The Taliban instrumentalizing women to promote their reactionary ideology
Hawa
Afghan women under the Islamic Emirate of the Taliban have lost all their human rights just because they are women. After women bravely stood up against the reactionary and barbaric Taliban rule, the Taliban resorted to parading black-covered beings to create the illusion of women's support for the Taliban regime. Although the Taliban assume that by parading a group of human beings covered-all-in-black, whose gender is unknown, they can suppress women's protests and set a model of servitude for half the population, they do not know that Afghan women are condemned not to accept slavery. They will fight for their freedom and rights until the final burial of this enslaving system.
The Taliban on Saturday (11 September) gathered a group of masked human beings (who the Taliban claimed were women) in the auditorium of Kabul Education University to declare their support for the Taliban regime and chant slogans against democracy, freedom, and the system of co-education. The people of Afghanistan, especially women on social media, have reacted to the Taliban's instrumentalization of women, announcing that women in Afghanistan do not wear clothes like that. Some have even doubted whether those in the black cover were real women, and that the Taliban may have used their fighters to wear black covers. In the past the Taliban have used women's clothing to hide themselves as well as for other military purposes.
What is even more problematic is the Taliban’s blind allegiance to their foreign fundamentalist teachers and instructors. The brainwashing in Pakistani seminaries and the abundance of Qatari dining tables have likely caused the Taliban social amnesia to the point where they are ready to auction the clothes off their mothers and sisters for political use and to instrumentalize the bodies of Afghan women as billboards for ideological propaganda.
Afghan women in the streets in colorful clothes responded to the Taliban: Afghan women are not dead and dark-hearted. Afghan women wear colorful and cheerful clothes. Their scarves are decorated with red flowers. Afghan women have borne the brunt of this struggle their whole lives and will continue to fight for their rights.
The Taliban are trying to instrumentalize Afghan women to promote their misogynist and reactionary ideology. As seen at Saturday's event, an orchestrated group, claiming to act in the name of women, declared support for the Taliban Islamic Emirate. But the interesting thing is that these black-covered people bear no resemblance to Afghan women. Not only do these people not wear the clothes of Afghan women, but neither do their demonstrations have anything in common with Afghan women's demonstrations. Afghan women take to the streets for their freedom and human rights, not to support servitude and oppression. This black cover is the uniform that the Taliban under the influence of the regressive teachings of Deobandi seminaries and their extreme fundamentalist counterparts in Arab countries want to impose on women in Afghanistan. Depriving people of the freedom to choose their dress and impose official uniforms on a large part of society is one of the characteristics of fascistic theocratic regimes.
After the fall of the puppet government and the Taliban takeover of power, not only women but also men lost their right to choose their clothing. Many men who used to wear pants and shirts until Saturday 15 August, since the Taliban entered Kabul must wear Piran tanban to attend their work. Since the change of clothes of most men in society cannot be related to the change of their collective taste, it can be concluded that the freedom to choose one’s dress is in danger. But women's right to choose their dress is particularly under attack because the Taliban's reactionary and anti-woman ideology are based on repressing women and depriving them of their most basic human rights. Controlling women's bodies and depriving women of all their human rights is one of the Taliban's main methods of controlling and “Islamizing” society. By the exclusion of women from society, whom the Taliban consider the main source of moral corruption and sin, the Taliban are trying to create a theocratic dystopia, ruled only by clerics and mullahs.
The Taliban are trying to mobilize public support for their misogynist ideology by tying their extremist readings of religion to patriarchal concepts of honor. Last year, the Taliban claimed in a short article that the Taliban are defenders of women's rights; but the worldview and the language of the same short article showed that the Taliban not only are not defenders of women's rights but even deny women’s humanity. In the Taliban’s worldview, a woman is not a complete, autonomous, and conscious human being, but an object that can be possessed. Therefore, the Taliban are now trying to control the way women dress, behave, act, and participate in all areas of social life.
According to the Taliban ideology, any woman who demands the right to participate in society is a "prostitute" and a "heretic" and must be repressed. Thus, on the one hand, the Taliban are suppressing the peaceful demonstrations and rallies of Afghan women, and on the other hand, they are parading a group of black covered being in support of their regime. They are trying to impose through the imported and alien clothes a symbol of fossilized and barbaric ideology on Afghan women, which shall be met with stubborn resistance.
Although the Taliban forced women to wear the burqa the last time they were in power (1996-2001), the instrumental use of women as the Taliban demonstrated in Kabul on Saturday (11 September), was not then observed. But such an instrumental use of women is not unprecedented in Afghanistan. In the 1980s, the People's Democratic Party regime, under the occupation of Soviet social-imperialism, brought women and girls from schools and universities to demonstrate under their party banner. The regime claimed legitimacy and displayed their democratic pretensions by bringing women to the streets and instrumentalizing women for revisionist, anti-national policies serving the social-imperialist occupation. The difference, of course, is that the People's Democratic Party, with its compulsory literacy classes and the forced removal of the hijab, claimed to fight for women's rights, while the Taliban's instrumentalization of women is for curbing their social presence and depriving them of political rights.
In addition, it should be noted that the US imperialists and its allies also used the issue of women as a political tool to justify their war and occupation of Afghanistan. For the past 20 years, the symbolic presence of women in the ranks of the puppet regime has been hailed as an achievement for the imperialist occupation of Afghanistan.
Today, Afghan women, with the historical experience including the past 20 years of the imperialists’ exploitation of the issue of women, have gained a deep understanding of their situation in Afghanistan, and have therefore stood even bare-handed in the trenches of struggle. Over the past few weeks, Afghan women have staged several protest rallies against the Taliban, to express their disgust and opposition to the group's reactionary and misogynistic policies and practices.
Today, women stand up to the Taliban for the right to life. The Taliban have deprived women of the right to travel, study, and work. In simpler terms, the Taliban have deprived women of the right to life and survival. All the women who were the breadwinners of their families until a month ago are now under house arrest, and it is not clear where their next meal will come from. There is no other option for women but to fight back.
It should be emphasized that we should not underestimate the Taliban’s ridiculous spectacles. The Taliban, equipped with American weapons, iron rods, electric shocks, and cable lashes, could try imposing this bizarre, forbidding, and alien costume on Afghan women. Therefore, it is time for the communist forces to seize the moment and intensify organizing among women and prepare for overthrowing the Taliban regime, overthrowing the dictatorship of the feudal-bourgeois-comprador classes, ending imperialist domination of the country, and striving for eradication of all forms of class, gender, and national oppression.
15 September 2021
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