Here Are the Muslim Feminist Voices, Mr. Rushdie!

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Harpreet:

What about the Real Khilafa group, the one that sent out a letter about converting Sikh girls. Is that even an actual group or is it British Nationalists creating the trouble. I read the letter and it really made me mad, but when I thought about it, it just seemed way too out there to be real.

Mr H.A.,

General Sohaila Siddiq`s comments are better put in perspective when understood as one of many viewpoints. Gen. Siddiq is correct in that many non Muslim countries view hejabs and burqas as an extreme manifestation of an archaic interpretation of Islam and tend to overlook immediate crises of food, medicine, shelter and safety.

Having said that, I am sure that there are many Afghani women, professional, skilled and unskilled, who have difering opinions on the significance of the burqa. I read an article in a moderate, mainstream newspaper that interviewed an Afghani radio journalist who described her burqa as `a movable prison`. The article also noted that most Afghani women are too afraid to abandon wearing burqas; the situation was likened to a prison door left opened, but the prisoner unable to walk through it. These metaphors were chosen by the Afghani women who have had to live in Afghanistan.

Ideally, each woman should be able to decide in which manner she chooses to cover herself, and is safe doing so.Whether or not the burqa has been around before the taliban is less relevant than what interpretations these women choose now. As for the men in Afghanistan, as elsewhere, should stay out of it.

regards

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``Art for Art`s sake``

That is to say, as long as one can call it art, all are and eveyone is, fair game. You can abuse them, malign them, disrespect them, hurl on them your worldview - take a giant dump on their sensibilities - because, it is not religion that is sacred, it is art. The artist is the prophet, and so if he or she should trash your tradition or sensibility - it`s OK.

It is part of the ``non-judgmental`` frame of mind - as if that in itself is not a judgement. Non-judgemental seems to have become an anchor for those who seem not to be able to anchor themselves in any kind of values: today this is OK, next minute something else, it`s opposite is also Ok - sure symptoms of unrestrained aestheticism.

Even as there is a general acknowledgement that this is a failed, exhausted movement in the land of it`s birth - in pretensious corners of the world, among unreasoning minds, it is set to devastate cultures.

Culture is the vessel morality - what is morality, if not reason and restraint????

A sad farewell to former Beatle George Harrison.

Rest in peace.

Ras

hamidm: During the one full day that I have spent in my life in India (hope to improve on that some day), I saw a couple of beautiful pieces of inlaid work with the faces of Hindu gods in one of the hotel shops. One was Ganesh (the elephant god) and the other was a really nice looking female god whose name I keep forgetting.

In the fine tradition of muslim invaders throughout history, I decided to fight idolatary by taking the lady god off the shelf (after paying for it, unlike the invaders) and take it away so there would be one less idol for these people to worship. The lady god now graces the living room, occupying a place of honor, along with a laughing Buddha, a stern-faced Mayan god and across the wall from the picture of an ancient Egyptian god, Anubis, the jackal headed chap with the body of a man. Moral: We dont worship idols, but we can still appreciate the love and the meaning they have held for people through the ages.

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re: 284 on Benazir

I think she`s plain psycho - baigharat type of words are not enough for this woman.

I know true muslim women are the most beutiful creature made by god inside & outside.

I also know Salman rushdie is like a wolve in sheeps clothing of disbelieveing believer muslim.The ultimate doubting Tom of Mcauleys Child.

To bring a muslim case or womens case with him as legal representative is to choose the wrong lawyer ,in the wrong jurisdiction & god help the poor client!

http://www.outlookindia.com/full.asp?fodname=20011127&fname=womenrushdie&sid=1&pn=3

Reply Urstruly

A RESOUNDING SLAP ON THE FACE OF HILLARY CLINTON as well as on the backward(``liberal``),munafique(``secular``),Mazdakee(``socialist``) and kanjarised(``modern``)westernised looseies.

__________________________________________________

WEDNESDAY NOVEMBER 28 2001



West`s feminists under fire from female general



FROM STEPHEN FARRELL IN KABUL



THE general leans forward in the gathering gloom, her eyes glinting with anger, and delivers a surprise attack on an unexpected foreign enemy.

Not the Soviet Union for invading Afghanistan, nor the Americans still bombing her country. Not the Pakistani-backed Taleban, nor yet their Arab legions, whose Wahhabi fundamentalism fuelled much of the regime’s misogyny.

Instead General Suhaila Siddiq, 60, sighs with exasperation at Western feminists and their obsession with the burka, the all-enveloping veil whose forcible use symbolised for many outsiders the Taleban’s oppressive rule.

“The first priority should be given to education, primary school facilities, the economy and reconstruction of the country but the West concentrates on the burka and whether the policies of the Taleban are better or worse than other regimes,” she says dismissively. “Let these things be decided by history.”

She believes that the burka, which was worn long before the Taleban and still is by most women around Kabul, is not the battlefield upon which to fight their war.

General Siddiq is Afghanistan’s only woman general, a surgeon, hospital director and heroine to a generation of young women who remained in the country. Born in Kandahar the daughter of a powerful regional governor, she is that rare thing: an Afghan Pashtun who is not comfortable speaking her own language and prefers Persian, historically the language of the Kabul elite.

Now head of the Women and Children’s Hospital in Kabul, she is scornful of exiled Afghan women’s rights campaigners and Western feminists who champion their agenda. Her most withering comments are reserved for such vaunted women’s champions as Emma Bonino, the former EU Commissioner, who brought the wrath of the Taleban down on Afghan women when a CNN crew accompanying her filmed women patients in Kabul in 1997.

Of Hillary Clinton, another supposed advocate, she simply says: “She cannot defend her own rights against her husband. How can she defend the rights of my country?” At the 400-bed hospital in Kabul, where she now heads a separate women’s section, her colleagues speak reverentially of the woman who took on the Taleban on their own ground.

“General Siddiq, General Siddiq,” repeated nine times, was the universal answer from women medical students asked to name the person they most admired in the world.

urstruly 289

That is good. We disagree on religious interpretation but at least you are not in the company of 12 headed studbaker and ali1. These perverts wont respect even their mothers.

Zahra

Kindly return if you want. If Zafar wants you here, I have not any objection. :-)

Ras Siddiqi

How do you reconcile being a journalist with your rampant nationalism?

A journalist is supposed to stand apart, dissect society, point out the evils of existing ideologies.

Can you really call yourself a journalist when you are so obviously trapped by narrow nationalisms?

Art must be appreciated for Art`s sake. It is foolish to promote Junoon simply because you share their Pakistani nationality.

This is petty thinking indeed. It is sad to see Music being politicized.

Dr Ali Akbar Poonawala

Jammu, India.

OH OH, a fatwa from mullah urstruly. And pray, oh wannabe bearded one, how exactly does one respect women...by giving them ``special previlages`` [sic]and forcing them under purdah, forcing them to walk slowly without making a noise, severely restriciting their right to education and a career, and making them one of four wives?

Luke Harding in Mazar-i-Sharif

Thursday November 29, 2001

The Guardian

http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0%2C3604%2C608657%2C00.html

There can be few episodes in Afghanistan`s history where so many people have died such a futile death. The first Taliban body lay sprawled in a ditch next to the front gateway of the 19th century fort yesterday. After a short walk through an avenue of splintered pines and outbuildings full of bullet holes, there were more bodies.

The blackened and shot-up remains of mini-vans and a Red Cross vehicle sat in the gravel car park. Around a corner, it got worse. In the main courtyard of the small citadel that served as a prison for Taliban fighters - who decided to stage an insurrection on Sunday that turned into their last stand - some 40 foreign volunteers lay dead in the dust.

Few of the castle`s soldiers showed much pity for their dead Taliban adversaries, about 400 of whom had been taken to the fort on the muddy outskirts of Mazar-i-Sharif after surrendering to Northern Alliance forces in Kunduz at the weekend.

I watched as one soldier gingerly eased the trainers off a Taliban corpse; by early afternoon there were few pairs of shoes left. Other soldiers looted the armoury and helped themselves to dozens of second world war rifles.

``We don`t think the Pakistanis should have come here. We would be delighted if America dropped its bombs on Pakistan next,`` Anamraj, a plainclothes policeman said, wandering among the ruins beneath the high mud battlements.

``If we had allowed the Taliban to surrender they would simply have started fighting again. We had no alternative but to kill them.``

Several had their hands tied behind the back. They had been shot before they had been able to take cover. Why, I wondered, had they had been executed?

``Many of them were concealing grenades. They could explode them and kill us,`` one soldier said. ``We are sorry that they were killed, because they were Muslims. But you also have to remember that they were terrorists.``

In the stable area, fires still smouldered. The bodies of 20 grinning horses lay bloating in the dirt. One had survived; it rolled on the ground, its leg broken.

Against a wall, fin-tailed rockets had been piled neatly. Next to the shattered remains of what was once the kitchen, a rocket lay mounted on a tripod. It was here, hidden among sylvan avenues of pine, that the Taliban prisoners had made their final stand.

There were few clues as to why the foreign volunteers who rioted in the Qala-i- Jhangi citadel on Sunday had refused to give up. But fluttering amid the pinecones and the bombed-out remains of a house where the Taliban had been sheltering in the compound, were several Koranic primers written in Arabic.

They offered advice on how to pray; how to behave in the mosque; and the promise of a better life in eternity. In short, they offered certainty. ``Trust in Islam and there will be life after death,`` one encouraging verse read. It was clear enough that the Taliban volunteers had been alternately reading the Koran and lobbing mortars at the enemies who surrounded and finally engulfed them.

The uprising was apparently provoked by the sight of two CIA agents who entered the compound to look for al-Qaida men, the core loyalists of Osama bin Laden. The CIA have been liaising closely with the local Uzbek strongman, General Rashid Dostam, over the treatment of prisoners, but its two operatives had apparently failed on entering the fort to observe the first rule of espionage: keep a low profile.

The fighters had wanted martyrdom; and after a barbarous four-day battle almost all of them had got it. Everything seemed to be over yesterday morning. But, incredibly, two Taliban turned out still to be alive at 9am.

The pair, almost certainly Pakistanis, had hidden in the deep basement of a military classroom. When a government soldier peered down the stairs early yesterday, they shot him in the hand.

``They are hungry and they are thirsty. But they are still fighting,`` one solider, Mohammad Asif, confirmed. ``We listened and they were speaking to each other in Urdu. We couldn`t understand what they were saying.`` He added: ``They are speaking right now. We are trying to kill them.``

Over the next three hours, I watched from the battlements as government troops came up with increasingly inge nious strategies to finish the pair off. They poured oil into the building and set light to it. They rolled grenades down the stairs. They fired shots every few minutes: as a reminder, just in case they had forgotten, that death was very near indeed.

Finally at 12.30pm a genial commander, Din Mohammed, manoeuvred a 6ft rocket into a drainage chute that led directly to the subterranean hideout. The rocket fizzed orange. Then it exploded, sending a furious back-blast of dust into the trees. There was a tomb-like silence.

``We are certain that they are dead. But we will explode a few more rockets just to be sure,`` Din Mohammed said.

Beyond the gazebo, next to where the Taliban had set up a makeshift mortar factory, were the corpses of several well-off Arab volunteers.

Unlike their Pakistani counterparts, dressed in flimsy salwar kameezes, the Arabs wore expensive fleece jackets and trousers. One Talib corpse sported a San Francisco 49ers football sweatshirt; another a zip-up Dolce &Gabbana top.

Osama bin Laden`s fighters may have rejected the west`s relativist ideology, but not its fashions. Concealed under their outer garments, however, many of the dead Taliban fighters were wearing combat fatigues. After a few hours it was hard to take it all in.

The dead turned up everywhere: in dense thickets of willows and autumnal poplars; in waterlogged ditches; and in storage rooms piled with ammunition boxes. Some had been crushed by tanks; others, covered in dust - with their hands flung up as if in astonishment. It was a death scene that Dante or Bosch might have conjured up.

Sitting on the balcony of his wrecked headquarters, Gen Dostam yesterday said he had lost 40 men in the battle, including three of his top commanders. Another 200 had been wounded. ``I`m very upset that my commanders had been killed,`` he said. ``They all had children and families.``

``We tried to treat the Taliban humanely. We gave them a chance to wash and to pray. But they attacked us. We could have tied their hands and legs but we didn`t,`` he lamented.

The Taliban commander who had brokered the foreign fighters` surrender from Kunduz, MullahFaizal, turned up yesterday to survey the damage. It is still not clear whether he had tricked the men into surrendering, or whether they had genuinely wanted to give up their weapons, only later to change their minds.

As Red Cross workers armed with masks and stretchers began carrying off the dead, it became clear that perhaps fewer Taliban had died than was previously assumed. The Red Cross yesterday cleared away 118 bodies, rolling them into a tractor-pulled cart before dumping them in a mass grave. Many others have yet to be dug out of buildings pulverised by American missiles.

But the body count seems lower than the 400 prisoners who arrived at the Qala-i-Jhangi last Saturday afternoon. In the confusion that broke out after several prisoners overpowered their guards and grabbed their weapons, several Taliban volunteers may have slithered down the castle`s precipitous outer walls and escaped across the fields.

There was no sign yesterday of the British SAS and American Special Forces, for whom this operation can scarcely be counted a triumph. Before the revolt began, the theory was that all the prisoners would be treated according to international law.

Instead there was an avalanche of death from the sky. Walking away from the compound, the smell of death mixed with dust hung in the air. The minah birds were swooping among the pine trees. I washed my hands with a bottle of water, but the smell lingered.