Barbarism is a spectator sport and barbarians feed on public participation. The video of the public flogging of a 17-year-old girl in the Swat Valley is such a telling document of an apathetic society overrun by misanthropic men. Scores of men watched as a Taliban flogger went about his task with cold and clinical efficiency. One of the two men holding the girl down kept adjusting her burqa with the fastidiousness of a fashion designer making sure his garment his fine before a fashion show.
While the Swat Valley has witnessed many such incidents and even beheadings of men who defied the Taliban’s lunatic code of conduct, this particular video has become emblematic of all that is rotten there. So much so that President Asif Ali Zardari has come under pressure to rescind the peace deal he signed with the Taliban and virtually handed over the affairs of the valley to them. There has been some feeble explanation that the incident took place before the peace accord, as if that makes it any less barbaric and as if the practice has now ceased.
The Taliban remain quite unrepentant. In fact, their spokesman so aptly named Muslim Khan said the girl was punished because she was living with her father-in-law after being divorced from her husband. "She came out of her house with another guy who was not her husband, so we must punish her. There are boundaries you cannot cross,” Khan was quoted by the Pakistani media as saying. Implicit in this comment is that since she was living with and came out of the house with her father-in-law, there was something necessarily abhorrent in their relationship. But rather than flogging the man, they chose to flog the young woman. The Taliban know that lashing a young woman in full public view establishes a benchmark for socially acceptable behavior with much greater ferocity and finality.
It is possible that the video is dated but that does not materially change anything. Such conduct remains the hallmark of the Islamic law Sharia as interpreted and enforced by the Taliban. Leading Muslims voices in India have expressed their horror and unequivocal disapproval of the practice. "I am horrified. This (incident) is a gross violation of Islamic and Quranic injunctions which teaches humanity, love, peace and magnanimity," Professor Mushirul Hasan, one of India’s most respected historians and vice chancellor of the Jamia Millia Islamia university has said. Maulana Wahiduddin Khan, another leading authority, went further and said, "This kind of treatment is neither Islamic nor human. In fact, not only is it un-Islamic and inhuman, but also satanic." It is greatly reassuring to hear such categorical rejection.
Unfortunately though, such voices have no impact on the Taliban and others who have dominated the Islamic platform for so long. Whether or not there are Quranic injunctions that allow flogging as a punishment is incidental to groups such as the Taliban who have overrun the popular debate in the Islamic world.
