mukto-mona : Message: Muslim Fellowship and………….

[Moderator's note : We thank to our hounourable member Ms. Shabnam Nadiya for writing in Mukto-mona after a long time. Interested readers may find some of her previous article at :

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Muslim Fellowship and………….

Shabnam Nadiya

diya_di@...

Most of the people I have spoken to in Bangladesh express their anger at the American attack on Afghanistan vehemently. To the extent that some of them will say that people like Bin Laden are perhaps the only answer to American arrogance and callousness. Yet when I ask them how they feel about the muslims who died on September 11 and how they feel about the deaths of the Bangladeshis working in the World Trade Centre – because there were many who died that day – and how they rationalize those deaths, they fall silent. And when, after asking this question, I ask them again, do they really support what Laden and the Taliban stand for, they become unsure how to respond.

The US, with its long and abysmal track record of pet dictators and fundamentalist groups it has taken under its wing to further its own economic and political spheres of influence will not get a lot of sympathy anywhere in the developing world. Add to this, the Western world’s famous fear of the Islamic bugaboo further whipped up by a Western media initially throwing the concept of responsible journalism to the winds (i.e. the now famous repetitive broadcast of a few Palestinians celebrating the attack on America), and the US government’s initial attitude of "line ‘em up for lynchin’, pardner!" – and you have a very potent mixture. Resulting in innocent people in the US being harassed (and even killed) and a virulent anti-Americanism spreading everywhere.

In the face of all this, it is perhaps natural for muslims everywhere – including Bangladeshi muslims – to need to feel a sense of solidarity among themselves, to want to present to "them" a common front united under the banner of a common faith. Yet does that and – more to the point – should that solidarity extend to including the Taliban regime?

It is important for the muslim community at this point to make a very important distinction – that it is the Afghan people who can be considered as fellow muslims, a people who are not represented by the Taliban. The Taliban came to power through force, not popular mandate. And the people who are suffering most under the Taliban regime are the Afghanis themselves. America has come under attack of the Bin Laden/Taliban brand of Islam on September 11, 2001; Afghanistan has been under Taliban attack since 1996.

The people of Afghanistan are faring badly under the Taliban regime, but the worst off are the women. Every amenity that a society has to offer its inhabitants is denied them. Schools have been shut down; the next generation of Afghan women will only have distant memories of a remote past where even "lowly" women were allowed to be educated. Women have no access to healthcare; having a male doctor examine a female patient would be "indecent", and since even professionally trained women are not allowed to work, the possibilities of a woman being able to get to a qualified physician is effectively nil. Even girl children (as young as four or five) at death’s door are being turned away by hospitals because they are female and there are no female doctors available to treat them. Women are not allowed to work; if a woman is not fortunate enough to have a man in her family to provide for her (and in a country ravaged by conflict for decades now, there are without doubt a large number of families without able-bodied men), she must starve or beg. But for women it is safer not to go out in public unless accompanied by a male family member. Women can be and have been stoned to death for the slightest infraction of the purdah. Windows of houses with women have to be painted over or totally covered so that even the shadow of a woman cannot be seen from outside.

Information is hard to come by, but what meagre information does come out of that god-forsaken country shows us a regime that is effectively murdering its female population. Intense depression is widespread among women and while there are no accurate estimates, suicide rates among the female population have risen frighteningly. We are allowed terrifying glimpses of the women of a whole nation slowly being driven to either insanity or death.

The question demands to be asked: Is the Taliban way the true way of Islam? Is the depraved destruction that the Taliban is carrying out on Afghani women what Islamic societies are supposed to do to their women? These women are human beings……and they are muslims. While there is so much talk of the muslim Ummah and solidarity and fellowship, let us not forget that. Incidentally, let us also not forget that the Taliban regime is a major player in both the regional and the global illicit drug trade.

No morally sane person can truthfully say that the American attacks on Afghanistan are defensible or justified (except perhaps the American government and its allies). But can any morally sane person defend the Taliban regime? Why, then, are the muslims throughout the world not condemning the Taliban as strongly and as vocally as they are condemning the US? Is this what muslim solidarity is all about – supporting the unsupportable, defending the indefensible? Is this what the Muslim ummah stands for – that crimes committed by non-muslims should receive loud condemnation while muslim perpetrators, no matter how inhuman or how terrible their crimes, must be embraced? From where does this concept emanate from that because the Taliban speak so persistently and so noisily about Islam that they are more Islamic than the common Afghani or that anti-Talibanism is equal to anti-Islamism?

I read in the papers that US government has stated that it is "perverse" to focus on civilian casualties as there are many "terrorists" among those that are being killed in Afghanistan. Although they have no official state department form which to issue memos from, the majority of muslims appear to have come to the conclusion (probably by applying the same type of moral logic used by the US government) that it would be "perverse" to dwell on the failings of the Taliban, or to dwell on the fact that the people who suffered under the Taliban regime are also part of the greater muslim community as well. Today the muslim world weeps for muslim brothers and sisters being killed in Afghanistan, where were their tears when their brothers and sisters were being tortured and killed by the Taliban? Muslim hearts break as they watch images of starving Afghani children scrabble for food, why was that tenderness absent in their hearts when these children suffered the ravages of famine under the rule of a "muslim" government? Both the US government and the muslim community seem to share a common policy of ignoring or glossing over unpalatable facts.

Is the Taliban then the people that the majority of muslims here can identify with? There are many who will say that the majority of muslims are peace loving people and do not support the Taliban. That protest against the American attacks on Afghanistan is meant not in support of the Taliban regime or of Bin Laden but in support of the defenseless, already half destroyed Afghani people. Perhaps that is true. But how will the world know that unless that distinction is made loud and clear for all to hear? If it is the common people of Afghanistan that muslim hearts go out to – people who are living between the oppression of the Taliban and the assault of America – then by all means condemn the attacks on Afghanistan. But let the support of the muslim world be given to organizations (like RAWA) and people who are working in the face of immense and immediate danger for the common Afghani, not to the Taliban.

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