Fundamentalism in Comparative Perspective (37 page)

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Authors: Lawrence Kaplan

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Women's Council, I was able to observe dozens of women (many of them veiled) entering the grounds to attend a class or to seek advice.
An example of the kind of cases and causes the AWC takes up is the complaint by twenty-two-year-old Najiba, who has been abandoned by her husband for another woman because she could not give him a child. He has since remarried, but the AWC has taken up Najiba's case for maintenance rights in accordance with the law. According to Najiba: "Earlier a woman like me would have had no prospects. Today I am assured of my rights as an individual, and have also been given a job due to the efforts of the AWC."
5
Mrs. Wardak told me that the AWC has a membership of 150,000, with branches in all provinces except Wardak and Katawaz. The branches organize traditional festivals that include awards for handicraft pieces, and "peace camps" which provide medical care and distribute garments and relief goods free of charge. The branches also assist women in income-generating activities, such as raising chickens and producing eggs and milk for sale, as well as sewing and craftwork. The work of the AWC is supported by the government, which provides it with a generous budget.
6
The principal objectives of the AWC, according to its president, are raising women's social consciousness, making them aware of their rights, particularly their right to literacy and work, and improving women's living conditions and professional skills. She stressed equal pay with men and workplace child care as two important achievements. But customs die hard, as evidenced by an ongoing radio and TV campaign against the buying and selling of girls. The AWC is also trying to change the laws on child custody that favor the father and his agnates.
Like the AWC, the Kabul Women's Club is located on spacious grounds and holds literacy classes (two-hour classes are held every day) and vocational training, as well as employment workshops where women weave rugs and carpets, sew uniforms, embroider, and produce handicrafts. The work is entirely salaried, and child care and transportation are provided. Courses on house management, health, hairdressing, and typing are offered free of charge. The Afghan Women's Club also works with the Public Health Ministry on mother-
 
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and-child issues, such as disease prevention, vaccination of children, breastfeeding, and family planning.
During the past ten years, the women's organizations have worked among and mobilized hundreds of thousands of Afghan women. Of particular importance to the AWC has been literacy and education of girls. According to a recent AWC survey, there are 7,133 women in institutions of higher education and 233,000 girls studying in schools. The total number of Afghan female professors and teachers is 190 and 22,000 respectively.
In Kabul I asked many party members and workers of the Afghan Women's Council if women's rights would be sacrificed on the altar of national reconciliation. All were fervent believers in the party's duty to defend the gains made in women's rights, and in the ability of the women's organizations to stand up for women's rights to education and employment. Some women with whom I spoke insisted that the April revolution "was made for women." Among women in the capital, there is considerable hostility toward the Mujahideen, and I was told several times that "the women would not allow" a Mujahideen takeover.
A Brief Digression on the Mujahideen and Women in Peshawar
Unlike liberation, resistance, and guerrilla movements elsewhere, the Afghan Mujahideen do not encourage the active participation of women. In Cuba, Algeria, Vietnam, China, Eritrea, Oman, Iran, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Palestine, women were/are active in the front lines as well as in social services. Significantly, the Mujahideen do not have female spokespersons. Indeed, women in Peshawar who become too visible or vocal are threatened, and sometimes killed. The group responsible for most of the intimidation of women is the fundamentalist
Hizb-e Islami,
led by Gulbeddin Hekmatyar, who has over the years received substantial military, political, and financial support from the United States, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia. The educational situation in Peshawar is extremely biased against girls. Some 104,600 boys are enrolled in schools against 7,800 girls. For boys there are 486 primary schools, 161 middle schools, and 4 high
 
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schools. For girls there are 76 primary schools, 2 middle schools, and no high schools.
7
A UNICEF study indicated that in the camps there are only 180 Afghan women with a high school education. This is consistent with the highly patriarchal arrangements among the Mujahideen and in Peshawar.
As women become excluded from the production of the means of subsistence, their role in human reproduction becomes exaggerated, fetishized. The control of women's fertility and sexuality becomes a matter of family honor. The honor/shame complex in Peshawar is thus a feature of the extreme privatization of the domestic sphere to which women have been relegated, as well as a legacy of the patriarchal social structure. Reintroducing women into public life and social production would change the definition of women's roles. But given the Mujahideen's record on female education, and considering the antipathy toward women's advancement evinced by religious and traditionalist elements, there is no guarantee that, in a post-civil war situation, resources intended for education would be allocated in a gender-equitable fashion. In all likelihood, and in the absence of monitoring, boys would continue to be privileged.
The subordinate status of women is apparently decried by some in Peshawar. The Revolutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) was founded in 1977 (as a Maoist group) but made prominent on 4 February 1987, when its founder, Mina Kishwar Kamal, was killed by fundamentalists in Quetta. RAWA staged a demonstration by women and children in Rawalpindi on 27 December 1988, on the occasion of the ninth anniversary of the Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan. The demonstrators distributed pamphlets attacking in the strongest terms the KGB, Khad (the Afghan secret police), and the Hizb-e Islami. They claimed that the majority of Afghans stood for an independent and democratic Afghanistan, where social justice and freedom to women was guaranteed (Yusufzai 1989). In a communiqué distributed that day, RAWA deplored "the reactionary fanatics [who] are savagely suppressing our grieved people, specially [sic] the women." It continued:
Killing the innocent men and women, raping, to marry forcefully young girls and widows, and hostility toward women literacy and education, are some customary cruelties committed by the fundamentalists who have
 
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made the life inside and outside the country bitter and suffocating. In their cheap opinion, the women struggle for any right and freedom is regarded as infidelity which must be suppressed brutaly [sic].
The communiqué decried the "antidemocratic and antiwoman" activities of the fundamentalists and warned of "fundamentalist fascism" replacing the current regime.
Summary and Conclusion
At this writing (1991), fundamentalist fascism has not taken over Afghanistan. The Mujahideen have not succeeded in overthrowing the government. However, there has been a marked shift in the government's ideological and programmatic orientation. Following its congress in Spring 1990, the PDPA changed its name to the
Hizb-e Watan,
or the National Party. Constitutional changes were also made, stressing Islam and nation and dropping altogether references to the equality of men and women. The emancipation of women will have to await peace, stability, reconstruction, and development.
This chapter has underscored the importance of the issue of women's rights in the Afghan revolution and civil conflict. It has also explained the subordinate position of women, the resistance to women's rights (including education), and the weak state's inability to implement its reform program in the face of a persistent patriarchy. While Afghanistan is not the only patriarchal country in the world, it is an extreme case of "classic patriarchy." Its rugged terrain and armed tribes have made modernization and centralization a difficult, prolonged, and limited enterprise. This has had serious, and dire, implications for the advancement of women.
Throughout the Third World, women are devising strategies for empowerment and emancipation. In addition to struggling around issues of control over production and reproduction, women have been actively and creatively involved in human rights movements, peace movements, anti-imperialist movements, and movements for social change and equity. One of the most interesting and dynamic examples of a Third World women's movement is that of India, which is strongly anticapitalist and antipatriarchal (Calman 1989; Caplan 1985). It was initiated by women intellectuals and academics con-
 
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cerned about violence against women, and is now constituted by women of the popular classes. It could be an appropriate model for Afghan women. Afghanistan has no mass women's movement and never did, although it has many dedicated women intellectuals, activists, and party cadre who are willing to help initiate one. Perhaps in the near future a popular and autonomous women's movement may emerge, especially as women redefine their roles and assume positions for themselves in the protracted process of reconstruction and development. The Afghan Women's Council and its associated groups should play a significant role in raising women's awareness of their rights, providing women with vital information and services, and organizing and mobilizing women at different levels and sectors of society.
Notes
1. The formal reinstatement of Muslim family law did not apply to party members. Interview with a PDPA official, New York, 28 October 1986.
2. Interview with Farid Mazdak, PDPA official, Kabul, 9 February 1989.
3. Ibid.
4. In 1990 Mrs. Wardak was made minister of education.
5.
Afghanistan Today,
no. 5 (SeptemberOctober 1988): 22.
6. Interview with Mrs. Esmaty Wardak, 24 January 1989, Kabul.
7.
New York Times,
2 April 1988, p. A2.
Bibliography
Abu-Lughod, Lila. 1986.
Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society
. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Afghanistan Today
(Kabul). Various issues.
Afshar, Haleh, ed. 1985.
Women, Work and Ideology in the Third World
. London: Tavistock.
Anwar, Raja. 1988.
The Tragedy of Afghanistan
. London: Verso.
Boesen, Inger. 1983. ''Conflicts of Solidarity in Pukhtun Women's Lives." In
Women in Islamic Society,
ed. Bo Utas. Copenhagen: Scandinavian Institute of Asian Studies, pp. 10425.

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