A Brief History of Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice (36 page)

Pakistan courts make little distinction between consensual sex and rape. Up to 80 per cent of all women in Pakistani prisons are there because they have been convicted under Islamic laws against adultery.
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It is reported that girls as young as twelve or thirteen face conviction and a public
whipping if convicted of illegal sexual relations.
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Nearly half of all women who report rape end up convicted of adultery. The law actively discourages women from bringing a charge of rape, but if they do not, and become pregnant, they can be convicted of adultery. A few weeks after the Zafran Bibi case caught the eye of the media, that of Mukhtaran Bibi (no relation) came to light on the other side of Pakistan, in the Punjab district. She was gang-raped on the orders of the local village council because her younger brother had been accused of forming a relationship with a higher-caste woman. After a public outcry, however, the police charged six men in connection with the rape.
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The state awarded Mukhtaran Bibi just over $8,000 in compensation.
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Normally, the vast majority of cases such as this go unreported.

However brutal and repressive to women Iran and Pakistan were, events there would prove merely a prelude to what was to happen in Afghanistan, where perhaps for the first time in history a state came into being the primary purpose of which was to enact, politically, socially and legally, a misogynistic vision of terrifying cruelty.

Afghanistan has impressed itself upon the imagination of the West because the men who flew their hijacked aircraft into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania, were largely products of the training camps established there over the last few decades by fundamentalist Moslems. Mohamed Atta, believed to have crashed Flight 11 into the Trade Center’s north tower just before 9 a.m. on the morning of 11 September 2001, stipulated in his will that no women would be allowed to touch his body or even attend his last rites. In fact his inhuman crime, with ghastly irony, ensured that his atoms intermingled with those of many hundreds of women in the conflagration and collapse that the crash caused. That Atta was a misogynist is no coincidence. Misogyny is an essential
part of the worldview of the Moslem terrorists trained in the mountains of Afghanistan with whom America is now at war, just as it is a crucial ingredient in the recent history of that unhappy land.

The thread that runs through the recent history of Afghanistan, linking it to the attacks of 9/11, is the ferocious resistance to any attempt to have women treated as human beings. Since 1959, when a reforming government decreed that women were no longer required to veil, Islamic fundamentalists have been at the centre of that resistance. Sometimes they have collaborated with various nationalist groups, as well as a patchwork of tribal alliances – these have united periodically to fight a common enemy – before invariably turning their weapons on each other. Afghan women obtained the vote in 1964. At this point, Afghanistan was more progressive than most Moslem nations: In cities such as Kabul, some girls were allowed to attend school. Nonetheless, the vast majority of women remained illiterate. And those who did dare seek an education faced fundamentalist fanatics such as Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, whose first memorable action as a mujahideen or holy warrior was when he commanded a group that threw acid in the faces of young women who attended school unveiled. Later, his men crucified a young woman student, whose naked and bisected body was found nailed to the doors of a classroom in Kabul University.
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The United States only really began to pay attention to Afghanistan when pro-Soviet socialists staged a coup against the government in 1978. The new regime’s efforts at reform, often aimed at bettering the position of women, were fiercely resisted, and support for Islamic fundamentalism grew. This prompted the Soviet Union to intervene in late 1979. From this point, the United States firmly supported Hekmatyar, who by that time was a puppet of the fundamentalist Pakistani regime
of General Zia ul-Huq. Under the Reagan administration, billions of dollars were funnelled through the Pakistani secret service to Hekmatyar and his supporters.
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More moderate mujahideen were never bankrolled to the same extent. The Soviets were forced to withdraw in 1989 after a bloody war, though Hekmatyar’s contribution to their defeat has been disputed.

US policy-makers obviously assumed that communists were more dangerous than misogynists. History would prove them wrong. The movement known as the Taliban emerged out of the chaos that followed the Soviet withdrawal. It was made up mainly of religious students trained in the madrassas or Koranic schools of Pakistan. Its roots lay in Deobandism, an ultra-conservative tendency in Islam that dated back to the nineteenth century and came from Northern India. It taught a strict, literalist reading of the Koran.
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Misogyny was to the Taliban what anti-Semitism was to the Nazis: the very core of their ideology. As they spread their rule from Kandahar in the south, to Kabul in the north, women were systematically driven from the public sphere. In a long series of decrees, the misogynistic equivalent of the Nazis’ Nuremberg Laws against German Jews, women were forbidden to work, go to school, attend male doctors, wear make-up or any form of decoration, appear in public unless accompanied by a male relative and completely covered from head to toe in a burka – the dark veil of opaque cloth, attached to a close-fitting cap – which completely encloses a woman’s body. Only a peephole at eye level allows any light into this walking tomb. Television was banned, as was music, dancing and any form of entertainment. The radio droned out Koranic prayers and what seemed like a never-ending stream of restrictions and edicts such as:

Public transport will provide buses reserved for men and buses reserved for women . . . Women and girls are forbidden to wear brightly coloured clothes beneath the chadri [dark veils] . . . A woman is not allowed to go to a tailor for men. A girl is not allowed to converse with a young man. Infraction of this law will lead to the immediate marriage of the offenders. Women are not allowed to speak in public because their voices arouse men. Women engaged to be married may not go to a beauty parlour, even in preparation for their weddings . . . Merchants are forbidden to sell female undergarments.
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Men too were targeted. They were forced to grow beards and wear a white cap or turban. Nobody was allowed to display photographs, or have their photograph taken, even at festive occasions such as weddings. It was against the law to whistle. The Taliban even found Koranic justification for banning whistling kettles. This was literalism gone mad.

But however absurd or insane their decrees, the Taliban enforced them with frightening cruelty. Their moral police, under the aegis of the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, patrolled the streets. They attacked two women on a Kabul street and beat them senseless with whips. Their crime: wearing white shoes under their burkas, a gesture seen as an insult to the flag of the Taliban, which is white. Another Kabul woman was seized in the street and denounced. Her crime: wearing nail polish. Her fingers were cut off on the spot. Women were flogged for going out alone. Two women convicted of adultery were dragged to the Sports Stadium in Kabul, which had become a public execution ground. Before a large crowd, they were shot in the back of the head. As one young woman who lived through this nightmare expressed it: ‘Even though they seem to follow one another without rhyme or reason, these decrees have a certain logic: the extermination
of the Afghan woman.’ The Taliban, she wrote, ‘tried to steal my face from me – to steal the faces of all women.’
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Women fought back. One woman opened a secret beauty salon in Kabul. Her patrons came and went with the surreptitiousness of conspirators bent on some dreadful revolutionary act: in fact, that is what putting on make-up had become. Others opened schools for girls in their apartments. Girls were advised to carry some religious tract with them at all times, and if the apartment was raided, religious works were always on hand in the hope that the morals police could be persuaded that the children were undergoing only religious instruction.
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Shortly after the occupation of Kabul, in September 1996, the Taliban debated whether or not the peepholes in the chadri were too big. The veil had turned a woman’s face into a sexual organ, and it has to be negated, denied, and repressed at all costs. Not only woman herself, but anything to do with her is infused with her sexuality, especially her clothes, which the Taliban will not touch. A man, his wife and daughter were fleeing the country. He avoided having his suitcases searched simply by telling the Taliban guards: ‘This is my wife’s suitcase, and these belong to my daughters,’ and the guard steps back.
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Rarely has the horror and fear of the female body expressed itself so eloquently, or manifested itself so explicitly.

Some have sought explanations for this misogyny in the nature of Islam itself. It is easy to dig out quotations from various mullahs condemning women’s beauty as evil and the work of the devil. But in this the Islamic tradition is in fact little different from that of Christianity and Judaism. It shares with them a common inheritance rich in misogyny (though in works such as
The Perfumed Garden
it incorporated the erotic influence of the East in a way the Christian tradition never has). The historical traditions to which Islam is heir were no doubt influential, but an explanation for such unrelenting
misogyny as the Taliban embodied must be sought elsewhere.

The Taliban have been compared to an all-male brotherhood of holy warriors like that of the Medieval Crusaders.
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A more recent parallel might be drawn with the origins of the Nazi party, whose policy towards women was aimed at driving them out of the public sphere into a domestic prison where they were expected to perform their only true function: reproduction.

Both the Taliban and the Nazis were products of war, disillusionment, and frustration. The Taliban emerged from the Pakistani refugee camps, where millions of Afghanis had fled during the war against the Soviets, and the all-male world of the religious schools that wealthy Saudis set up and funded in Pakistan to teach a reactionary form of Islam deeply hostile to the West. Many who flocked to these schools were orphans, with little or no contact with women. In the Taliban, this all-male world would consolidate into one that was profoundly antagonistic to women, and not a little afraid of them.

Both movements attracted men brutalized by years of death and destruction, men whom humiliation had embittered. For the Germans who joined the National Socialists, Germany’s defeat in the First World War was the catalyst of their anger; for those who joined the Taliban, it was the humiliation of their country and its traditions at the hands of lawless brigands funded by America, and more broadly, the humiliation of Islam, as the influence of the West spread throughout the Middle East. The Nazis had the beer halls, an all-male domain like that of the trenches, the veterans and paramilitary associations that they created after the war. For the Taliban, the Koranic schools exercised a comparative function, where their anger and frustration could coalesce into an ideology whose misogyny is so extreme that it does not pasts the test of sanity. Had an individual expounded such doctrines, he would have
been regarded (quite rightly) as insane. But, as has been noted before, once religion sanctions a belief, our ordinary notions of what distinguishes the insane from the sane are thrown out the window.

As in the all-male milieu of the Nazis, it is not surprising to find also a strong homoerotic element among the Taliban. Shortly after the fall of the Taliban in late 2001, an American journalist visiting their stronghold of Kandahar was surprised to find a photography shop with photographic portraits of Taliban fighters, some of whom were wearing eyeliner. He learned that it was not uncommon for these fundamentalists to do what was utterly forbidden to women: paint their finger and toe nails with henna. Some even wore high-heeled sandals, which gave them a mincing, feminine gait. These ‘Talibanettes’ were tolerated in the capital of a state that brutalized and mutilated women for putting on make-up and where the official punishment for homosexuals was to use bulldozers to crush and bury them alive.
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Hypocrisy is inevitable when moral restrictions defy human nature.

Unfortunately, hypocrisy also remains a fundamental part of the West’s relationship to the Moslem world. Until after 9/11 the governments of the West largely ignored the Taliban’s violations of human rights and the many atrocities that they were responsible for that were specifically aimed at women. In February 1997, the French government invited the Taliban Minister for Health, Mullah Mohammed Abbas, to Paris where on the very day that two women were executed in Kabul for committing adultery he was received by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the President of the National Assembly. ‘A “Minister for Health”,’ commented one Afghan woman, ‘who bars women from hospitals,’ who forced women doctors and nurses out of work, and closed day-care centres. Abbas
was an ‘uneducated mullah’ who was not even a doctor. The invitation caused some Afghan women to despair that ‘if France is welcoming a talib, that means the Taliban propaganda has worked.’
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In May 2001, just four months before the attacks on the United States, President George W. Bush congratulated the Taliban because they had cracked down on opium production and compensated them for the loss of revenues with a check for $43,000,000.
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All this time, the Taliban were providing facilities for training the men, followers of Osama bin Laden, who would attack the United States and its allies.