Ascent of Women (12 page)

The story of the women of Afghanistan is a blueprint for moving from centuries-old oppression to the tentative beginnings of emancipation. When I first visited that country in the spring of 1997, about six months after the Taliban had taken power, the
women told me they had no voice—they had been silenced. They said, “Ask the women of Canada to be our voice. Let the world know what has happened to us.”

They already had suffered from second-class citizenship, but when the Taliban swept into power and legislated misogyny for women with rules that threatened their health and safety, the status of women moved from oppressed to endangered. And Afghan women began to plot a way out of the dark ages for themselves. They opened clandestine schools for girls. They moved medical supplies from village to village as though they were transporting a cache of stolen diamonds. When radios and televisions were banned, they buried radios under the floors of their houses. As one woman told me, “News became as important as food.”

When the Taliban were ousted, women started to work openly for change: researching traditions and practices such as polygamy and tribal laws that were harmful to women. They forced their way into discussions about the new constitution and made sure women were included. They ran for public office and sat in the parliament holding up their flags—green for “I agree” and red for “I disagree”—and demanded that women had the right to participate in every debate.

Much has changed for women in Afghanistan. But like other places where oppression and second-class citizenship have defined the status of women, creating sustainable change requires time and tenacity.

One of the toughest objectives for women today is to eradicate the so-called cultural practices that physically harm them. Honour killing, for instance.

Scholars of Islam say honour killing has nothing to do with the Quran and that the prophet Muhammad called for an end to
it. But femicide has burgeoned recently and sent deadly tentacles into Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran, where women are stoned to death for presumed infidelity, and in the Middle East, where they are shot, choked to death and bashed over the head with slabs of cement to rid the family of some perceived stain. Honour killing has cropped up in immigrant communities in Europe and North America, in Australia and New Zealand, too, when the female children of first-generation immigrants stray from the orbit of their fathers. The way men in some tribal cultures see it, a man is the sole protector of the girl or woman, so he must have total control of her. If his control slips, he loses honour because either he failed to protect her or he failed to bring her up correctly.

This obsession with the purity of women has survived the centuries to a greater or lesser extent throughout the Middle East and parts of Asia, as well as in Brazil; honour killing is practised by Christians, Muslims and Hindus. The good news is that, today, a sisterhood of women in groups such as WLUML is defying the old order, rescuing women and keeping them in safe havens while they lobby for change. Accused of promoting promiscuity and destroying the traditional family, activists who have been challenging political, cultural and religious forces for the past decade are poised to win the culture wars. And millions of women are cheering for their success.

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On June 30, 2009, the bodies of three sisters and their father’s first wife were found in a car at the bottom of the Rideau Canal in Kingston, Ontario. The coroner declared that drowning was the cause of death. But rumours that their deaths were actually
honour killings swept across Canada. Three weeks later, on July 22, Mohammad Shafia, fifty-nine, his second wife, Tooba Mohammad Yahya, forty-two, and their eldest son, Hamed, twenty-one, were arrested and charged with first-degree murder. The family, including four surviving children, had recently immigrated to Canada from Afghanistan. Over the eighteen months that followed their arrest, Canadians tracked an investigation that held honour killing up to the light. What the evidence suggested was that duplicity, ego-driven face-saving and colossal entitlement were the forces behind the murders.

If pushing a car occupied by your three daughters and your first wife into a canal so they will drown is an act of honour, why pretend the death was an accident? If it’s all about family honour, how come it’s a secret?

The jury had to endure statements and explanations so convoluted and astounding that journalists covering the trial reported that individual jurors sometimes rolled their eyes. They heard that the Shafia daughters had been confined to the home, forbidden to wear Western-style dress, beaten for any whisper of defiance and threatened with more serious harm: treatment revealed as abhorrent in the courtroom but that had been overlooked by outsiders who bowed to the familiar specious argument that “it’s not your culture, so it’s none of your business.”

During the trial witnesses took the stand to try to explain a culture that is entrenched in blaming women and saving face, a culture that allows a father to give his underage daughter to a man three times her age, knowing she will be sexually assaulted. A culture that allows him to send his child back to a husband who has blackened her eyes and broken her arm. It is the same culture that prescribes that a woman wear black garments that absorb the
blazing heat so she will avert the eyes of men who strut about in white robes that deflect the heat. It’s a culture that creates men who can ask a daughter how she was dressed—was it modest enough?—when the rapist attacked her and then suggest that her loss of chastity is her own fault, that a man can’t help himself.

In the case of the Shafia family, the eldest girl, Zainab, had the temerity to report the physical and verbal abuse being heaped on her at home. What’s more, she dared to have a boyfriend. The second daughter, Sahar, also reported family abuse to the authorities. The youngest daughter, Geeti, paid the price simply for being with her sisters that night. The first wife, Rona Amir Mohammad, was also seen as expendable that June in 2009 when the family set off on what was billed as a two-day holiday to Niagara Falls, Ontario. They’d taken two vehicles—a Nissan that the girls and their father’s first wife were driving and a Lexus carrying Mohammad Shafia, Tooba, and Hamed. In what Mohammad Shafia at first called a terrible accident, the vehicle that the girls and Rona were in wound up at the bottom of the Rideau Canal in Kingston.

The police investigating the scene soon suspected that the Nissan had been bumped into the canal by the Lexus and got warrants for wiretaps on conversations between the three suspects. Those conversations were profoundly incriminating. For example, Mr. Shafia is heard telling Tooba and their son, “May the Devil shit on their graves.” When asked in court to explain what he meant, he replied, “The Devil would check their graves and then God would decide their fate.”

The court also heard his wiretapped comments to Tooba: “Were they to come back to life I would do the same thing a hundred times.” But when asked on the stand if he knew how the
girls and Rona wound up in the water, he replied, “I didn’t know anything [about the accident] until the eighteenth of July when they showed us where the car went in.” That was nineteen days after the girls and Rona had drowned.

During the trial, there was plenty of public discussion particularly in online commentaries about the use of the words
honour killing
versus
murder
. Many wondered how honour killing could be seen as a cultural phenomenon rather than an act of derangement. Invariably those who defend honour killing and other assaults on women and girls are quick to challenge a critic with “this is our culture, our religion; it’s none of your business.” But when misogyny is passed off as “our way,” when women and girls are denied an education, denied access to health care, exposed to daily rations of violence, even killed, then surely it is the obligation of everyone to speak out, to insist that what is happening here is not cultural but criminal.

The philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote, “Evil thrives on apathy and cannot exist without it, hence apathy is evil.” She argued, further, that when injustice encounters inertia it uses that passivity exactly as though it was approval; in the absence of protest, evil is nourished and can flourish. People who are next-door neighbours or United Nations observers are beginning to shed the “not my business” mantra and are bringing the truth to light. In country after country, women are speaking up; their neighbours, colleagues and international partners are echoing their call for justice and change. The days of malignant presumptions about cultural practices being no one else’s business are being challenged, and the human rights argument is beginning to trump the influence of the tribal past.

On January 29, 2012, the jury in the Shafia trial returned a
guilty verdict. Looking straight at the three convicted murderers, Judge Robert Maranger of the Ontario Superior Court told the courtroom, “It is difficult to conceive of a more despicable, more heinous crime. The apparent reason behind these cold-blooded shameful murders was that the four completely innocent victims offended your completely twisted concept of honour … that has absolutely no place in any civilized society.”

He sentenced the Shafias to life in prison with no chance of parole for twenty-five years. If there is a legacy for the four innocents—Zainab, Sahar, Geeti and Rona—let it be the public airing and censure of shameful traditions.

Honour killing is usually tied to public “knowing”—the family’s need to take action to save face. If the “crime”—which can be anything connected to a girl’s or woman’s sexuality, even talking to a man she’s not related to—is not disclosed, there’s less pressure to take action. But if everyone in the village knows that a girl was walking with a boy who was not her brother, taking that girl’s life becomes the tool to silence the gossips and rescue the family’s honour. If a man wants to get rid of his wife because she’s sick or he’s tired of her, all he has to do is claim that he saw her with another man. He doesn’t require witnesses. With preserving his honour as his shield, he can crush an inconvenient wife’s skull, shoot her, drop her down a well or slit her throat. She’ll be dead. He’ll have saved his honour.

Curiously, although honour killing is claimed as a cultural right, those who practice it invariably attempt to cover it up with a tapestry of lies and protestations of innocence. I once interviewed the chief coroner for the Palestinian Authority in East Jerusalem, Dr. Jalal Aljabri, who said he sees plenty of corpses that have all the marks of honour killing, but he hardly ever sees
a case in which honour killing is the official cause of death. “In our culture, everybody knows but nobody says. I get cases that say the cause of death is a firearm injury. I know inside what really happened, but what can I do? I sign the certificate and say, ‘Bye-bye; that’s it.’ ”

And this is indeed the point—a cowardly response to a vile act. Dr. Jalal Aljabri exemplifies the “enlightened” Palestinian man. Ask him about the price that women sometimes pay for safeguarding the family’s name, and he says he’s strongly against honour killing. Ask him about his own family, and the tone changes. He’s the father of eight, five boys and three girls. What would he do if one of his daughters became pregnant and wasn’t married? He’s aghast even at the question. “A girl knows she cannot be pregnant. She cannot have sexual relations. She must understand what would happen.” So, I asked him again, what would he do? “I don’t know,” he replies.

I also remember an astonishing discussion with an educated man in Afghanistan about the case of a girl who’d been “given in Bad” to settle a dispute. Bad is a tribal law—illegal but still practised—that basically says, if your tribe has a fight with my tribe and my tribe wins, you are obliged to give me a girl child, preferably about the age of four or maybe two or three little girls depending on the size of the harm done. The child in question was eight. She had just escaped after four years of being housed with the livestock, of being tethered to a harness and being used as a plow horse, of being sexually assaulted by the men of the house at night. I said to the man, “How can anyone treat a child like that?” His reply? “I know it is wrong, but it is our way.”

~

So how is it that children’s rights, women’s rights, human rights are hailed as the way forward in some places while the concept can hardly get traction in others? The recorded human rights debate started long ago, in the thirteenth century BCE. The concept developed slowly over the centuries, and the idea that women have rights is a relatively recent invention. Women tried to change their status and even scored victories here and there century after century but were either thwarted or sold out before their elusive equality rights could become recognized.

“Universal brotherhood” and the “common good” are themes in the earliest writings about the idea of human rights. There is evidence of such laws, though paternalistic in nature, having been enacted to secure the common good in the earliest religious doctrines. For example, despite the derisive language about women in his Letters to the Corinthians, Paul the Apostle in Acts 17–19 says that God created all humankind and individuals of all races equal under his tutelage.

Although passages restrict women’s rights and even allow a man to beat his wife, the Quran’s Sura 12, 168–242 reads, “The rights of women apt to be trampled under foot, now clearly affirmed.” The Ten Commandments is a moral code that applies to men and women. So, too, the early Buddhist writings. The duties, rights and responsibilities of citizens were also written in the Hindu Vedas, the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi and the Analects of Confucius.

In 300 BCE, Athenian women had no rights whatsoever, but Spartan women did. Plato’s
Republic
contains a defence of human rights for women at a time when women were entirely excluded from political life. His student Aristotle used the idea of the common good as the baseline for his
Politics
, which had a
profound effect on the development of human rights, as did Cicero’s ideas expressed in
The Laws
. But women’s rights were not top of mind even for these intellectuals. Just as in today’s version of the debate, religious leaders relied on the Holy Scriptures for their arguments while scholars claimed that the concept of human rights was secular. In either case, women’s voices were generally excluded.