In the wake of the attack that wreaked so much human destruction in New York on September 11, the U.S. has undertaken military action in Afghanistan as part of the strategy to defeat the El Qaeda terrorist network. The current war effort is waged against virulently patriarchal opponents. Yet it appears that in this war and in the possible reconstruction of a new government in Afghanistan, the lives Afghan women is to be a secondary consideration. Feminists must challenge the current administration to re-examine its policies affecting women’s status both at home and in Afghanistan. In the wake of the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, feminists around the world appealed to the UN and national governments to do more in opposing the defeating the Taliban. The refugee feminist organization, RAWA, in responding to the UN sanctions against the Taliban, stated that these measures were not sufficient, and asked that the UN and the U.S. “disarm the Taliban” and “try the Taliban and Jihadis…as war criminals.” Despite this outcry, our own government’s perspective on the Taliban rulers was, until the September 11 terrorist attack: “live and let live.”
In the current military action in Afghanistan, the U.S. seems to be making every effort to aim at military rather than civilian targets. But the history of war instructs us that any war fought within a country is certain to bear down hardest upon its least defended members, often the poor, the elderly, and women and children.
In Afghanistan, these innocent lives will indeed be lost in vain, if the U.S. participates in building a coalition government that will continue to ignore the issue of women’s rights. A new government in Afghanistan must result in an actual improvement in the climate of terrorism. The new government must be willing to abide by all UN resolutions, including those affecting the status of women and children, and the human rights of all citizens. The input of women’s nongovernmental organizations such as RAWA must be a part of the negotiation and formation of a reconstructed government. The future status of women in Afghanistan and other repressive regimes must be on our foreign policy agenda, and here at home, the anti-feminist agenda of fundamentalism must be opposed.
In 1990 in the prelude of the Persian Gulf War, the New York Times featured a photo of President George Bush and the Sheik of Saudi Arabia experiencing a moment of shared hilarity during the former President’s pre-war visit. The great disparity in the status of women within their two nations clearly presented no barrier to the “male bonding” of these two leaders. The Saudi regime has fostered a fundamentalist vision of Islam and a government that was and is repressive to women.
Less than a decade earlier, President Reagan provided crucial and largely benign support to Osama Bin Ladin and other Islamic militants fighting the Russians. The fundamentalist Islamic beliefs of the military and social organization that was to become the Taliban government were not a cause for second thought in Reagan’s unqualified support of the Afghan front.
In the present, it is clear that even to some liberals in the United States, the status of women is expendable in the arena of international politics. The liberally inspired series, West Wing, in a program broadcast after the September 11 attack, featured a scene in which the White House Chief of Staff apologizes to an Arab man for having earlier said that Saudi Arabian women should be allowed to drive. The de facto message was that while human rights are considered universal, woman’s rights are culturally relative. While fanatical fundamentalism is now recognized as a threat to modern democracies, another fact is largely unrecognized by our political leaders: whether associated with Christian, Islamic or other religions, fundamentalist movements are universally anti-feminist.
Yet it is no coincidence that the social organization of terrorism is also the social organization of misogyny. In cross-national studies, the status of women has been linked to the ability of women to control birth and in turn, to economic progress. A subordinate status accorded to women, and spiraling birth rates are both prevalent in regions of poverty and instability. The lack of reproductive and economic choices for women is pandemic in just those areas where terrorism emerges. In areas such as Pakistan and Afghanistan where fanatical Islam is festers, up to 65 percent of the population is under the age of 25.
A pillar of fundamentalist religious belief is the puritan notion that women are defined by their sexuality, and as sexual beings cannot lead autonomous lives. Opposition to a woman’s control of her reproduction and a woman’s access to public life is a common denominator of fundamentalist movements. Drawing on Scripture for validation, fundamentalism claims that women’s subjugation is a necessity in defending the purity of women and the sanctity of human life.
But when put into practice, fundamentalist notions result not in purity but in tyranny. Women are denied the ability to control reproduction either through abstinence or intervention. As household captives, women are not in a position to enforce sexual relations. In a social climate in which the unfertilized ovum or the fetus is accorded rights above the needs of the living woman and her family, women in fundamentalist regions cannot control reproduction through artificial means either. The result is further lowering of women’s status as well cheapening the value of human life. In an article appearing last week in the New York Times Magazine, an impoverished Pakistani woman is quoted as saying that she has six sons and is willing to sacrifice all of their lives for the sake of the Jihad. One wonders how many children in total this woman has, and whether if she had only one son she so willingly relinquish his life to Jihad.
Fundamentalist religion damages men as well. In separating the domestic from the public sphere, and advocating superior economic and social privileges for men, fundamentalism creates a climate in which some men remove themselves completely from the experiences of domesticity and become drawn into a psychology of male supremacy and militarism. This in turn brings about a propensity for violence, suicidal acts, and terrorism, like that unleashed on September 11.
America’s homegrown brand of terror has resulted in several major incidents of loss of life of innocent people. Right-wing vigilante violence is deeply embedded in Christian fundamentalism. The recent round of white powder letters sent to abortion clinics across the country, whether or not they were hoaxes, are evidence of the antifeminist stance of terrorists. The Bush administration is on friendly terms with domestic fundamentalists. Almost the very first policy action of the Bush administration was to cut off funds to international organizations providing birth control education and denying to women around the world a limited source of assistance that had been available to control reproduction. This U.S. sanction on international birth control was enacted as a direct political appeasement to the right wing religious movement. American women were unaffected by this policy, yet in the future appointment of a Supreme Court Justice committed to the “right-to-life,” President Bush may preside over the demise of Roe v. Wade. When a right wing minister called the September 11 attack an act of God’s vengeance upon America because of its toleration of lesbians and gays, President Bush barely raised an admonishing finger.
It is time for our political leadership to understand that the rights of women to control her reproduction and to lead public lives have been critical to the advance of modern civilization. Women’s rights need to be not only the agenda of an advanced democracy, but should lead the agenda.
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