Nicole said:
>What was this society like before the militia group came in? Tribal
African, Muslim (lots of Africa has Muslim influences), Christian?
It sounds like the women had a fair degree of freedom before:
another quote from the website:
Prior to the Civil War and Taliban control, especially in Kabul, the
capital, women in Afghanistan were
educated and employed: 50% of the students and 60% of the teachers at
Kabul University were women, and
70% of school teachers, 50% of civilian government workers, and 40%
of doctors in Kabul were women.
The Taliban claim to follow a pure, fundamentalist Islamic ideology,
yet the oppression they perpetrate
against women has no basis in Islam. Within Islam, women are allowed
to earn and control their own
money, and to participate in public life. The 55-member Organization
of Islamic Conference has refused to
recognize the Taliban as Afghanistan's official government. The
Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, regarded by
many as an ultraconservative, fundamentalist organization, has
denounced the Taliban's decrees.
>Do the women with children in this culture have husbands or do they
have
>children on their own? If they have husbands, I do not understand why
it
>is so vital that the women beg or work. Except in comparison to our own
>society... then we find it harder to understand.
I think the problem is that there have been various wars in that region,
so there
are a great many widows who no longer have the support of a husband.
another quote from the website:
The Taliban issued a declaration last week which states that the Taliban
will now allow impoverished
widows with no other means of income to leave their homes to work.
They must follow certain conditions
which are not completely explicit at this time. For example, these
women are to refrain from wearing
fashionable clothes, follow Islamic hejab, and dress modestly. It is
unclear as to what degree of purda (or
cover) the declaration requires. The declaration also states that
these widows should not be working in the
company of men. Married women are still forbidden to leave their
homes to work without the permission of
their husbands.
(end quote)
When topics like this came up in school, the teacher (male or female)
would usually
say something like:
"Well what they do with **their** women is their business"
and what makes me upset is that I saw **nothing wrong** with this
statement - but women
are a _majority_ of the world's population (51%) so who exactly are
"they"?
(If it was a question of what some hypothetical "they" does with "their"
slaves or something
like that, for some reason we see the problem much more clearly in that
case)
~
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