Karzai Backs down on Key Elements of Law on Shiite Personal Status
The Afghan government says that it will amend a recently passed law that puts Afghanistan's Shiites under the law of their branch of Islam for personal status purposes. The law allowed marital rape and detracted from the rights of women in other ways, as well.
The government's pledge to amend the law so as to forbid marital rape misses the point. Afghanistan has a civil code on personal status, and all citizens should be under it. If the state farms out personal status law to a Shiite court, then a conservative interpretation of Shiite law (sharia) will become the de facto law of the land for Shiites. Moreover, there is the issue of the state creating the Shiites as a separate group not under national law.
Some 300 to 500 women had demonstrated in Kabul on Wednesday, drawing a larger counter-demonstration of men who support the law.
AP reports on the reaction to the women's demonstration, which included pelting them with stones.
The conservative Persian-language Afghan press dismissed the women as largely local school students joined by a few prominent outside agitators, who were challenging the authority of the Hawza or Shiite religious establishment. In fact, the demonstrators consisted of women's rights activists from all over the country.
The issue should not be construed as a couple of objectionable provisions of Shiite Islamic law, but the desirability in a democracy of having a uniform civil code for all citizens. Karzai is widely thought to have signed the bill to pander to Shiite clerics, in a bid to attract votes from the Shiite minority, some 22 percent of the population. Karzai is contesting a presidential election in August.
Updated link See for controversies about the US in Afghanistan William Astore at Tomdispatch, just out.
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posted by Juan Cole @ 4/17/2009 12:41:00 AM
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9 Comments:
What's alarming about this is that it's most certainly going to be misconstrued. By that i mean, it's going to be used for more Muslim bashing, as it was essentially used by many before the Iraq invasion (i recall when i was in school right around the whole Iraq polemic, before the invasion, how comments about how Muslims treat women and how terrible that is were spreading throughout the school like wildfire, and somehow that justified the invasion for many, or at least helped to). I can almost assure you that the fact that this was a political stunt or pandering by Karzai will hardly be mentioned and the media will instead paint Muslims, once again, as women hating loonies, and likewise, it will hardly be recalled what the mujahideen thought of women during the conflict against Russia, or that the US supported them.
US experts: Pakistan on course to become Islamist state
A growing number of US intelligence, defense and diplomatic officials have concluded that there's little hope of preventing nuclear-armed Pakistan from disintegrating into fiefdoms controlled by Islamist warlords and terrorists, posing the a greater threat to the US than Afghanistan's terrorist haven did before 9/11.
"It's a disaster in the making on the scale of the Iranian revolution," said a US intelligence official with long experience in Pakistan.
Pakistan's fragmentation into warlord-run fiefdoms that host al Qaida and other terrorist groups would have grave implications for the security of its nuclear arsenal; for the US-led effort to pacify Afghanistan; and for the security of India, the nearby oil-rich Persian Gulf and Central Asia, the US and its allies.
"Pakistan has 173 million people and 100 nuclear weapons, an army which is bigger than the American army, and the headquarters of al Qaida sitting in two-thirds of the country which the government does not control," said David Kilcullen, a retired Australian army officer, a former State Department adviser and a counterinsurgency consultant to the Obama administration.
"Pakistan isn't Afghanistan, a backward, isolated, landlocked place that outsiders get interested in about once a century," agreed the US intelligence official. "It's a developed state with a major Indian Ocean port and ties to the outside world, especially the Persian Gulf, that Afghanistan and the Taliban never had."
"The implications of this are disastrous for the US," he added. "The supply lines from Karachi to US bases in Kandahar and Kabul from the south and east will be cut, or at least they'll be less secure, and probably sooner rather than later, and that will jeopardize the mission in Afghanistan, especially now that it's getting bigger."
I’m beginning to form the opinion, perhaps mistaken, that the Afghan state is nothing but a fiction written in the west to help rationalize continuous warfare in this region. I’m beginning to see the democratically elected government of Afghanistan as a token having no writ outside its capital city, or perhaps not even outside its palace walls. Is Karzai anything more than an improvisational actor in a costume? Why are there any expectations at all about his ability to govern?
Curiously, a uniform civil code has been a part of the BJP platform for a long time. And it accuses Congress of pandering to muslims by not supporting it.
Taliban Exploit Class Rifts in Pakistan
The Taliban have advanced deeper into Pakistan by engineering a class revolt that exploits profound fissures between a small group of wealthy landlords and their landless tenants.
[David Letterman mode on]
Troubles in world politics.
So, a weak president panders to a conservative group in order to shore up an administration of doubtful legitimacy.
No, wait, Bush is no longer in office.
[David Letterman mode off.]
Who do those women hating Muslims think they are, Christians? The first "Anabaptist Republic" created in Europe was at Munster during 1532-1535. Not only were men allowed to rape their wives, it was eventually made a capital offence for a wife to refuse sex with her husband. Polygamy and marriage to children was also legalized.
The very first action of the Anabaptist mob was to break into convents and rape the nuns. Women were expected "to go forth and multiply". Those that didn't had to be dealt with harshly.
The Anabaptists also seized all money and valuables from the citizens of Munster.
Munster had been ruled by a Catholic bishop. To get rid of the Anabaptists, Catholics and Lutherans joined together to besiege the city.
To show that such interpretations of the Bible wasn't just an European thing, the Taiping Rebellion (China 1850-1864) was started by converts of American missionaries. The Taiping leaders also enacted laws for wealth expropriation, spousal rape, polygamy and child marriage.
A uniform civil code, especially in personal status law, could lead to persecution or marginalization of religious minorities, including the Shiites, or to the imposition of a de facto state religion.
Separate laws for the various religious groups is probably the best solution, perhaps modeled on India's system. Such a system need not discriminate against any one group, though it may not correspond entirely to Western norms, either.
8:10 PM, Anonymous
You repeat as a fact rightist propaganda against one of the first trials in Germany to build a more just society. The same slander was used many times - against Bolshevics as well.
In reality, reaction rulers, including Chirch' ones, were slandering their ideological foes.
So, if one wants examples of some reactionary Christian laws against women, one does not need to repeat such rubbish - just ask what it was about womens' rights in Christian Europe not so long before.
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