Good Muslim or Bad Muslim? Ask the women

Amit Sengupta, Delhi, Hardnews

So what would Hillary Clinton and Richard Holbrooke say to the underground documentary truth shot on a risky cellphone in Swat where the Taliban’s unique interpretation of Sharia is law? Good Taliban or bad Taliban?

And, what kind of religion is this particular version on clandestine film-asks Hardnews.

Witness this ghastly public spectacle: A girl in black burqa and pink pants (salwar?) is pinned down on the ground by men. One holds her legs. The other holds her head and hands, perhaps shoulders too. Another commands that she be pinned down properly. A crowd of men are watching this grotesque show, as accomplices, believers and ‘subjects’. And, the girl is screaming as she is whipped on her buttocks by another man. With every whip of the 34 lashes, which is her punishment under some brutish reinterpretation of the Taliban law, she screams, in abject pain, again and again.

In this utter degradation of a woman, is the collective degradation of all women in Pakistan, in the sub-continent, in West Asia and across the world. It is a collective degradation of every norm of a civilised society of human beings, where men and women must learn to live equally, in a shared space. This is total and final condemnation of the female identity, celebrated by retrograde macho barbarians of the Taliban, neither beast nor human, bereft of any god or religion or prophet, more like mindless savages with neither feelings nor knowledge systems nor a social contract or human sensibility. So, what kind of Taliban is this male spectacle of ghastly, sexist, perverse, legitimate criminality: good Islam ?

In many ways it is like the gang rape of a woman in Pakistan’s feudal, patriarchal interiors by the entire male village community, for a crime she had not done. And, what was the god-damned crime? Her Gujjar brother had a relationship with a woman from another tribe/ clan higher in the social hierarchy.

Or, stoning a woman to death in a football stadium in Kabul with men in the audience baying for her blood?

And, what was the crime of the woman (girl?) in Swat? She went out with a man (boy?) who was not related to her. There are no details available. There is no trial, no evidence, no chargesheet, no hearing, no courts, no consensus, no lessons in human conduct or democracy. This is when late Benazir Bhutto’s husband is the honourable president of Pakistan: Mr Ten Per Cent. And, how is it a crime to be seen with a male in a public space, any male?

Remember that incredible film Osama by Siddiq Barmak (2003)? This ‘Osama’ had nothing to do with the infamous Osama, CIA’s original Frankenstein Monster. This Osama is a little girl who disguises as a boy to work in a bakery because her heart-broken mother is starving, and she can’t go out to work because the Taliban has banned women from public or work places, schools, fields, factories or markets, they couldn’t even walk on the streets alone, or with men who are not relatives or husbands. So, this little girl works, disguised as a boy, to help out her mother.

She is eventually caught, and guess what? The Taliban clergy declares her divine punishment under Islamic law: She is ‘sold off’ to an old, 75 plus Muslim man with flowing white beard as a slave, who takes her home (where he has kept other women in a locked room) and goes for a long hot bath, preparing for this fated night of organised juvenile rape.

So what is this, good Taliban or bad Taliban? And the practitioners of faith- Good Muslim or bad ?

Khaled Hosseini dedicates his two epic novels to the women of Afghanistan: The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns.
He dedicates them because it is women (and little children, and little boys, especially) who suffer this perverse, autocratic, barbarian Talibanic Islamic masculine sex regime the most.