“Western” feminists often discuss and offer solutions for the position of women in Afghanistan, however as Munazza Ebtikar writes, these viewpoints are often stripped of the context of decades of military devastation and silence the voices of Afghan women who are fighting for change
Featured image – member of Aghan parliament Fawzia Koofi
Cheryl Benard recently published an article comparing the current plight of Afghan women to women in “Western civilisation”. In Benard’s view, Afghans have been “organically resistant” to imported American ideas and modernity. She advises Afghan women to learn to fight for their own rights and to ally with the Taliban—an insurgency group with the worst track record on women’s rights—in order to stand against Afghan “anti-woman traditions”.
This civilisational grandiloquence, pitying non-Western women because “we” in the West are more civilised and rational, is championed by white feminists who suffer from a white saviour complex. This understanding assumes that gender relations and women’s rights are more advanced in “the West” and need to be imparted on non-western women as agentless objects of unchanging patriarchal systems. It also detracts attention from the discrimination to which women in Western Europe and North America are subject.
Sara R. Farris has coined the term “femonationalism” to describe how right-wing nationalists and neoliberals instrumentalise women’s rights to advance their anti-Islam and anti-immigration campaigns in Europe. Femonationalists include feminist theorists and policymakers or “femocrats” who frame Islam as being a misogynistic religion and culture. In a similar way, Benard takes pride in having worked on Afghan women’s rights for over 20 years while publishing on Eurojihad, or how Afghan refugees in Western Europe are criminals and rapists.
“After 2001, humanitarian institutions, Euro-American media organisations, and academics have promoted the rhetoric that women living in Afghanistan need to be liberated from their religion, their culture, and their oppressive men, with little to no attention to the political and historical reasons behind the current conditions”
Likewise, when the United States first started bombing Afghanistan in October 2001, first lady Laura Bush gave an address to the effect that “the fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women”, justifying the US military occupation by using Afghan women as a rhetorical ploy. Meanwhile, Ivanka Trump has championed Afghan women’s rights in her official announcement on “empowering” Afghan women during the Regional Conference on Women’s Empowerment in Afghanistan. Trump stated that the status of Afghan women “will determine whether or not Afghanistan will be a civilized member of the community of nations”.
Concerns about Afghan women have been at the forefront of many discussions about American military intervention in and occupation of Afghanistan since 2001. This came after a long silence following the USSR withdrawal (from which the United States benefitted), at a time when Afghanistan witnessed a Civil War (1992-1994) and intense fighting during the Taliban regime (1996-2001). After 2001, humanitarian institutions, Euro-American media organisations, and academics have promoted the rhetoric that women living in Afghanistan need to be liberated from their religion, their culture, and their oppressive men as part of a broader civilising mission.
This comes with little to no attention to the political and historical reasons behind the current conditions under which women live. The 1964 constitution, on which the current constitution relies, recognised that all Afghans “without discrimination or preference, have equal rights and obligations before the law.” This constitution guaranteed women “dignity, compulsory education, and freedom to work”. Even if there was dissent from more conservative-minded groups, Afghan society gradually reconciled with women’s participation in the workplace and in academic institutions from the 1960s onwards.
An Afghan woman casts a ballot polling centre in Kandahar Province
There is a long history of women fighting for their rights in Afghanistan. As a response to the communist coup in 1978, followed by the Soviet invasion in 1979, various underground women’s groups undermined the USSR-backed government. Women students took part in a massive anti-government demonstration on February 1980 in Kabul, where many were arrested, and some killed. Meanwhile, women in rural areas actively supported the resistance against the USSR and the USSR-backed government. Even during the years dominated by the draconian Taliban regime, Afghan women risked their lives to open underground schools for girls, at a time when schools and universities were made inaccessible to female students and teachers.
But even when we look past the most recognised forms of resistance in which Afghan women have engaged—that is, those forms that are politically intelligible within Western traditions—we can better understand the lessons that leading feminist scholars such as Lila Abu-Lughod and Saba Mahmood have taught us: that women are able to exercise their agency even within an oppressive patriarchal system. Afghan women are not waiting, in the words of Cheryl Benard, to have “people from a different culture far away (feel) sorry for us and (send) their soldiers and tons of their money to lift us out of oppression”. Afghan women have exerted and still use their agency despite the insurmountable hardships that they face every day.
So-called feminists such as Benard ruminate on how aid money or job placements have not “empowered” Afghan women, while disregarding the most crucial element of their lived experiences: Afghan women have lived in conditions of war, occupation, and militarisation over the past four decades, creating and sustaining the circumstances under which freedoms of all kinds are limited. Julie Billaud’s ethnography in Kabul demonstrates how women in post-2001 Afghanistan have dealt with the norms that decades of war, destitution, and displacement have made more rigid. So how can we expect Afghan women’s fight for their rights to live in a just, equal, and safe society to mirror the fight of women living in Western Europe and the United States?
“Afghan women are faced with multi-layered challenges, and to draw an equivalence with any other context in terms of women’s struggles is not only ill-informed, but profoundly unfeminist”
Benard’s article comes at a time when her husband, Zalmay Khalilzad, the official representative of the United States in Afghanistan, is stepping over the Afghan government to negotiate a peace deal with the Taliban in Qatar for a fast-track US withdrawal. Benard’s husband is negotiating with the same Taliban that have vindicated America’s longest war, expended American lives and money, and caused the death and displacement of millions of Afghan women, men, and children.
Currently, the very same people who advocated for military occupation in Afghanistan and justified it by claiming to be saving Afghan women are telling us that the Taliban are not so bad after all. And that although they came to Afghanistan to rid the country of the Taliban, they are instead negotiating with them and compromising the lives of the same women they supposedly came to save.
Cheryl Benard advises women to “march up to the table” and speak to the Taliban directly during these peace talks. A female member of the Afghan parliament, Fawzia Koofi, did exactly that earlier this month. And just last week, 700 Afghan women from across the country held a conference in Kabul to express their concerns about the legitimisation of the Taliban by the United States.
Afghan women are faced with multi-layered challenges, and to draw an equivalence with any other context in terms of women’s struggles is not only ill-informed, but profoundly unfeminist. If so-called feminists such as Benard, Bush or Trump are concerned about the predicament of Afghan women, they should push for the re-evaluation of American foreign policy. Imperialist wars have culminated in the destruction of Afghanistan since 1979, creating the dire conditions in which Afghan women now live. Unwanted saviours should check their white privilege, listen, recognise, and not undermine the everyday struggles of Afghan women.
Bibliography
Abu-Lughod, Lila. Veiled Sentiments: Honour and Poetry in a Bedouin Society. Berkeley: U of California Press, 1986.
Billaud, Julie. Kabul Carnival: Gender Politics in Postwar Afghanistan. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015.
Farris, Sara R. In the Name of Women’s Rights: The Rise of Femonationalism. Duke University Press, 2017.
Mahmood, Saba. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton University Press, 2012.
Munazza Ebtikar is a PhD student in Oriental Studies and Anthropology in the University of Oxford.
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I’m struggling to understand some of this. This article’s well-written and I suspect the main concepts are true. I believe some of them already. But listening to interviews and reading articles such as this has provided more questions than answers for me. I mean, I already get that the U.S. is hypocritical, a lot. I get that a wartime situation isn’t conducive to women’s rights, so invading for women’s rights is a bit of an oxymoron. I get that wars are for greed, not humanitarianism or women’s rights in the first place. I get that a number of white women (who I guess are feminists, maybe) have been ridiculous and probably will continue to be, like wearing a blue burka and complaining about feeling claustrophobic. I get that the typical white woman’s way isn’t the only way, in theory, just because there’s almost always more than one way to do any complex thing. I’m not liking the involvement of capitalism, but haven’t heard the alternative. I assume it’s more like some ways to shift perceptions gently like performance art and empowering conversations, rather than direct emancipation in the financial sphere through getting a job or running a business which can be confrontational I suppose if the culture’s men don’t want women to have their own money. That’s just propaganda and guesswork on my part probably. I’m missing, basically the core of the matter. I’m guessing the disagreement is a lot deeper than questions like whether or not a burka is oppressive (although I believe that could get pretty deep). I’m looking for a logical exercise that proves the point. Or photographic evidence. Or an anecdotal personal story that gets deep into the lives and feelings and needs of one Afghan woman and thereby illustrates what a different kind of feminism looks like, and how it’s not the same as white feminism, and how it’s more fit for purpose. Or is the heart of the matter really just as simple as “shut up and let an expert (an Afghan) talk about the parts they find important (like, not burkas)?” If so that’s fine, but I feel like there must be more to it. These things suggest there COULD be something, but don’t say much about whether there IS, or WHAT it is.
I hear that white feminists often imply that brown women need saved from brown men, and I hear that implication is wrong and offensive, and that does sound bigoted, but I don’t hear what the alternative narrative is exactly, only the negation, so I’m left guessing the rebuttal is “Afghan men treat Afghan women just as respectfully as western men treat western women” but if so, why isn’t that just plainly stated? In articles/interviews where a western audience is part of the target anyway, because that’s hard to believe to the western ear and will not be understood and accepted by just inferring. Because of propaganda or reality? Hard to tell. In the west there aren’t public stonings for promiscuity. There aren’t honor killings. Vibrators are legal. There’s no question that women are allowed to drive cars even among white nationalist dirtbags. Is that propaganda or reality? What metrics or topics disprove those things, or balance them out, or provide a more appropriate focus? The point is, a strong mistaken perception (to the point of bias) can’t be solved by negation alone. It has to be replaced with something true.
Maybe pulling this thread could lead to unraveling some mystery:
“Afghan women are faced with multi-layered challenges, and to draw an equivalence with any other context in terms of women’s struggles is … profoundly unfeminist”
This is the part of the article I understand the least. Everything on a given spectrum has an equivalence to another thing on that spectrum, except sometimes the very bottom and the very top if they’re far from their peers. That’s just how reality works. How tasty flavors of chocolate are according to opinion polling, how challenging a struggle is… anything. The very idea of equivalence includes that the two things aren’t exactly the same, but rather that some _aspect_ of them is in the same _ballpark_ as each other. So it seems like this statement is saying Afghan women have it by far the worst (challenges) of women in any country or culture (context) and to suggest otherwise (draw an equivalence) is profoundly wrong (unfeminist). If that wasn’t the intention, I think it desperately needs rephrased, because that matches the meaning of the words quite well and is (I believe) the most likely interpretation for the uninitiated.
The only thing I can think of otherwise is that it’s not talking about how “bad” they have it, but how “different” they have it, but in that case… of course every country, culture, and challenge is unique, but is Afghanistan an alien world populated by alien women where the similarities between other countries based on the fact that we’re all human don’t apply and they have to reinvent the wheel on every single subtopic on women’s struggles? Of course there are going to be similarities and hence equivalencies with other contexts. If this is just trying to say something like “This isn’t England. England’s feminism isn’t going to work here” then, yeah, I really think it needs rephrased.
Anyone have a sense of what I’m missing here? Thanks.
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Brilliant post, I loved it.
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