Why is it that historically the few have often managed to hijack and destroy aspirations of the many? This is true of countries across the world. For the purposes of this particular post, I want to talk a bit about Afghanistan.
Some of you might know that Afghanistan’s misanthropic Taliban rulers have intensified their draconian anti-women campaign by ordering an indefinite ban on university education for them. Sixteen months after they made a cakewalk entry into Kabul in the face of a disastrous U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan after nearly 20 years, Afghan women have to suffer the worst anti-women impulses of the rulers.
As pointed out by the well-respected Afghan women's rights activist, Mahbouba Seraj, the Taliban have "erased" women from her country's public life. It is heartbreaking that entire generations of girls and women are being destroyed by a bunch of men reveling in medieval prejudices and hatreds.
What I find extraordinary is that about 400,000 active Taliban members are able to ride roughshod over 40 million Afghans as if they were some trophy in a game of buzkashi. How is that one percent is able to lord over the rest with such brutal efficiency? I have long been mystified by the cruelly mesmeric hold that any such order is able to work up on the rest of the populace. Related to that is my incomprehension over why there are such few mass uprisings against an avowedly misanthropic order.
As Seraj and I discussed in my interview with her, it is instructive that the fundamentalist regime in Afghanistan's neighbor to its west, namely Iran, has been imposing some of the same draconian practices on its women. The Taliban, of course, is an extreme Sunni group while Iran's regime is a fundamentalist Shia order. Both these sects of Islam, otherwise at daggers drawn historically with stunning blood-letting between the two, are united in their misogyny.
Women always bear the worst of all religions founded by men and yet they choose to follow them. This is beyond me.