Western Media’s slander of Women’s Rights in Afghanistan

By: Safiyyah

Recently, Western media has been preoccupied in propaganda against the Islamic Emirate’s policies regarding women in Afghanistan. Under the garb of women’s education, Western media is once again attempting to portray the government of Afghanistan as against the rights of women and girls. The Western world which boasts of being tolerant proves yet again that it is, in fact, only tolerant to worldviews and values that do not clash with its own.

Westerners are now attempting to groom Afghan women in a very predatory fashion. A Guardian article recently suggested that since western ideological indoctrination has been curbed in Afghanistan, western countries ought to provide such indoctrination through distance-learning methods or granting visas for study abroad. The article further suggests that online channels should be created so that people residing in the West can gain access to the minds of Afghan women through correspondence. This is because western invaders have been physically removed from Afghanistan which means they cannot carry out any form of face-to-face brainwashing programs. The only options they are left with are the internet through which they seek to lure Afghan women into programs that will then teach them beliefs at odds with Islamic values, or luring these women into leaving their home country for study abroad. Education and women’s rights are but an excuse to misguide and brainwash Afghan women into accepting beliefs contrary to their faith and cultural values. The West desires to create a group of Afghan women who appear merely visibly Afghan, but the minds of whom are corrupted with western ideas that are in complete opposition to their religion and culture.

A lack of freedom to commit evil and immodesty can never be termed wrong. The West is very offended by laws pertaining to the hijab but does not afford its own women the right to appear topless in public. Men, however, can do so. Must we term this a lack of freedom or inequality? Infact, countries throughout the world have restrictions based on what their societies deem to be moral wrongs. Westerners ought to begin accepting, however hesitantly, that they ideologically have little to offer Afghan women who possess the Islamic Shariah. The Shariah is a complete system of life wherein women’s rights have already been explained and preserved, as well as the rights of other members of society. It does not befit mere political commentators, analysts or others with no Islamic expertise to ludicrously term mainstream Islamic legal rulings pertaining to women as fringe interpretations, or misinterpretations.

To understand this reality is understandably difficult for the westerner who lives in a society that legitimizes self-mutilation for those who delusionaly believe they are not their biological gender. Clearly, more freedoms for women did not improve the quality of life for women in the United States which has among the highest rates of depression in the world — such are the societies that seek to educate Afghan women. Societies wherein women are regularly giving birth to illegitimate children, unable to maintain their marriages, abandoned as single mothers, are suffering from depression and other mental disorders and whose usefulness declines once their youth dies should certainly not be lecturing others on the betterment of women. The hedonistic western woman’s inevitable fate is usually an old people’s home where she is left to rot by her daughters that learned their values and morals from a western education system that they seek to bring to Afghanistan. It is not illogical that the Afghan woman, or any sensible woman, does not want to accept such a self-destructive lifestyle.

Unfortunately, the all-powerful solution of education and freedom has not saved western women from such depressive conditions. The reason for the depressed condition of the western woman is that she has taken human desires as the standard for her ever-devolving morality, and now wants Afghan women to do the same under the guise of education, freedom and women’s rights. However, Afghan women desire to live by the morality revealed by God. The Quran states, “Have you seen the one who takes as his god his own desire?” (25:43).

The Western world must explain to Afghan women and society why they should adopt such desires as their standard of morality instead of the Shariah.