The Underground Girls of Kabul (44 page)
Read The Underground Girls of Kabul Online
Authors: Jenny Nordberg
1
Husbands otherwise have an absolute right to the children
Orzala Ashraf Nemat provides an analysis about divorce in an Islamic context under Afghanistan’s civil law in “Roundtable Conference: Comparative Analysis of Family Law in the Context of Islam,” Kabul, August 15–17, 2006,
af.boell.org
. The Afghan Civil Code affords the husband a unilateral right to divorce the wife for any reason, or for no reason, at any time (Article 135). In addition, Afghan Civil Code, Articles 236 through 255, cover custody issues.
2
Nine out of ten Afghan women will experience
For information on the statistics of domestic abuse in Afghanistan, see “Living with Violence: A National Report on Domestic Abuse in Afghanistan,” Global Rights: Partners for Justice, March 2008,
globalrights.org
. This report notes “an overwhelming majority of women, 87.2%, experienced at least one form of physical, sexual or psychological violence or forced marriage, and most, 62.0%, experienced multiple forms of violence.”
3
According to Mara Hvistendahl
Mara Hvistendahl’s
Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men
(Public Affairs, 2011) reports on the sex-selective abortions of female fetuses throughout Asia.
1
but in the 1980s, Dr. Eleanor Galenson
The research was presented in Eleanor Galenson and Herman Roiphe’s
Infantile Origins of Sexual Identity
(New York: International Universities Press, 1981).
2
Christian countries did not recognize marital rape
See websites of RAINN—Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network,
rainn.org
, and Rape Crisis,
rapecrisis.org.uk/maritalrape2.php
(accessed January 31, 2014).
3
When the United States, the United Kingdom
The Sunday, October 7, 2001, online edition of
The Guardian
had a timeline of the attack on Afghanistan; see
theguardian.com
.
4
the UN-mandated 2002 emergency
loya jirga
The structure of the
loya jirga
is described in press briefing notes from the UN,
un.org/News/dh/latest/afghan/concept.pdf
.
5
Afghans have been tortured to death by U.S. forces
See Tim Golden, “In U.S. Report, Brutal Details of 2 Afghan Inmates’ Deaths,”
New York Times
, May 20, 2005,
nytimes.com
.
1
King James I of England denounced
See Anastasia S. Bierman,
In Counterfeit Passion: Cross-Dressing, Transgression, and Fraud in Shakespeare and Middleton
(University of Nebraska–Lincoln, Department of English thesis, 2013),
digitalcommons.unl.edu
.
2
France implemented a law in 1800 that said women
Lizzy Duffy, “Parisian Women Now (Officially) Allowed to Wear Pants,” National Public Radio, February 4, 2013,
npr.org
.
3
just as the Old Testament
For instance, Timothy 2:9 says: “Likewise, I want women to adorn themselves with proper clothing, modestly and discreetly, not with braided hair and gold or pearls or costly garments, but rather by means of good works, as is proper for women making a claim to godliness.”
4
Veiling predates Islam
See Leila Ahmed,
Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), pp. 5, 11, 12, 55. She writes that veiling was apparently introduced in Arabia by Muhammad, but already existed among the upper-class Greeks, Romans, Jews, and Assyrians. Veiling is nowhere explicitly prescribed in the Koran.
5
According to one Islamic hadith
Everett K. Rowson, “The Effeminates of Early Medina,”
Journal of the American Oriental Society
111, no. 4
(October–December 1991): 671–93. Rowson notes that the Prophet did not really seem to have a problem with cross-dressers, which were common in his time, but he may have grown to believe it threatened established social norms. The hadith is here translated as: “The Prophet cursed effeminate men and mannish women.”
6
The Koran can be read in many ways
Sadakat Kadri,
Heaven on Earth: A Journey Through Shari’a Law from the Deserts of Ancient Arabia to the Streets of the Modern Muslim World
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), offers a fascinating view into how Islamic law and its many intepretations have developed through the centuries.
7
title of mullah is open to anyone
Louis Duprée describes the role of mullahs in his book
Afghanistan:
“Those at the bottom of the hierarchy, the village mullah, often non-literate farmers, often function as part time religious leaders. Technically, Islam has no organized clergy, and every man can be a mullah. Anyone can lead in prayer” (p. 107).
8
a marketing gimmick invented in the United States in the forties
Background on the use of color for gender identification was found in Jeanne Maglaty, “When Did Girls Start Wearing Pink?,” April 8, 2011,
smithsonianmag.com
.
9
famous warrior Malalai of Maiwand
Abdullah Qazi, “The Plight of the Afghan Woman: Afghan Women’s History,” January 2, 2009, Afghanistan Online,
afghan-web.com
.
10
“Before Islam” would be sometime
See Library of Congress: Federal Research Division, “Country Profile of Afghanistan, August 2008,”
loc.gov
, which states: “After defeating the Sassanians at the Battle of Qadisiya in 637, Arab Muslims began a 100-year process of conquering the Afghan tribes and introducing Islam.”
1
Shah Massoud, the “Lion of Panjshir,”
See Farangis Najibullah, “What If Ahmad Shah Masud, Afghanistan’s ‘Lion of Panjshir,’ Hadn’t Been Killed?” Radio Free Europe, September 9, 2011,
rferl.org
.
2
from the war that killed one million Afghans
See Rafael Reuveny and Aseem Prakash, “The Afghanistan War and the Breakdown of the Soviet Union,”
Review of International Studies
(1999), faculty.washington. edu.
3
in Afghanistan, a man is allowed
The Afghan Civil Code, Article 86,
asianlii.org
, states:
Polygamy can take place after the following conditions are fulfilled:
1. When there is no fear of injustice between the wives
2. When the person has financial sufficiency to sustain the wives. That is, when he can provide food, clothes, suitable house, and medical treatment.
3. When there is legal expediency, that is when the first wife is childless or when she suffers from diseases which are hard to be treated.
Polygamy, however, means that both parties could be married to several people, so what the law allows in Afghanistan is actually
polygyny
.
1
It makes her a very unusual young woman
According to
Higher Education in Afghanistan—An Emerging Mountainscape
, A World Bank Study, August 2013,
www-wds.worldbank.org
, which states: “Second, education attainment among women is particularly low in Afghanistan. The three percent enrolled in higher education consists disproportionately of male students. Females comprised only 19% of all students enrolled in public universities and higher education institutions in 2012 [MoHE (2013)].”
2
Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission
Detailed information about the organization’s mission can be found at their website with a profile of Dr. Samar,
www.aihrc.org.af
.
3
The word itself is not mentioned once
See the full text of the Convention on the Rights of the Child at United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights,
ohchr.org
.
1
The three pillars of Pashtunwali
The three pillars are explained further in Charles Lindholm,
Generosity and Jealousy: The Swat Pukhtun of Northern Pakistan
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1982).
2
gender identity disorder
and
transsexualism
The International Classification of Diseases’s ICD-10 Classification of Mental and Behavioural Disorders, World Health Organization, Geneva, 1993,
who.int
, lists the detailed criteria for gender identity disorders in section F64.
1
Marriage is a core component
Gerda Lerner explains how marriage was always a key part of the patriarchal system in
The Creation of Patriarchy
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). She writes: “For
women, class is mediated through their sexual ties to a man. It is through the man that women have access to or are denied access to the means of production and to resources. It is through their sexual behavior that they gain access to class. ‘Respectable women’ gain access to class through their fathers and husbands, but breaking the sexual rules can at once declass them.”
2
Afghan prosecutor Maria Bashir
See Jeremy Kelly, “Afghan ‘Defender of Women’s Rights’ Maria Bashir Puts 100 in Jail for Adultery,” October 22, 2012,
thetimes.co.uk
.
3
the rules of succession
See Max Fisher, “Last Vestiges of the British Empire Complicate Royal Baby’s Succession to the Throne,” July 22, 2013,
washingtonpost.com
.
1
According to Butler, just as little children
See Butler in a video explaining her work at
http://bigthink.com/videos/your-behavior-creates-your-gender
. “Nobody really is a gender from the start,” Butler proposes in the video. See also Judith Butler,
Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity
(New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 191, where the author writes, “In what senses, then, is gender an act? As in other ritual social dramas, the action of gender requires a performance that is
repeated
. This repetition is at once a reenactment and reexperiencing of a set of meanings already socially established; and it is the mundane and ritualized form of their legitimation.”
2
central argument in nineteenth-century Europe
Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English’s book
For Her Own Good—Two Centuries of the Experts’ Advice to Women
, first published in 1978 by Anchor Books and later by Random House in 2005, recounts the efforts of medicine and science to shut women out of public life and intellectual thought for much of history.
3
group individuals by traditional “male” or “female” traits
Sociomedical scientist Rebecca M. Jordan-Young critiques brain studies in
Brain Storm: The Flaws in the Science of Sex Differences
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011). She spent thirteen years going over brain studies dating back to 1967. Most studies had concluded that the male and female brain were very different from birth, making a strong argument for inherent gender differences. But Jordan-Young found the brain studies to be problematic at the outset, mainly because experiments had often been performed on rats, with the results transferred to assumptions about humans. Studies did show great
differences between the brains of newborns in general, just as their bodies and skin color were also very different. But the differences between the brains of boys and girls did not constitute two distinct and separable categories.
4
more different
than a random man put next to a random woman
Janet Shibley Hyde, “The Gender Similarities Hypothesis,”
American Psychologist
(2005). In this paper, University of Wisconsin–Madison psychologist Shibley Hyde offers the following conclusion: “The gender similarities hypothesis stands in stark contrast to the differences model, which holds that men and women, and boys and girls, are vastly different psychologically. The gender similarities hypothesis states, instead, that males and females are alike on most—but not all—psychological variables. Extensive evidence from meta-analyses of research on gender differences supports the gender similarities hypothesis.”
5
With time, nurture can
become
nature
. Lise Eliot, a neuroscientist at Chicago Medical School, explains brain-based differences in
Pink Brain, Blue Brain: How Small Differences Grow into Troublesome Gaps—and What We Can Do About It
(New York: First Mariner Books, 2010). According to Eliot, physical differences do exist in the brains of boys and girls, but they are not responsible for gender dissimilarities. Instead, very early on in life, different behaviors and skills are expected from each sex. The language used with each gender is different, and each child, depending on whether it’s a boy or a girl, is encouraged to develop what we think of as typical traits and behavior—for instance, that girls are more quiet and that boys are more active. Through that process of learning and forming habits, the brain will physically develop along the same lines. The brain—especially a growing brain—is so malleable that it will grow, form, and adjust according to the repetitive patterns to which it is exposed. Behavior is ingrained in the brain as it develops and comes to feel “natural.”
