Fear is their Religion Peggy Elliot speaks out against the Taliban's treatment of women in Afghanistan.
Imagine, if possible, a country where at least 97% of the female population suffers from major depression; where at least 86% of them display symptoms of significant anxiety and, the most horrifying, at least one-quarter of these women - nearly one-quarter of the entire female population - are seriously considering ending their misery by the means of suicide.
Afghanistan, a remote and treacherous land, has survived the pain and misery of war only to be taken hostage by the all-invasive control of the powerful Islamic faction, the Taliban, which now governs large sections of the country, including the capital city of Kabul. Though adjustment to the new religious order has been difficult for the entire population, it is the Afghan women who have been most brutalized by the Taliban's stranglehold.
Life in Afghanistan has always been difficult, but in recent years progress was being made in educating the population. Women held professional positions and made up a significant percentage of the work force, particularly in the government and health care fields. Families, devastated by the shattered Afghan economy, relied on the income of both husband and wife for survival.
However, the rise to power of the Taliban, a fanatical fundamentalist Moslem sect, and their harsh adherence to strict and often tyrannical religious covenants have rendered all Afghan women not only virtual prisoners in their homes, but nothing more than the meager possessions of men, whom by law they must obey and whose needs they must satisfy.
Consider, for example, you are a young wife and mother, intelligent and college educated. You worked for the government health care system and as a midwife you went into families' homes to help deliver their babies. You enjoyed your work and cared for the families you assisted. A daughter of Islam, you fulfilled your life through your dedication to your religion, your family and your work. Unfortunately, you live in Kabul, Afghanistan.
You know of other women in the world who live in progressive cultures, who have grown complacent to the existence of their own rights as women, and you realize it is difficult for an outsider to imagine the extent of degradation in which Afghan women are forced to live. You, an Islamic woman in Afghanistan, have no rights, you have no voice, you can not act in your own defence nor may you act to defend another. You may not teach, nor may your daughters go to school. You may not display pictures of women - not your mother, not your daughters - not even in your home.
The windows in your home are painted over so others do not have to look upon your face. You live in darkness, isolated from other women, dependent upon the males in the family for any food you are provided. Often there is no food at all. Having lost half their income because their wives are now forbidden to work, Afghan men can choose to feed their wives, or not; to clothe them, or not. Many, including your husband, do not.
If you must go outside your home, you must be completely draped, anonymous, invisible and under the complete control of your male authority, your "mahram" - this may be your husband, father, brother or another male family member.
Should you fall ill there is not a doctor who can treat you. Only men are now allowed to practice medicine and they are not permitted to treat women. The hospital in which women are admitted carries little in the way of medications. Afghanistan, in the throes of a desperate healthcare crisis, reserves what precious little aid is received for the men. Women die from illnesses easily treatable; die because they do not have access to the surgical procedures which would have saved them. Surgeons are men and they are forbidden to perform surgery on women. The clinics, which open their doors surreptitiously to women, do so at great risk.
For you, a woman who has no life, who is but dirt upon her dungeon floor, who sees no future worth the suffering, suicide holds out the promise of welcome release. And for an increasing number of Afghanistan's women it is the only avenue they feel offers escape from an impossible life. Yet when the decision is made, the suicide attempt is a difficult and torturous mission, as most suicides are committed by the ingestion of "caustic soda," the only poisonous material most women can readily obtain.
Three days it will take. Three days from ingesting the soda, which burns away your throat, before you die. Your children will watch you suffer, but nothing can be done. The only treatment available to save your life is at a hospital into which you, a woman, can not go. Still you will swallow the soda. And you will endure three more days of suffering, but then, at last, the suffering will end. To continue to breathe in the hell which is now Afghanistan for you, a woman, is impossible.
And so they die, these women, young and old. Their talent, intelligence, the very fibre of existence women bring to the pattern of all life is irretrievably lost from the world. There is no shrugging it off, no "life goes on." For without women, without the mothers, daughters, grandmothers, life does not, indeed, "go on."
Throughout mankind's history there have been those who have adopted the sinister creed of practicing fear and hatred by hiding their true selves within the sanctity of "religion." Safe behind their holy masks, these demons have enjoyed the freedom to terrorize without fear of reprisal; criminal behaviour in the name of religion is deemed necessary, even desirable, as it shores up particular religious beliefs.
But there exists no religion on the face of this earth, which condones slaughter, torture and the complete dissolution of human rights. However, cowards and bullies still conveniently hide behind these masks, knowing they act not truly within the laws of their religion, but by the power of their hatred.
Some day, some time, the horror that is today's Afghanistan will end as the last Afghan woman dies out. And Mohammed, despite his wisdom, can only watch in horror the evil being perpetrated in his name.
copyright © P.L. Elliot 1999
Pictures courtesy of RAWA
