Perceptions
Painting Coal Black
Photo: Star File
A Taliban leader, Adnan Rasheed, recently wrote a letter to Malala Yousafzai not apologising for shooting an unarmed, female child in the head, but accusing her of a 'smear campaign' against them. They claimed Malala was tarnishing the Taliban’s image in the international arena. I wonder which image the Taliban was referring to – of shooting unarmed people or burning schools? Perhaps these acts are legal in the Talibani books. As far as my basic understanding of Islam goes, I have never heard of any Surahs which advocated the shooting of unarmed minor children or blowing up educational institutes. Rather as a child, I heard a Hadith in which Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) advised us 'to go to the faraway land of China for education'. It did not say that only men should go to China for education or after reaching China, that they should burn down non-Muslim educational institutions there. Perhaps the Talibani version of the Hadith does.
While Rasheed wrote a letter to Malala defending their action, leaders of Hefazate Islam are publishing statements in newspapers, the very media they accuse of running smear campaigns, defending their leader Shah Ahmed Shafi's sermon against women. They say Shafi's sermon is meant for rural people not the urban educated mass; as if it is ok to tell the impoverished villagers not to send their daughters to school and work places, so that they might bring home food to eat. Perhaps the Hefazat has a rationale behind their argument. If the rural population becomes educated and comes out of poverty, they might not listen to such nonsensical sermons or send their children to seminaries, where Hefazat can turn them into robotic zealots, who can be used in their processions and rallies against the 'atheists'.
According to Hefazat, Shafi is not against women's education or career. He just wants them to go to Islamic educational institutes or Sharia approved work places as the existing ones are infected with Western values and ideas. The same values and ideas which according to a World Bank report reduced poverty of the country, improved the health of its people, and reduced mother and child mortality. Hefazat might argue that these achievements are not real since the evaluation has been made by 'ungodly Westerners'.
Let us, for argument's sake, discard the World Bank's report about Bangladesh's progress and say people have not come out of poverty in reality. If that is so, I wonder why Arati, Rehana, Lovely and families of hundreds of other female garments workers say they have been thrown again into the clutches of poverty since their earning members, females, lost their lives or limbs in the Rana Plaza collapse. Mind you, all of these women had come to the city from far away villages and most did not want to go back despite their fear of working in cities with buildings all around. “What would I go back to, sister? Back home we don't have any land to cultivate,” one of the victims had told me. Most female garment workers belong to families of landless or marginalised farmers. They did not come to the city for fun. If not garments the other choice they had was to work in houses as domestic workers. Interestingly, in Shafi's sermon he did not vilify maids who live almost like slaves in houses and often suffer physical and sexual harassment at the hands of their employers. Neither did he say anything about those climate change victims, the displaced rural women who are forced to work as floating prostitutes in the city streets.
The first group, to Shafi's consolation, stays within the walls of houses, dusts furniture and looks after the male child of their employers. Though they earn, unlike garment factory female workers, they do not live independently or dare to have a say in their families. The second group begs in the morning and at night earns through the century old trade and hardly makes enough to have a say in family affairs.
It is hunger that changes society not religion. It was hunger that turned men into settlers from hunter-gathers, led them to different innovations to make life easy. Religion comes in to bring a balance, some discipline in the hunger games. As far as I know, Islam, Judaism and Christianity came to emancipate the oppressed, ensure equal rights for all, not to force people or a certain group or community into poverty. The Talibani economics, which forced women to give up their work and confined women to their homes, did not pull out Afghanistan from the shackles of poverty. Neither did it save women from violence. But of course, if the Taliban or Hefazat opine that men have the right to beat, rape and murder their wives, who according to Shafi should stay within the four walls of their homes like queens, then there is no point of trying to raise an argument. I wonder how many women in Afghanistan would claim that they lived like queens during the Talibani regime. But of course, if the Afghani women say otherwise, they will be accused by the Talibans of carrying out a 'smear campaign'.
The writer is a reporter of The Daily Star.
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