They called him Dr Baloch, the man in the white coat who stood waiting for his patient at the pulpit of the mosque. Fourteen-year-old Muhammad Daud, accused of stealing from a shop’s till, was dragged forward. Then, his wrist was snapped in two, so Dr Baloch could saw through the flesh and bone easier. Later, before the doctor returned to the clinic in the bazaar, he held up Daud’s severed hand, so the audience could see justice had been done: In the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, justice was always illuminated by the infinite light of god’s laws.
Later, in the football stadium nearby—where women had first appeared in western attire in 1959, journalist Tim Bonyhady recalls—punishments would be carried out at half time, as vendors sold tea and pistachios to the crowd. The first to be shot dead was Zarmeena, mother of seven, daughter of Ghulam Haznat of Parwan, and alleged murderer of her husband.
Following 9/11, the former first lady of the United States, Laura Bush, vowed that the war on terror would dismantle organised violence against women. “The fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women,” she said.
Except, it isn’t.
Even as governments, from the United States to India, work to expand counterterrorism cooperation with the Islamic Emirate, and provide aid that is widely reported to be misappropriated by the Taliban, the Islamists who rule the country have begun their war on the country’s women again. The Islamic Emirate barred women from studying medicine this week, on the back of laws banning primary and secondary education.
The Islamic Emirate’s leader, Hibatullah Akhundzada, has barred women not just from working, but also operating businesses, sitting in women-only cafes, taking taxis, looking toward men—even talking at a volume their voices might be heard. The public whipping and execution of women who seek to escape oppressive marriages has resumed, with victims facing charges such as moral corruption, adultery, and sodomy.
Laws like these have, nowhere in the world, been used to regulate the behaviour of an entire gender. And the world, it’s becoming clear, couldn’t care less.
A false dawn
From her elegant palace, the Serai-e Gulistan, its exquisite facade decorated with foliated scrolls and bird motifs, Empress Halima would sometimes emerge on horseback, discarding her veil and wearing a Western-style riding attire. “She rode horses and trained her maidservants in military exercises,” the grand dame of Afghan studies, Nancy Hatch Dupree, recorded in a 1986 book. “She had a keen interest in politics and went on numerous delicate missions to discuss politics between contending parties.”
Emir Abdur Rahman Khan—the so-called Iron King—made the first tentative steps toward gender justice during his rule from 1880 to 1901, ending the tribal custom of forcing widows to marry their brother-in-law, granted the right to divorce, and allowed women to inherit property. To the Emir, these were necessary tools to build a national culture, distinct from tribal norms.
Anthropologist Ashraf Ghani—Afghanistan’s last president—demonstrates that local sharia courts rarely introduced barbaric Taliban-style punishments when adjudicating cases involving women. One Kamalshah arrived at a sharia court in 1886, to complain his wife had eloped with another man, by whom she had become pregnant. The case was settled with an agreement to pay a fine of Rs 60 to the aggrieved husband.
In another case, a father approached the court, seeking a sum of Rs 40 from his daughter, which he had paid to secure her divorce, but was not repaid after she married again and secured a bride price.
Though stoning did exist for crimes like adultery, other cases excavated by Ghani show judges who handed it out capriciously were censured by the royal court and ordered to pay compensation.
Emir Habibullah Khan, who succeeded Abdul Rahman, continued his father’s reforming work. Liberal politician and intellectual Mahmud Beg Tarzi, who returned home from exile in Syria during Emir Habibullah’s role, persuaded the Emir to set up Afghanistan’s first colleges, as well as an English-medium school for girls. This isn’t to suggest the country had become a liberal democracy—the king’s advisor, Sahibzada Abdul Latif was brutally executed for apostasy—but incremental gains were being made.
Furious at what they saw as Emir Habibullah’s pro-British tendencies, his enemies succeeded in securing his assassination in 1919.
Together with his queen, the highly educated and progressive Soraya Tarzi, Emir Amanullah responded to the assassination by seeking to deepen the pace of change. Tarzi, historian Huma Ahmed-Ghosh writes, tore off the veil, as did other women of the court. Amanullah’s sister founded the country’s first hospital for women, and 15 young women students were sent to study in Turkey. The age of marriage was raised from 18 to 21 and polygamy was proscribed.
Facing growing tribal anger over the imposition of military conscription, taxes, and an economic downturn, however, Emir Amanullah came under increasing pressure. Though he crushed a revolt in Khost in 1925, the pro-women reforms became the pretext for his being forced into exile.
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Tentative progress
King Zahir Shah’s long reign from 1933 to 1973 saw him move cautiously on social issues, careful of the consequences of handing clerics and tribes emotional issues on which to oppose his regime. Women teachers, nurses, and doctors, however, began quietly emerging from Afghan educational institutions in the 1940s. Kabul University set faculties of medicine, sciences, and humanities exclusively for women students.
King Zahir Shah was deposed by his cousin, former Prime Minister Mohammad Daud Khan, who set up a one-party republic. The new republic, however, continued to expand education for women. In 1959, the wives of Daud Khan and other important government officials appeared unveiled on the viewing stand at the independence day ceremonies—making clear they were committed to transforming the gender relationship.
Leaders supported by Pakistan, like the Islamists Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Ahmad Shah Massoud, and Burhanuddin Rabbani, made these social changes a centrepiece of their resistance to the regime. Kabul and other cities, anthropologist Julie Billaud writes, “were perceived to be the centres of ‘sin’ and ‘vice’ precisely because of the high visibility of educated, emancipated urban women”.
In the decades of jihad that followed, two cities on either side of the Durand Line emerged as models for women in Afghanistan. In Kabul, inspired by Soviet socialism, women occupied increasingly public roles, with few restrictions on their attire or mores.
In the jihadist-run camps around Peshawar, though, Pakistani military ruler General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq’s Islamist conception of the role of women was ruthlessly imposed. In 1989, psychologist VM Moghadam records that orders were issued for women “not to wear perfume, noisy bangles or Western clothes. Veils had to cover the body at all times and clothes were not to be made of material which was soft or which rustled…Women were not to walk in the middle of the street or swing their hips, they were not to talk, laugh, or joke with strangers or foreigners.”
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Birth of dystopia
Even though it has become commonplace to attribute the gender apartheid in Afghanistan to its tribal backwardness, the truth is more complex. For much of the 20th century, the country’s leaders made the same complex accommodations with tradition that modernising nationalists engaged in across the region. Left alone, the Afghanistan that had begun to emerge in the 1970s would more likely than not have developed into a very different kind of country for women as greater numbers flowed into the city—flawed, violent, patriarchal, but with some hard-won and meaningful gains.
Afghanistan was not, however, left alone. The worst kinds of Islamist reactionaries were empowered by the intelligence services of half a dozen nations led by the United States, unravelling the fragile social gains of a century.
Today, after a two-decade war that was marketed as laying the foundations for a new Afghanistan, its women have been betrayed again. Their most basic human rights just don’t matter enough. The erasure of the rights of an entire population will rank as one of the worst crimes of our time.
Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. He tweets @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Prasanna Bachchhav)