February 2004

Women, citizens, Muslims
Afghan women assert their human rights in the context of Islam, not in opposition to it

By Amy Zalman

ON DECEMBER 13, 2003, 502 members of Afghanistan's constitutional Grand Council, or loya jirga, met in the capital, Kabul, to begin writing the document that would henceforth shape governance of an Islamic, representative democracy. Three weeks later, after at least two rocket attacks near the council's meeting place and even more explosive politicking among the council's members, the council emerged with a new constitution.

Among those who watched the process with attention were Afghan women and their activist partisans in other parts of the world, who wanted the new constitution explicitly to reflect the rights and needs of women. They had particular reason to worry that the assembly gathered in Kabul would be hijacked by conservative extremists who would interpret women's rights narrowly using religion as an excuse, or who might eliminate mentions of women's human rights altogether.

The Grand Council met just two years after the United States toppled the Taliban, the extremist party that had been in control of Afghanistan's capital since 1996. The American objective was to destabilize a regime that had given refuge to Osama bin Laden and the leaders of Al Qaeda, whose bases were in Afghanistan. At that time, the United States linked its military agenda in Afghanistan with the need to liberate Afghan women from oppression. As First Lady Laura Bush put the matter in a national radio address in November 2001, "The brutal oppression of women is a central goal of the terrorists. Long before the current war began, the Taliban and its terrorist allies were making the lives of children and women in Afghanistan miserable." The first lady went on to assert that the removal of the Taliban from power would mean the liberation of Afghan women. For the next year, Afghan women were big news: There were books and reports, and pictures on the front pages of newspapers showing formerly illiterate women learning to read. Women began the work of reconstructing their lives by returning to the streets, to school, to work. Then the war in Iraq began, and Afghan women, and Afghanistan's reconstruction, became old news.

By the beginning of 2003, warlords in provinces who had been allies of the United States when it went to war against the Taliban were instituting measures themselves that were reminiscent of the Taliban era. Human Rights Watch reported in January 2003 that in the Western province of Herat, girls and boys would no longer be permitted to go to school together. Because most teachers are men, the ruling effectively shut girls and women out of an education. Other restrictions against interactions between the sexes were imposed; girls or women seen in public with a male might be taken against their will to a hospital to check for their "chastity." These alarming trends coincided with a sharp drop in international scrutiny, although Afghan women themselves continued to seek access to good health, higher education, and equal pay for their work.

Their experience in the last two years has made it clear that simply removing a dictatorial regime and installing a democracy does not automatically guarantee women's rights. Indeed, the challenges facing women's effort to make sure their rights are legally enforceable in the future highlight broad conflicts in Afghanistan between conservative and liberalizing factions of the future government and between forces competing to control interpretations of Islam in the public sphere. Islam is the prism through which human rights are articulated in Afghanistan, and it is it is therefore crucial for women that their rights to education, work, and freely chosen marriages be articulated in its terms. The importance of the relationship between Islam and rights is one supported by women. Indeed, "Ninety-nine percent of Afghan women are Muslims, and their faith is extremely important to them. Most feel their rights are available to them through Islam," says Masuda Sultan, the spokesperson for Women for Afghan Women (WAW), a New York City-based grassroots organization of Afghan women and their supporters. Sultan explains that the number of women who frame their rights in secular terms is much smaller.


THE PROCESS OF SHAPING A NEW women's rights doctrine that would take Islam into account was in evidence in the making of the "Women's Bill of Rights," authored in September 2003 by a representative group of 45 women who found ways to interpret relevant Islamic edicts in ways that amplified their human rights. The bill of rights was the achievement of a unique conference on women and the constitution sponsored by WAW. Organized with the help of the Afghan Women's Network and Afghans for Civil Society, the Kandahar conference brought women together to deliberate over how their rights could best be reflected in the constitution. Kandahar, unlike the more liberal capital, is one of Afghanistan's most conservative provinces, and it was unclear until the day of the conference whether it would be secure enough for the gathering to take place. It was, but only under heavily armed guard. The conference participants comprised elite female decision-makers as well as largely illiterate everyday women from all over the country. For some, simply completing the trip, whether alone or in the company of a male relative, was itself a triumph.

Over the course of three days, these women reviewed the 1964 constitution on which the 2003 draft was based and began composing the 16-point bill of rights, framed by the demand that the rights be not simply "secured in the constitution but implemented." Some of the demands are basics on the menu of modern human rights: women require mandatory education, equal pay for equal work, freedom of speech, and the freedom to vote and run for office and and to be represented equally in Parliament and the judiciary.

But other points are specific to the situation of Afghan Muslim women and responsive to the recent forms of deprivation imposed by the Taliban and long-standing excesses based on tribal convention. There is, for example, the demand that women and children be protected against sexual abuse, domestic violence, and bad-blood price-- when one family compensates a second for a crime by giving them one of the family's women. There is a request for "the provision of up-to-date heath services for women with special attention to reproductive rights." Under the Taliban women were denied healthcare by male doctors, who were not allowed to touch the bodies of women to whom they were not related, and severe restrictions on women's movements made it difficult for female doctors to supply healthcare. Women made it clear they wanted the right to marry and divorce according to Islamic law.

At the end of the conference, the document was presented publicly to President Hamed Karzai, and women were promised that their rights would be incorporated explicitly into the new constitution. However, when the draft constitution was released in November 2003, there was no explicit mention of women's rights. Instead, the constitution granted rights to all Afghan citizens. As Ritu Sharma, the co-founder and executive director of the Women's Edge Coalition and Afifa Azim, the director of the Afghan Women's Network, argued in a joint editorial on the eve of the council's meeting, lumping together men and women in the text of the constitution, rather than clearly designating rights for women as well as men is "an important distinction because Afghan women are not issued the identification cards given to men. Therefore, some men argue, women are not citizens and entitled to equality." A crucial question at the Grand Council was whether women would be identified separately from men in the final constitution. It was a triumph when the constitution that was released contained an article stating that "The citizens of Afghanistan--whether man or woman--have equal rights and duties before the law."

At the same time, other challenges remain. The introduction of women's rights to the national political agenda cannot itself be taken for granted while control of the country is still in question. Although it is true that on paper, the government of Afghanistan is headed by President Karzai and moving toward democracy along well established lines such as the creation of a constitution, the actual situation in many parts of the country do not reflect this shift in power. The Taliban have reasserted power in Southern and Eastern parts of the country. Indeed, in the few days leading up to the meeting of the constitutional Grand Council, coalition forces waged their largest attacks to date on Taliban members who threatened violence against the proceedings. As a recent Amnesty International report also noted, Northern Alliance commanders who committed human rights abuses under the Taliban government now hold government positions themselves (the October 2003 report, Afghanistan: "No one listens to us and no one treats us as human beings": Justice denied to women, can be found at www.web.amnesty.org/library/index/engasa110232003). Where these commanders govern, women's movements remain as restricted, or nearly as restricted, as they did before they were "liberated."

So, one of the threats to women's rights is related to the ongoing danger to the entire nation's stability as well as to the ability of the most conservative or militant actors in Afghanistan to influence the political process. Extremists exploit claims to Islam to intimidate women. This means that although women themselves frame their rights in terms of Islam, they can also be intimidated into making claims for interpretations that don't serve their needs at all. Sultan explains:

Security is still a huge issue, and regional warlords and extremists are around. A woman who doesn't speak in terms that acknowledge Islam will face trouble. The affirmation of being Muslim is important because otherwise they'll be called infidels or be threatened or seen as secular or non-Muslim.

THE PROPER RESPONSE TO THIS SITUATION, in the view of Sultan and others who work closely with Afghan women, is to promote the education of women in Islamic law and history so that they can express their own rights as well as refute interpretations that do not serve them. As the legal system begins to hammer out laws that confirm the bases of the constitution, such knowledge will be increasingly important. Jurists are qualified in Afghanistan through higher education or training in Islamic law. As Sultan notes, these qualifications "leave open the door" for those trained informally by radical Islamist clerics to shape law. Women's education in the language, tradition, and law through which they understand their rights and themselves is a practical and necessary step in this context. This may appear counterintuitive to onlookers in the United States and Europe, whose recent revolutions in rights have often taken place in social and political contexts that opposed democracy to religion. Enhancing the rights of women by encouraging their access to religious education may also seem counterintuitive in the present media environment, which is saturated by the idea that Islam is inherently undemocratic. But women working for their rights in Afghanistan make it clear that both Islam and democracy are evolving practices that permit competing interpretations. It is their right to shape both in ways that confirm their identities as women, Afghan citizens, and Muslims.