HUM105 Watch a 9mins video answer 3 short and easy question
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WomeninAfghanistan.pptxWomen in Afghanistan
Hi Everyone,
Right now we are exploring the formation of nation-states, their history, and how geopolitical relationships affect our interpersonal relationships. Over the past 17 years, we have been bombarded with very specific discourses about a very specific region of the world: the Middle East. The “War on Terror” after September 11th resulted in a narrative about the Middle East and Muslim people that essentially made the word “terrorist” synonymous with “Muslim.” That discourse has taken a very particular lens on gender.
Not only has this discourse been very harmful to Muslim people, it is also very ahistorical. So what I want to do in this lecture is take a closer look at the Middle East, and U.S. discourse on Muslim women, within the context of U.S. imperialism.
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Orientalism (Edward Said)
“Taking the late eighteenth century as a very roughly defined starting point Orientalism can be discussed and analyzed as the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient – dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating restricting, and having authority over the Orient” (Said, 1979, pg. 3).
Your reading by Andrea Smith, “Heteropatriarchy and the Three Pillars of White Supremacy,” identifies one of the pillars as “Orientalism/War.” Smith gives a brief definition of Orientalism, but I would like to provide a little more context.
Orientalism is a social theory developed by Edward Said; a literature professor at Columbia University who was born in Palestine. The term comes from his book of the same name, which looks at orientalism as a discourse to describe the Orient, or the East. In other words, it is a social construction of the East – so Asia and the Middle East.
The quote on this slide is taken from a passage in the introduction, which reads, [read directly from slide]
So, I want to bring your attention to this part in the middle, first calling it a “corporate institution” to deal with the Orient: that indicates two things: that Orientalism is structural, and that it is profitable. There is an economic interest in it.
The second thing I want to bring your attention to is this part in the middle, how Orientalism works: you take a region, or a town, or a people, or all of those things, and you talk about them. You make statements about them, describe it, you teach it, and ultimately rule over it. In other words, Orientalism is a discourse to justify Western rule over the “Orient.”
Orientalism predates the War on Terror, but it is still present in much of the discourse used to justify the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. This discourse is highly gendered and racialized, which we will focus on in this lecture.
Before you continue, I would like you to pause the lecture here and complete Exercise 5.2 on Islam in the Media. This will help you apply Said’s theory to current media portrayals of Islam and Muslim people.
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Laura Bush, Address to the Nation, 2001
Discussed the “civilized people throughout the world” and the Taliban who wants to “impose their world on the rest of us.”
Used the suffering of women and children in Afghanistan as justification for war.
“Because of our recent military gains in much of Afghanistan, women are no longer imprisoned in their homes. They can listen to music and teach their daughters without fear or punishment. The fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women” (cited in Abu-Lughod, 2013).
One of your readings for this week is by Lila Abu-Lughod, who discusses the role of cultural reductionism in her article “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?” In this article, Abu-Lughod is asking us to think critically about how we reduce complex geopolitical relationships to cultural issues, and the ways in which Western feminism reproduces racist narratives to “save” Muslim women from a patriarchal, oppressive religion. Abu-Lughod raises some important questions here, not the least of which is whether Western women are really all that liberated (something the political cartoon in your online exercise speaks to).
What she is also calling attention to is how the discourse around Muslim women and gender oppression is really an Orientalist discourse to justify a war that has nothing to do with women’s liberation. She uses Laura Bush’s Address to the Nation as an example of the kinds of discourse used and offers a pretty good explanation of it, so I won’t repeat that here.
But I am putting together some of her key points here because one thing Abu-Lughod doesn’t do is provide some important historical context. That is, she doesn’t fully explain what those complex geopolitical relationships are. That wasn’t really the point of her article, but I think it’s useful to go over since many people don’t have this background.
It is true that the burqa is required by law for women in Afghanistan. What is often overlooked is that this law is relatively recent, and was established through U.S. intervention.
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Rise of Al-Qaeda
1970s and 1980s: Cold War
April 1978: Daud Chan Mohammad is deposed and killed by army officers who supported People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA)
PDPA begins instituting various reforms but did not have a social base.
Conservative Islamic groups join forces under the name of “mujahideen (holy warriors)”
December 1979: Soviet Union enters Afghanistan to support the PDPA.
1980: CIA official reports state that they sent resources into Afghanistan to support the mujahideen
Daoud Chan Mohammed
Abdul Qadir
Nur Muhammad Taraki
So to provide that background, I want to start with the 1970s and 1980s, during the Cold War. The Cold War was a time of geopolitical tension between the United States and the Soviet Union. During this time, communism and communists were constructed as the ultimate threat to U.S. prosperity, similar to how we talk about terrorism today. The Cold War ended being being an important backdrop for the political history of Afghanistan, and the changing conditions of women within Afghanistan,
In 1978, Daud Chan Mohammad was deposed and killed by army officers who supported the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA).
The PDPA begins instituting various reforms, but because of how they seized power, did not have the social base to really cement them.
This provided an opportunity for conservative Islamic groups to join forces against the PDPA. They called themselves the “mujahideen,” which translates to “holy warriors.”
In December of 1979: Soviet Union entered Afghanistan to support the PDPA.
And CIA official reports indicate that they sent resources in 1980 to Afghanistan to support to the mujahideen. So what we are seeing here is Afghanistan being swept up in the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States. And according to CIA official reports, the Soviet Union entered Afghanistan first.
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Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security advisor to President Carter, in interview with Le Nouvel Observateur in 1998,
“According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the mujahideen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan [in] December 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise: indeed, it was July 3, 1979, that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this was going to induce a Soviet military intervention…The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter: We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war” (Frank, 1998, cited by Stabile and Kumar, 2005).
In 1998, however, that timeline gets challenged. Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was national security advisor to President Carter (president during this time) gave an interview to a French publication called Le Nouvel Observateur. During that interview, he said the following:
[Read passage]
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Adjusted Timeline
April 1978: Daud Chan Mohammed deposed and assassinated.
1978: Rise of conservative Islamic mujahideen.
July 1979: President Carter signs off on aid to mujahideen to combat the PDPA
December 1979: Soviet Union invades Afghanistan
Strategy to draw USSR into a protracted war to sow internal dissent and divert resources.
So, for an adjusted timeline:
Daud Chan Mohammed as deposed and assassinated in April 1978.
In that same year, we see the rise of the mujahideen in opposition to the PDPA.
In July of 1979, not 1980, President Carter signs off on aid to the mujahideen to combat the PDPA.
And it wasn’t until several months later that the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan.
So this was basically a strategy to pull the USSR into a proxy war so that they would deplete their resources.
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Mujahideen and U.S. Involvement
1980s: Ronald Reagan
U.S., with help of Pakistani intelligence:
Sends U.S. military weapons to mujahideen.
Sets up training camps.
Notable alumni
1989: Soviet Union is defeated and withdraws from Afghanistan
Impacts on Afghanistan
Early 1990s: Mujahideen parties begin taking power in Afghanistan, establishing religious decrees that change women’s position
1996: Taliban comes into power
Mujahideen, 1989
So now I want to give a little more background on the mujahideen and the U.S.’ relationship with them.
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This continued on into the 1980s with the election of Ronald Reagan. Reagan praises the mujahideen in the U.S. media, calling them war heroes. He is very vocal about his support for them.
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So it was during this time that the United States, with the help of Pakistani intelligence, begin:
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Sending U.S. military weapons to the mujahideen, as well as
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Setting up training camps. So we trained the mujahideen in U.S. military combat and we armed them. So remember that we’re talking about 1978 to 1989, eleven years of war. Wars that last this long devastate economies, physical infrastructure, and create a lot of instability in the region. And it was in this climate that conditions for women begin to change.
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In the early 1990s, parties within the mujahideeen begin taking power and establishing religious decrees that change women’s position.
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In 1996, one of these parties comes into power: the Taliban.
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This is important because the mujahideen have some very notable alumni, the most infamous of which is Osama bin Laden. Osama bin Laden was a member of the mujahideen and was trained and armed by our government. In fact, it was the connections he made in these training camps that would eventually allow him to form Al Qaeda.
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So in 1989, the Soviet Union is defeated and withdraws from Afghanistan, and this had some pretty devastating impacts on the country.
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Women in Afghanistan pre-1996
Up until early 1990s:
Large numbers of women participated in the workforce.
1964 Constitution ensured basic rights such as the right to vote and equal pay.
Girls in Kabul and other cities were allowed to attend school.
Half of university students were women.
Women comprised:
40 percent of doctors
70 percent of teachers
30 percent of civil servants
Most women did not wear a burqa
So I want to note a couple things here about Afghanistan before 1996.
[Read directly from slide]
The photo on the right is from an old fashion advertisement in Kabul. So although women did wear a burqa in some regions, there was diversity in how women dressed. So it wasn’t exactly uncommon to see women dressed in the kind of clothing you see on the right.
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Women in Afghanistan, post-1996
Taliban implemented four central policies:
Women were forbidden to hold jobs.
Women could not attend school until an appropriate curriculum had been developed.
Women had to wear burqas and men had to wear shalwar kameez
Women could only leave their home with male relatives and had to avoid contact with male strangers.
Implemented these changes with U.S. support
When the Taliban came into power in 1996, they implemented four central policies around women:
[Read four policies directly from slide]
What is also very important to note is that they did this with U.S. support. The United States had an interest in Afghanistan because a U.S.-based company, Unocal, wanted to construct an underground oil pipeline in the region. The U.S. government was well aware of the repressive policies being implemented, but they were okay with this because the Taliban was willing to support their economic interests.
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Ethnocentrism and Cultural Reductionism
Imperialism, not culture or religion
Ethnocentrism: Idea that one’s own group’s way of thinking, being, and acting in the world is superior to others (Sorrells, 2016)
Cultural Reductionism: Reducing complex structural issues to cultural ones.
Rhetoric of Salvation
So if we want to talk about gender oppression in the Middle East, it is important to establish some things:
First, the issues of women’s oppression in Afghanistan is an issue of imperialism, not culture or religion.
Second, much of the discourse in Western feminism and really general portrayals of the Middle East are Orientalist and Ethnocentric; it is coming from a supposed position of superiority when 1) our country’s government played a role in this situation and 2) we might not actually be all that liberated ourselves.
So when we’re talking about complex geopolitical relationships it is important avoid what’s called “cultural reductionism;” a tendency to reduce complex structural issues to cultural ones. So in this case, we take a complex history involving U.S. interference and reduce it to religious and culture issues, basically blaming Islam. This oversimplifies a complex religion and completely erases U.S. responsibility in this issue.
What’s also present here is what Abu-Lughod called a “rhetoric salvation.” Review this part of the reading and make sure you understand it. We will discuss it in class.
That concludes our lecture, so thank you and please let me know if you have any questions.
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