By Jim Taylor
21 April, 2009
Sometimes it takes an unconnected event, somewhere else, to make things clear.
For years, I used a single-lens-reflex camera whose focussing screen broke the image up into fragments -- until I rotated the lens and suddenly everything snapped into focus.
That's the effect that Sitara Achakzai's death had for me.
Achakzai was a female Afghan politician. That's not as rare a creature as you might think – the Afghan parliament had 27 female members, a higher proportion than Canada.
Those 27 women all went into politics because they saw signs of hope after NATO routed the Taliban. A new constitution supposedly guaranteed equal rights for women.
Those signs of hope are fading fast.
In March, Afghan president Hamid Karzai signed into law a bill that severely restricts the rights of Shiite women.
They are now subject to Sharia law. They can be married off as young as nine. They cannot hold jobs outside the home without the husband's permission. They cannot withhold sex, except during illness and menstruation. Critics call this provision the right of a husband to rape.
Murders and assaults
Meanwhile, largely unnoticed by the western media, Afghan women have come under more direct attack.
Another female politician, Malalai Joya, has lived in hiding for the last five years, never spending more than 24 hours in the same place. Her life has been in danger since she condemned the warlords who have profited hugely from the arms and drug trade.
Another parliamentarian stood up and demanded that she be taken outside and raped.
Policewoman Malalai Kakar was murdered. So was the head of Kandahar province's women's affairs department, Safia Amajan. Acid was sprayed in the faces of a group of Kandahar schoolgirls for their "crime" of attending classes.
And last week, Sitara Achakzai was gunned down at the door of her house, by four men who rode off on motorcycles.
Achakzai was a German citizen, with a mother and sister living in Canada. She had fled from Afghanistan during Taliban rule, but returned in 2004 to work for women's rights. On International Women's Day, she led a national sit-in of 11,000 Afghan women, in seven provinces.
When the news of her assassination reached Canada, Canadians expressed shock and horror. Was this what 117 Canadian soldiers had died to defend? A headline in the Toronto Star asked, "Is it time to give up on Afghanistan?"
Bellwether for societal change
As I read these stories, I recognized how battle lines have been drawn in our modern world. Women's rights are visible evidence of our civilization's conversion experience.
My mother's generation struggled to gain the right to vote, the right to be recognized as legal persons. My wife's generation fought for admission to professions other than nursing and teaching. My daughter's generation has tried to crack the glass ceiling that limits access to boardrooms and senior management.
That's how recent our change has been. Even though it is not yet universally accepted, it would be unthinkable for our society to retreat to the days when women were mere chattels, the property of their fathers or husbands.
We now expect other nations to conform. If they're going to trade with us, get aid from us, or rely on our military protection, they must meet our standards.
Understandably, they feel threatened.
So did I, when affirmative action hit workplaces and universities in the 1970s. I considered it discrimination -- against me. When I first encountered the issue of inclusive language, I ridiculed it.
It took my friend and publishing partner Ralph Milton to convince me that male-dominated imagery was simply wrong. And once converted, I could not go back. As an editor, I required all authors to use inclusive language, period. If they didn't, I rejected their manuscript.
Beyond retreat
Similarly, having accepted the principle of equality, the western world cannot backtrack. It cannot accept a law that treats women -- in the words of Fatima Husseini, 26, one of about 300 women who dared march in protest of Karzai's new law -- "as a kind of property, to be used by the man in any way that he wants."
Feminism opened our eyes. Not just about Afghanistan. About sweat shops in Bangladesh, sex tourism in Thailand, cocoa slavery in West Africa – wherever one class of people are systemically oppressed, repressed, or exploited by and for another class.
It continues to challenge 20 centuries of male domination in the Roman Catholic Church.
It has even affected the way we read sacred scriptures, the authority for fundamentalists in any religion – especially Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. Through a feminist lens, the Bible is incurably patriarchal. It is all about men's conquests, triumphs, failures, insights...
You can count the female heroines on the fingers of one hand; other women are typically unnamed, treated as accessories to the male story, or treated as villains.
Once you rip off the veil of male bias, you can never read scripture the same way again. Nor can you view the world the same way again.
Jim Taylor, a retired journalist with 50 years experience in communications, still writes two columns each week. For an e-mail subscription, write him at jimt@quixotic.ca
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