which it certainly is—but meanwhile, it is not only Islamic countries. India, whose Hindu religion is the only one not to lose its goddesses, is the capital of gang rape. In America, abortion rights have fallen.

And a note to American women: as a friend of mine said the other day,

“If American women think the right to abortion is the only thing they’re going to lose, they have no idea how big the backlash against their freedoms and against their successes—and the huge amount of free labor and money they have taken from men—is going to get. Men want back what they should never have been allowed to have.

Below are links to other PolitiSage articles on the Manosphere and Misogyny.

And a little good cheer …