Terror's first victims
When fanatics like the Taliban seize control of Islamic countries, women are the first to suffer.
By Janelle Brown
Sept. 24, 2001 | A woman living under Taliban rule in Afganistan can leave her home only for essential government-sanctioned activities. She must wear her burqa, a shroudlike gown that covers her entire body -- with a small mesh screen through which to see -- and she must be accompanied by a male relative. At home, she must live behind blackened windows. She cannot go to school, nor can she hold a job. Widows without a man to support them are forced to beg in the street to survive.
The Afghan woman cannot speak to men to whom she is not related by blood or marriage, which means she cannot visit a male doctor, so she might easily die from a treatable illness, because the female doctors she can visit are fleeing the country, and it is illegal to educate new ones.
If she wears nail polish, the top of her finger could be chopped off. If she is suspected of committing adultery, she can be publicly stoned to death. If she is suspected of disobeying any rule of modesty or decorum -- say, meeting the eyes of a male, or laughing in public -- she can be publicly beaten by the police who roam the streets under the authority of the Department for the Propagation of Virtue and the Suppression of Vice.
Feminists and human rights activists have been concerned about the Taliban's oppression of women for years, and in the aftermath of the World Trade Center attacks they might be expected to be having a "We told you so" moment. Eleanor Smeal, president of the Feminist Majority, warned three years ago of the potential danger to the rest of the world of Taliban fanaticism, demanding, in a petition organized with a coalition of feminists, that the U.S. government not recognize the Taliban government because of its treatment of women. (The United States, owing in part to this pressure, never recognized the Taliban government.) Smeal and her supporters were not merely complaining of sexism, but insisting that the oppression of women in Middle Eastern Muslim countries is a sign of a greater fanaticism that could be expected to use terrorism to attack its enemies.
"We argued that the Talibanization of society would not stop in Afghanistan. We could see it moving into Pakistan, into Algiers and all through the Middle East to Turkey," explains Smeal. "We argued that it would lead to regional instability, and that this had much larger world ramifications than just what is happening to women there."
The subjugation of women in extremist Islamic states like Afghanistan is carried out in the name of Islam, even though it does not have much basis in the religion itself. Instead, Islamic extremists simply pervert weak religious tenets for political expedience. The oppression of women serves a dual function -- it works as a demonstration of political might and as a convincing rejection of the West. What better way to show your defiance of the United States than by symbolically cloistering your female population from the "corruption" of the sexually liberated American woman, as seen in movies, advertising and TV?